The EHP Experience

Required of all incoming EHP students, this course fosters a variety of critical encounters (between students, students and professor, students and ideas, students and culture) in order to equip students to more thoughtfully map out who they are, who they want to be and ways to be intentional about pursuing that. To do this, we explore literature, philosophy and film. The course explores critical, literary and philosophical approaches to the following related problems: how we organize knowledge and construct meaning, and how we locate a sense of self, as both individuals and members of various groups, amidst the resources and demands of competing interpretations, traditions, challenges and circumstances. Critical Encounters I is an approved course for EHP students’ lower-division humanities requirement.

These are the basic math courses required of all Engineering students. In the Fall, EHP offers smaller sections of Calc 1, Calc 2 and Calc 3 and, in the Spring, Calc 2, Calc 3 and Differential Equations. The EHP sections are limited to EHPers and capped at 28 students but participate in the same common exams given to all sections of these courses. That is, they are not Honors versions of these courses, but cover the same material in smaller classes with EHP peers.

CE2 is an elective offered each Spring for graduating seniors. Whereas CE1 frames what it means to be an authentic and intentional person with their undergraduate university education ahead of them, CE2 looks back at this education and forward to what’s next. We explore what it means to be a fully human being: through group discussion and closely examining individual works of culturally and historically significant philosophy, literature and art.

The Harry Potter series addresses the idea of conflict from a wide variety of perspectives: personal identity, class, race, morality, education, age, ambition and friendship (to name just a few). This course will explore how these themes are worked out both within this extended coming of age narrative and against the classical background that J.K. Rowling so freely appropriates. Through a close reading of the texts, themselves (minus the “Epilogue”), we will map out their philosophical and existential significance and how this is related to their popularity. This course is taught every 3-4 years.

This course explores of one of the greatest accomplishments of literary philosophy: Dostoevsky’s “polyphonic” novel, The Brothers Karamazov.  Organized around a murder mystery, this novel gives voice to competing responses to many of the great questions that have vexed and inspired humankind:  What is good and evil?  What is the purpose of suffering?  What is the nature of justice, forgiveness, personal responsibility, family, faith, intellect and desire? Dostoevsky does not flinch from facing the most difficult questions of life, and he asks us to face them with him.  By doing this in novels (as opposed to essays or philosophical treatises), Dostoevsky approaches these ideas by exploring what it means for individuals to embrace them, wrestle with them and attempt to live in light of them. This course is offered every 3-4 years.

By looking at literature and leadership, as opposed to the literature of leadership, this course will examine fictional characters living out leadership within all the complexities of the world of the text or film. In doing so, we will see that the question of what it means to be a leader cannot lose sight of the verb “to be.”  That is, being a leader has everything to do with being attentive to a complex set of responsibilities within an multi-faceted context. A number of things make this project complex:  the complexity of the person who would be a leader; the complexity of the situation in which the leader must be; the complexity of the project that requires leadership; and the complexity of the disparate realities that any particular call to leadership inherits: legacies of success, failure, scandal or entrenchment; people who unnaturally believe in you, love you, hate you, suspect you or envy you; your own responses of over-confidence, insecurity, fear, impatience, etc.