This is the key initiative of the project. During Winter Term, a team of up to six faculty members will teach a course with DePauw students where the students and the faculty will design together new courses, modules, and experiential learning opportunities that connect business and leadership with the humanities. Co-design is practiced in several different design fields and essentially means engaging your audience in the design process from the start. Stipends are available for faculty who lead this winter term course.
Sixteen DePauw students joined six DePauw faculty/staff over the 2025 Winter Term to work on developing curricula that integrates business and leadership education and the humanities. Below is a description of the projects that were undertaken.
Using David Brooks provocative November 2024 Atlantic essay “How the Ivy League Broke America” as our launching point, we considered the tension between a functioning democracy and the institutions, especially colleges and universities, that cultivate the talent and provide the credentials for entry into the upper echelons of society. The disparate rewards, in terms of money, prestige, and access to power, granted to college degree holders in general and graduates of highly ranked colleges and universities in particular, is a hallmark of US society in the early 21 st century. Meanwhile, our society produces markedly disparate outcomes in terms of income, health, and well-being for college graduates and people who do not have a college degree. These phenomenon may, it turns out, destabilize the democracy and undermine the claims of meritocracy that higher education ostensibly seeks to promote. We deepened and broadened our perspectives by examining how US elites constituted themselves and promoted their role in society in previous eras in order to determine what is more and less distinct about our current dilemma. We also reviewed Thomas Jefferson’s thoughts, embedded as they were in hierarchies of race and sex, on how to democratize Virginia’s educational system. Thinking comparatively, we identified some of the roots of the problem by examining the dominance of professional elites in a range of late twentieth-century nations (Japan, East and West Germany, France, Britain, the Soviet Union, as well as the US) as analyzed by the British historian Harold Perkin. We discovered that, across geographical, cultural, and ideological spectrums, many major countries have wrestled with the tension between cultivating huge cohorts of professional experts and promoting the general well-being of society. We finished by reading former Harvard president Derek Bok’s consideration of how the temptations of commercialization might undermine some of the values that still make universities incredibly important resources for the promotion of knowledge and innovation.
This project was related to an upper-level course in the philosophy of mind. In light of recent developments in artificial intelligence, I re-worked the syllabus for this class to include a cutting-edge unit on AI. The students and I focused specifically on AI companions, creating a two-and-a-half week sequence devoted to that topic. We researched a large number of sources, selecting a few of them to incorporate into the course. This topic connects with business in that AI companions are being created and marketed by for-profit corporations and there is on-going debate about the risks of such companions, whether they should be regulated, and what sort of regulation might be most effective. A nice feature of the unit we created is that it leverages the topic of AI companions to connect philosophy and business in a natural, organic way.
Some things are valuable only because they lead to other things of value. But some things are valuable in themselves. Put another way: some values are final values. What is of final value? And, assuming that we know what is of final value, how to we measure how much of that value we've produced? These are the key questions addressed in this module/course. Below is a description of the readings and topics that make up this module. Note that this module is relatively long and it would not be difficult to add a few more topics to expand it into an entire course.
What does it mean to be information literate? What does that mean in the context of “business”? The purpose of the first module, "Information Literacy for Entrepreneurs", is to reveal the transferability of students' experience with college research/information literacy to entrepreneurship, and then explore the resources (and how to effectively use them) for student entrepreneurs. During the Winter Term sessions, I worked with three students to initiate their conceptions of business research then guided them in the areas of research: company and organization, industry, market, finance, economic, advertising, accounting, legal, and tax research. Together we gathered resources, walked through possible activities, and critiqued the process. The outcome is a LibGuide to start off the process for my module creation.
This project involved researching the feasibility of a new minor at DePauw in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and laying the groundwork for the structure of such a minor. Students researched PPE programs at other institutions, had a discussion with Dr. Frank Howland, the director of the PPE Program at Wabash, and also consulted with Dr. Deepa Prakash, chair of the Political Science Department at DePauw.
Students were enthusiastic about the possibility of studying PPE at DePauw and indeed such programs have proved very popular at other institutions. PPE has its roots at the University of Oxford, where it has traditionally been a course of study for those interested in public service, law, and careers in business.
PPE is an interdisciplinary program that seeks to understand how groups of people organize themselves towards common goals. It studies the interactions between social arrangements, political institutions, and markets. Some of the topics considered in this area include: Decision Making/Strategy, Collective Action Problems, Justice and Rights, Public Choice Theory, Markets, Property, Voting, Comparative Government, and Policy/Law. PPE epitomizes the integration of business and the humanities.
Our work on this led us to the following possible structure for a PPE minor at DePauw:
1 Introduction to PPE (0.5 credit), taught by a single faculty member but with some guest lectures from those in other departments.
1 Philosophy (1 credit), drawn from a select list such as Ethical Theory, Ethics & Business, Classical Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Law, Human Nature & Free Market Capitalism
1 Political Science (1 credit), drawn from a select list
1 Introduction to Economics (1 credit)
1 Elective OR 2 Approved Reading Courses (0.5 - 1 credit), elective drawn from a select list in Philosophy, Political Science, Economics, or related field
1 PPE Capstone Course (1 credit)
TOTAL: 5 - 5.5 credits
Further work on this will involve consulting with the relevant departments, building out the course content for the introductory course and the capstone, and determining how such a program might be staffed.
