Humans ask questions. From the beginning of civilization, deep questions have marked our cultures across the globe. Who am I? What do I know? What is the good life? How shall we live? Who is my neighbor?

A liberal arts education enshrines the question. Questions drive us to deliberate, to discuss, to investigate, to ask more questions. They are at the core of every class, research project, and creative work. They are the catalyst for and the evidence of a liberal arts mind.

In this class they are the explicit framework for discussion over the course of the semester. As such, this course is a foundational part of your journey into the liberal arts at Wabash College: asking enduring questions; interrogating the questions and questioners; and generating new, enduring questions for yourself.

No one discipline has a monopoly on asking these enduring questions. In this course we honor the classic pursuits of religion, philosophy, and literature. We look as well to the sciences and social sciences and to new, emerging disciplines to inform our questions of humanity and community. We explore multiple genres of literature and art, essays, drama, music, film, and new media. And of course no professor has all the answers or even all the questions. Thus, faculty and student are co-questioners and co-learners in the common exploration of these enduring questions.

We have organized the texts of this course around two enduring questions, "Who am I?" and "How do we live in the world?" and thus have chosen texts that are likely to speak, quite obviously, to one or the other of these questions. However, you will also find in the course of reading, viewing, and discussing that these questions overlap and that the texts are frames overflowing with other questions as well. We encourage you to explore these other questions without restraint or apology. Indeed, in this course, we celebrate questions of all kinds and forms.

EQ Course Goals

1. Fostering foundational intellectual skills inherent in critical thinking

EQ is devoted to helping students develop foundational interrelated intellectual skills that are a fundamental part of liberal education and educated citizenry in the 21st century.

a) Students will become more careful and considerate readers. They will become more aware of their own reading skills and habits, recognizing strengths and weaknesses so they can improve critical reading abilities across a variety of types of texts: identifying and analyzing arguments; understanding how literary form and structure function in a text; evaluating the quality of evidence presented in a text; and being open to consider additional questions and broader implications of a text’s argument for their lives and society.

b) Students will become more effective discussants. Students will improve discussion skills by engaging in various styles of oral presentation, including not just oppositional argument, but also conversation that builds upon, extends, and sharpens their own and others’ arguments and reveals the foundations on which their and others’ positions and questions are built. Students will listen effectively to the ideas of others, and thus, will approach discussions as an opportunity to achieve a richer understanding of the topic and issues under discussion.

d) Students will become more effective writers. EQ will build upon the writing instruction students receive in Freshman Tutorial by engaging students in multiple types of writing (including both informal and formal writing) and in writing for a variety of purposes, including but not limited to summary, interpretation, and comparison of texts. EQ will foster, among other things, students’ abilities to write about the principle ideas and arguments within one text and about how multiple texts speak to a common theme or idea.

2. Fostering meaningful relationships

EQ will encourage meaningful relationships among students, between students and alumni, and between students and faculty and staff, relationships that are grounded in common intellectual experiences and rigorous intellectual discussion about questions that matter.

3. Encouraging consideration of important questions

Students will be inspired to further thinking and discussion with others about complex, meaningful questions with which society has wrestled for centuries and with which contemporary society continues to struggle, albeit in new forms and manifestations and as informed by new technologies and perspectives.