What to teach and how?
Yale News Calendar Reinventing the liberal arts from the ground up By Eric Gershon August 28, 2012 (Photos by Michael Marsland) Jan Gruber’s travels through the academy in Europe and Asia have required the physicist-turned-biochemist to adapt to a variety of scholastic disciplines, pedagogies, and cultures. In mid-July, he found himself ensconced in a hilltop mansion on Yale University’s Connecticut campus, immersed in his latest cultural transition. This time he was helping to found the intellectual society he’d joined. Gruber is among nearly 40 inaugural faculty members of Yale-NUS College, a liberal arts school and joint project of Yale and the National University of Singapore (NUS) opening next year. He and his colleagues had assembled for the first in a series of intense curricular conclaves. Over two weeks, they would address and start answering two fundamental questions: What to teach. And how? “It’s a chance,” said Gruber, “to reinv...