The “Great Issues” Course at Dartmouth College

Dartmouth's new required course for seniors, called “Great Issues,” is avowedly an exercise in training for more effective citizenship. Its twofold purpose is to arouse in students a greater sense of public-mindedness and to make them more competent in the use and evaluation of the common sources of public information. Thus the Great Issues course, dealing with college students at the moment of their greatest undergraduate maturity, is pointed toward the problems of citizenship which beset a person in his adult years, just as it is also pointed toward the problems of adult education. It might, therefore, be described as an attempt to facilitate the transition from the methods of undergraduate instruction to the methods which adult citizens have to rely upon in securing the information necessary for making well-informed decisions.The principal textbook in the course is the daily and Sunday editions of either the New York Times or the New York Herald Tribune, according to the students choice. Other reading assignments are such official or semi-official publications as the Acheson-Lilienthal report, the Supreme Court decision and minority opinion in Everson v. The Board of Education of the Township of Ewing, and To Secure These Rights. Students are required also to read in entirety designated numbers of such magazines as the Atlantic, Harper's, Saturday Review of Literature, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The Nation, and Foreign Affairs, as well as a few particularly apposite current books.