Students Shop Off the Beaten Path

While more than 1,000 students debated the motives for violence in Moral Reasoning 22, “Justice,” a handful bypassed their moral quandaries and instead went straight for blows in Dramatic Arts 40, “Introduction to Stage Combat.”

The class, along with others that teach students to loiter, virtually voyage the high seas, or read science fiction, is one of a series of non-traditional courses offered this year on a campus dominated by economics and government concentrators.
 
In the recently renovated New College Theatre yesterday, students milled about over fresh, dark mahogany floors awaiting the beginning of Professor of the Practice of Theatre Robert Scanlan’s new class on stage combat.
“The first day we sat in a big circle and discussed what we’d cover,” Patrick H. Quinn ’10 said.

“He said we’d study slaps, pushes, and grabs,” Quinn added. “We’ll ultimately learn how to step on someone’s back and slam their head into the floor. Safely.”

Quinn, who said “Stage Combat” was just one of several alternative courses he had shopped this week, is a computer science concentrator who decided to take Scanlan’s offering as an elective after hearing about it last spring.
“This isn’t something you normally see in the Harvard curriculum,” he said. “It’s awesome.”

“Stage Combat” classmate Laura S. Hirschberg ’09 said she was thrilled to be taking this “dream course”—and that her parents didn’t mind.

“They want me to take things that intrigue me,” she said.

In Sever Hall, Rachel K. Popkin ’08 joined a band of approximately 30 sci-fi enthusiasts for the first meeting of another new course—English 182, “Science Fiction,” taught by Associate Professor of English and American Literature and Language Stephen Louis Burt.

Popkin said she was surprised to see the course—which she believes will “not be just fluff”—offered amid what she thought was the College’s traditionally conservative offerings.

Explaining why the course was appropriate, Popkin said that “Harvard tends to be a nerdy school in general and I’m sure quite a large percentage of students have at least had some sort of interest in science fiction.”

Popkin added that she worked for Computer Services at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and saw some of her co-workers at the class’s first meeting.
“They tend to be a nerdy bunch,” she said.

Cogan University Professor Stephen J. Greenblatt said that his new course, Humanities 27, “A Silk Road Course: Travel and Transformation on the High Seas: An Imaginary Journey in the Early 17th Century,” promises to be a “contingent adventure.”

Greenblatt will teach the course with the aid of a virtual sea voyage presentation that integrates Google Earth, and he said the class will allow students to “virtually follow the paths of three ships as they travel the world.”

—Staff writer Charles J. Wells can be reached at wells2@fas.harvard.edu.