DePauw has been awarded a NEH Humanities Connection Grant titled: “Business Meets Humanities: A Liberal Arts Curriculum”. This curricular planning grant will support a variety of curricular design projects for the 2024-2025 academic year. We will identify the learning goals for an education in undergraduate business and leadership that is anchored in the liberal arts and humanities. We will then work to develop courses and a curricular structure that achieves these learning goals.
The project team is led by Jeff Dunn (Prindle Institute, Philosophy) as well as the following leadership team: David Gellman (History), David Alvarez (English), Humberto Barreto (Business Analytics), Bridget Gourley (Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences), and John Clarke (Dean, School of Business and Leadership).
There are two key assumptions that undergird this curricular project. First, that the humanities should not be a haven for those who prefer not to think about money, markets, finance, and the business and leadership assumptions that define, shape, and direct global capitalism and business enterprises. Second, that business and leadership education should not function as a haven for those who would prefer not to engage the deep and complicated roles that business, markets, finance, and newer fields like data analytics have in shaping outcomes, defining the good life, and ordering societal and individual values.
Phase 1 of the project involves two main initiatives. First, a series of summer faculty reading groups on topics related to business and the humanities. Navigate to the Summer 2024 Reading Groups page (on the left-hand side) to learn more about these reading groups. The second part of phase 1 is a two-day faculty workshop in August where we will lay the big picture groundwork for the project and address the question: what curricular structure allows the humanities to be integral to business and leadership education and also ensures that the humanities are strengthened by their engagement with business and leadership? To learn more about the workshop, Navigate to the Summer Workshop page.
Phase 2 of the project will involve every-other-week meetings with the planning cohort as well as DePauw students with the goal of identifying new courses needed or courses that need some revision to integrate the humanities with business and leadership education. The planning cohort will work on the action items identified from the workshop.
Phase 3 of the project is central. It will feature a team-taught DePauw Winter Term course “Business Meets Humanities.” Faculty who are interested in developing new course material will be the instructors for the course, and DePauw students taking the course will engage in the interactive co-design of many of the courses identified in Phase 2. At the end of Winter Term, we will have new co-designed courses, course modules, and experiential learning opportunities.
Phase 4 of the project involves two main initiatives. First, there will be every-other-week meetings with the planning cohort to organize the new courses, new modules, and experiential learning component into a coherent curriculum that will work with the current curricular structures at DePauw University. Second, we will organize a closing workshop to finalize the curricular plan, where we will invite several academics from outside DePauw who have experimented with similar curricular ideas. At this workshop we will outline the next steps in the implementation of our plan and organize ourselves to apply for an NEH Connections Implementation Grant.