What do you believe and why? Can you prove it? How, or why not? Does it matter whether you can support what you believe? Is everything relative? Is science just another belief system? What are the roles of conjecture, evidence and theory in understanding? How can you articulate beliefs? How can you test hypotheses? What is the difference, if any? If these questions intrigue you, too, join us.

Classes will include discussions, lectures, and other activities. Workshops may include quantitative reasoning, science, and statistical reasoning. Some online work may be required.

Business Statistics is a program in business, undergraduate statistics, and quantitative reasoning that will serve as a foundation for further work in advanced social science and any graduate program (e.g., an MPB and MPA) requiring statistics. It will also provide the quantitative basics for understanding business management. Readings (such as the Wall Street Journal , How To Lie With Statistics, and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information ) will focus on increasing student familiarity with business topics, and developing quantitative reasoning skills and skills at presenting quantitative information.

Students will complete a research project that includes a significant empirical element. The program will culminate with the students presenting their research. Strategies for effectively presenting quantitative information will be emphasized.

The post-9/11 climate reinforced polarities in U.S. nationalist discourse, stressing oppositions between "civilization" and "barbarism," freedom and tyranny, "us" and "them." Individual markers of identity, like "Muslim" and "immigrant," have become social categories upon which U.S. domestic and foreign policy hinge. They situate groups and communities, marking out areas of significant, and seemingly incompatible, differences.

By contrast, this program will examine the borderlands where identities of nation, race, ethnicity, religion, class and gender are challenged and converge. We will focus on identities as being interdependent and intercommunal by pursuing the following questions: What are the master narratives shaping U.S. identity? How do we understand our personal and collective identities in relation to others? How are our stories and experiences of self, home and nation part of the narratives we share with those whose power and privilege differ from ours? How do we engage in critical solidarity with those we learned to see as "other" and "outside"?

We will explore how "American" identities are positioned within structures of power, privilege or marginality. Starting with our personal experiences of identity, we will examine how narratives of identity have been constructed and deployed, in our lives and in public discourse, to reinforce notions of separateness and community.

We will develop case studies drawn from national and international contexts. Nationally, we will look at debates over immigration, "race" and "whiteness," labor, and Islam-especially as they relate to African American, Arab, Latino and Jewish communities. Internationally, we will examine the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lenses of collective memory and constructions of Jewish and Arab identity, historically as well as in the present. We will examine how relationships to power and suffering, privilege and victimization are used to construct political policies and narratives of nationhood in the Middle East.

Our exploration of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is driven by what Jewish theologian Marc Ellis calls "the struggle for an interdependent empowerment." We will look to social movements in Israel/Palestine and the United States that are modeling solidarity and the narration of a shared identity and history. We will investigate the historical interrelations among Blacks, Jews and Arabs, including the experiences of African and Arab Jews in Israel, and the ways in which the Palestinian question and Islam have influenced Black-Jewish and Black-Arab relations in the United States, both before and after 9/11. Wherever possible, we will collaborate with community organizations that can help our work.

In spring, students can develop program-related projects or participate in up to 20 hours of community internship. We will examine further the impact of Islam as a longstanding counter-narrative, both in the Nation of Islam and more recently in Hip Hop culture, as well as the post-9/11 phenomenon of an Islamic internationalism in political and popular culture.

Media literacy and image-making will be emphasized in this program. We will analyze mass media representations, including films and news. We will also pay close attention to experimental, activist and community-based media by creating new representations of personal/collective identity. Finally, we will create with text and image, using video, installation art, oral history and storytelling/performance, to share our learning about identity and representation and move toward the construction of shared narratives of personhood, community and nation.

Our texts will be drawn from film, literature, social theory and history. Our modes of analysis will be taken from cultural studies, discourse analysis and the politics of media representation. Our goals are to move beyond identity politics, break down narratives of exclusion and supremacy, and work toward a critical practice of solidarity with those we have identified as "other."

Western psychology has so far failed to provide us with a satisfactory understanding of the full range of human experience. It has largely overlooked the core of human understanding-our everyday mind, our immediate awareness of being, with all of the complexity and sensitive attunement we feel to the vast network of interconnectedness with the universe around us. Instead, it has chosen to analyze the mind as though it were an object independent of the analyzer, consisting of hypothetical structures and mechanisms that cannot be directly experienced. Western psychology's neglect of the living mind-both in its everyday dynamics and its larger possibilities-has led to a tremendous upsurge of interest in the ancient wisdom of Buddhism, which does not divorce the study of psychology from the concern with wisdom and human liberation.

In direct contrast to this approach, Buddhism shuns any impersonal attempt to objectify human life from the viewpoint of an external observer. Instead, it studies consciousness as a living reality that shapes individual and collective perception and action. The primary tool for directly exploring the mind is meditation or mindfulness, an experiential process in which we become attentive participants-observers in the unfolding of moment-to-moment consciousness.

In this program, we will investigate the study of mind that has developed within the Buddhist tradition through lectures, readings, videos, workshops and field trips. In doing so, we will take special care to avoid the common pitfall of most Western interpretations of Buddhism-the attempt to fit Buddhist ideas and practices into unexamined Western assumptions and traditional intellectual categories. Lastly, we will address how the encounter between Buddhism and Western culture could have important ramifications for the human sciences in the future, potentially leading to new perspectives on the whole range of human experience and life concerns.

This program is shaped by the belief that liberal arts graduates bring a special kind of talent to the study and practice of business management. They are "big picture" thinkers skilled at framing the larger issues that often drive thinking in public and private organizations. Liberal arts graduates, and Evergreen graduates in particular, learn how to use collaborative processes that enable them to span and build upon differences in theory and application. They do this by becoming strong critical thinkers and active listeners, by reasoning about ethical principles and moral outcomes, by understanding their own abilities as leaders, and by communicating their ideas clearly in both written and oral formats.

In this program, students will learn about leadership, finance, organizational behavior, marketing and other disciplines in order to recognize when expertise in these disciplines is needed; how to get this expertise; and how to know when not to devote the bulk of their educational resources to any given area of specialized training. Students will develop specialized skill to integrate all the elements of business management into a comprehensive understanding of today's organizations that will be competitively successful and ethically consistent with their sense of what is right, just and fair.