Learn with me
March 13, 2009 | 7:16 am
Bridgewater State College has this wonderful seminar program where students take writing- and/or speaking intensive seminars in their first and second years. I mean, the students complain about it and don’t think it’s all that wonderful, but instructors love them because they get to design courses to indulge in their interests.
So heres the course description of what I’ll be teaching as a first-year, writing-intensive seminar in the fall:
Gangsters, Meltdowns and Greed: Social Deviance in American Society
Why can some people so easily break the law while most of us choose to obey it? The goal of this writing-intensive course is to understand behavior that goes against accepted social norms. We’ll look at career criminals, kidnappers and scam artists and show what social situations prompted them to make life choices most of us would never consider. A key focus of the class will be the current economic recession and the greed-fueled decisions that partially caused it. The instructor will draw on his work as a journalist who has covered financial wrongdoing, corruption and organized crime and will include some unlikely guest speakers.
In other words, this is a look at how Bernie Madoff and Robert Allen Stanford aren’t all that different from Ron Gonen and Henry Hill. I think I may have a potential hit, as many of the freshman I have been working with this semester are upset it won’t be offered as a second-year seminar.
A reading list is in the works and being developed here (very limited at the moment).
Tags: Crime, Economics, Teaching
Kat wrote:
March 13, 2009 at 10:02 am
Sounds pretty damn cool. I’d sign up.
Ruth Blake wrote:
March 13, 2009 at 8:22 pm
WOW!!! Do you have to be enrolled to attend? How much a credit. I’d take it in a heart beat.
Dave Copeland » Blog Archive » Evolution of Greed wrote:
May 21, 2009 at 7:44 am
[...] reading list for the course on greed that I’m teaching this fall continues to expand. I’m probably not going to go with a [...]