What: Integrated Liberal Studies is a certificate program offering interdisciplinary courses designed to meet your humanities, social, and natural science breadth requirements. We provide a cohesive curriculum with a core group of students so you can fulfill your general education requirements while creating a sense of community.
Where: Meiklejohn House on Charter and Johnson. Not only do we offer discussion sections and seminars in our living room, it’s a great place to hang out, study in the reading room upstairs, and hold study groups.
How: The certificate requires 18 total credits of ILS classes including 1 course above a 230 level and the capstone. Your freshman year FIG counts towards 6 ILS credits.
File: Fall2017ShortCourseDescriptions2.pdf
Integrated Liberal Studies is a certificate program dating back to 1927 that offers interdisciplinary courses designed to meet your humanities, social, and natural science breadth requirements. Besides meeting your graduation requirements, the program strives to create a cohesive curriculum based on a traditional liberal arts education. Most importantly, ILS is a melting pot of majors that come together for academic discussions, study sessions and film screenings. The classes we offer are included on this document.
File: Fall-2018-Course-Guide_Final-Draft_3-12-18-2.pdf
Integrated Liberal Studies is a certificate program dating back to 1927 that offers interdisciplinary courses designed to meet your humanities, social, and natural science breadth requirements. Besides meeting your graduation requirements, the program strives to create a cohesive curriculum based on a traditional liberal arts education. Most importantly, ILS is a melting pot of majors that come together for academic discussions, study sessions and film screenings. The classes we offer are included on this document.
File: Fall-2020-Course-Guide-ILS.pdf
ILS Fall 2021 Newsletter
File: Fall-2021-Newsletter.pdf
Ten Years Later: Reflections on the Founding of the International Learning
Community
(Remarks Prepared for the Opening Convocation of the ILC, Sept. 12, 2002)
File: Hinden_remarks_2002_Convocation.pdf
A timeline of who has Chaired the department over the years. Does not include Richard Avramenko, 2016-Present.
File: ILS_Chairs_1947-present.pdf
This course relates principles of environmental science to our daily activities, with an eye to sustainability, conservation, and systems thinking. It introduces science as a process of inquiry and discovery rather than just a pre-established set of facts. Topics relate to energy, water, and land use, and include food, electric power, materials, buildings, transportation, and waste.
Requisites - None
Breadth - Physical Science
Level - Elementary
Counts as L&S Credit
File: SP22-ENVIRST_ILS-126-Syllabus.pdf
This is introductory science course for non-science majors provides an overview of scientific discovery and the nature of science. It will explore science as a process of inquiry through five broad scientific concepts representing a range of disciplines: astronomy, geology, chemistry, biology, and ecology/atmospheric sciences.
Requisites - None
Breadth - Physical Science
Level - Elementary
Counts as L&S Credit
File: Syllabus-ILS-153-2022-FINAL-24Jan22.docx
What does it mean to think critically? To find fault? To employ intellectual rigor? Can we imagine a method of critical thought that produces writing with the potential to change the world? This course takes the definition of “critical thought” seriously in order to expand our idea of what critical communication is and has the potential to be. Explores the three modes of argument and expression: verbal, visual, numerical. Students engage in critical thinking about how these modes are structured and used. Practice in, and interpretation of, the three modes.
Requisite: Satisfied Communications A requirement
Breadth - Humanities
Level - Elementary
Counts as L&S Credit
This course fulfills the Communications B requirement.
File: ILS-200-Fall-2021-SyllabusAnderson.pdf
What does science have to do with religion? What does it mean to have expertise about the natural world? And what difference do politics and funding sources make to scientific investigation? Learn how to think critically and historically about science in this course by exploring such fundamental questions across two millennia. We begin with ancient mythology and philosophy, then follow the movement of the Greek classical tradition into medieval Islam and Christendom, and finally turn to the ‘revolution’ in science of the 16th and 17th centuries with Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. These historical investigations provide vital insights into ideas of the ‘natural’, scientific observation, and experiment, as well as into our expectations of scientific knowledge and the scientific enterprise.
Requisites: Not open to students with credit for HIST SCI 201.
Breadth - Natural Science
Level - Elementary
Counts as L&S Credit
File: HS_ILS201-fall20-syllabus-HSIA-FINAL.pdf