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This project focused on Universal Basic Income (UBI), which rose to prominence in U.S. politics during the 2020 presidential campaign cycle, as presidential candidate Andrew Yang championed a UBI proposal under which every adult American citizen would receive $1,000 per month from the federal government. UBI is a topic that comes up repeatedly in multiple contexts in previous versions of my course, “Free Market Capitalism and Human Nature”, and I wanted to add to the course a more careful, in-depth examination of the pros and cons of UBI.
The students and I researched a number of sources and ultimately developed a mini-unit focusing on a very recent three-year UBI experiment conducted in Illinois and Texas. The inclusion of careful empirical research on small-scale UBI should greatly enhance the treatment of UBI in the course.
Can this foundational thinker from eighteenth-century Scotland be productively taught in twenty-first century America? Can Adam Smith’s complex and far-ranging thought be rescued from highly selective readings of his work that reduces him to an avatar of modern capitalism? The answer to both questions is an emphatic ‘Yes’. Inspired by a wonderfully nuanced three-part podcast on Smith, students not only developed a new appreciation for Smith’s famous Wealth of Nations, but also encountered the rich intellectual and personal contexts from which this remarkable thinker emerged. The breadth of Smith’s interests became evident. Students sampled works by two of Smith’s key Scottish Enlightenment mentors, Francis Hutcheson and David Hume; familiarized themselves with aspects of his early life; and read telling excerpts from Smith’s other great work The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It became apparent that Smith’s work probed questions about moral values as well as the nature of economic value. More importantly, we realized that Smith’s vigorous intellectual life serves as a beacon for a liberal arts approach to asking and answering questions, his methods of deep and broad inquiry as useful to humanities and business students as any of specific eighteenth-century conclusions he reached.
Business decisions almost always involve risk. How should such risk be handled? How can things go wrong when making decisions about complex matters? These are questions that businesspeople must grapple with as a practical part of their work. They are also questions that philosophers and psychologists have considered. This unit attempts to bring these discussions together.
This project was inspired by David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs. Graeber argues that a surprising number of workers in the U.S. have jobs that, according to the workers themselves, are meaningless and should not exist. Graeber documents the psychological damage incurred by those who hold such jobs. What was missing from the class were concrete proposals about what might be done about the problem of BS jobs, both at the societal and individual level. The students and I researched a number of sources and created a second mini-unit focused on various proposals about how to address the problem of BS jobs.
During the Business Meets Humanities winter term, I worked closely with students and colleagues to develop course modules and curricular structures that center both humanities and business disciplines.
Tolkien was the inspiration for my Economics and Fiction course. As a linguist (and amateur cartographer), he used his academic interests to inform and inspire his creative writing. I ask the question, what if he were an economist instead? In this course, I encourage my students to practice writing and use ideas from economics to help develop the setting and inform their character’s decision making in their writing. We examine works of fiction including novels, movies and television. We seek to find economic principles in the work and evaluate how well the author thought through their story’s economy (broadly defined). Students also do their own creative writing, taking these ideas seriously.
During winter term, I wanted to develop a module for this course in which we discuss the cold war, its cultural impacts, and the game-theoretic decision making that is happening. I worked with students to develop a lesson about the game theoretic concepts. We also explored various cultural works including movies, books, and musical satire from the time.
A scholarly and teaching trend in recent years is the “history of capitalism,” sometimes referred to as the “new history of capitalism.” Historians of the United States have taken the lead in this emerging subfield. Does this trend reinvigorate old school topics like “economic history,” “labor history,” and “business history”? Does this attempt to look at capitalism as a cultural, ideological, and political system properly incorporate economics scholarship? Most importantly, should we at DePauw be teaching a course or courses that explicitly emphasize “history of capitalism” and, if so, how would such a course look different from the ones taught to undergraduates at larger research universities, where traditional lecture course surveys still are prevalent? Our group investigated these questions by reading a critical review essay of several prominent “history of capitalism” books, reviewing syllabi by leading scholars in the subfield, and carefully reading an essay on the relationship between gold mining, slave labor, banking, and monetary policy in the Jacksonian era. The takeaway is that the “history of capitalism” would be a valuable way to bridge humanities and business perspectives, but a course taught in DePauw’s student-centered liberal arts classrooms would be structured quite differently than the survey-lecture model of larger universities.
During the Business Meets Humanities winter term, I worked closely with students and colleagues to develop course modules and curricular structures that center both humanities and business disciplines.
I hope to teach a class on contemporary economic problems next fall. In this course, we will discuss important issues such as inequality, labor market discrimination, environmental economics, and immigration. While I will ask students to approach the analysis of these issues from an economic perspective, I think that discourse about this course should be heavily influenced by the humanities, allowing us to have normative conversations about what we value. During winter term, I worked with students and colleagues to brainstorm topics that are relevant to students today. We looked for sources that would bring diverse perspectives into the class. It was very helpful to work with students to make this course relevant to them and interconnected with disciplines who examine these issues from different lenses.