When I take students on summer geology study trips to Iceland as part of Northeastern’s Dialogues program, I have targeted field interpretation skills that I want everyone to acquire, but those trips are also “trips about everything,” because there’s also much to learn about what choices people in Iceland have made over the past 1,000 years to live sustainably in a volcanically active environment along the Arctic Circle, etc. The choices people make often affect their local environment, and paying attention to the places people have chosen to live, and not to live, are in turn affected by environmental hazards like volcano-triggered glacial floods, the availability of water or sunlight, etc. One of the jobs that I think we have as faculty is to provide students with opportunities that will lead them beyond their comfort zone, where people learn or discover new ideas and connections they didn’t have before. That widened skill- or knowledge-set enables people to go even further with a topic the next time.

Drug abuse, or drug addiction, is viewed differently by various people.  Some view it as a medical disorder, others as a form of moral failing, others as a societal problem, and some view recreational drug use as a personal choice and not a problem.  Often overlooked is that the term drug abuse is too global and doesn’t differentiate between, for example, use of heroin, cocaine, or alcohol, and yet all drugs produce their effects through distinct mechanisms of actions.  The pharmacological basis through which drugs act are not only the major determinants of the sequelae that lead to addiction but also underlie the different therapies that may be used to treat drug addiction.  In addition, it is equally true that societal norms, politics, and economic forces are also brought to bear in determining which types of recreational drug use are more likely to be viewed as being acceptable or reprehensible.

The Connecticut tragedy of December 2012 reminds us again that we live in an age of violence which can strike any of us, any time, anywhere.  Seemingly, it can come out of nowhere and, if we are not mindful, could crush us.  This is not the planet-busting, nuclear era of the Cold War, but when the threat strikes, it is hot terror.

Many students are interested in questions of social justice – how do we make the world a better place? How do we deal with injustice and inequality? – but have not spent much time thinking about these questions philosophically. My course, Human Rights: Ideas, Institutions, and Laws, gives students the opportunity to think about precisely these important questions. Human rights is the language that is used most often in political discourse on questions of justice and this course aims to give students a solid foundation on the theories, laws, and institutions that relate to it.

By any measure, 2012 was a tumultuous year for the American health care system.  In June, the Supreme Court issued its decision on the constitutionality of the health reform law.  The ruling surprised nearly everyone by preserving one core feature of health reform, tax penalties for individuals who do not obtain health insurance, while threatening another feature, the significant expansion of Medicaid coverage.  In August, presidential candidate Mitt Romney selected Paul Ryan as a running mate, thus ensuring that Medicare reform would remain a continuing topic of discussion.  And throughout 2012, hospitals and physicians struggled to keep up with the pace of change in the health care industry.

Thirty-eight students in Professor Dennis Shaughnessy’s Honors Freshman Inquiry class, “Voices of Development” were given the opportunity to work on an impact investing strategy with a $10,000 investment made in honor of the late Dean Thomas Moore of the College of Business Administration.  The program was created by Professor Shaughnessy & the University Honors Program in memory of the former Dean to enable students with practical experience of impact investing, or assessing the societal and financial return on investment for a social business or social enterprise.

Honors Writer in Residence, Michael Patrick MacDonald was honored at the Ireland-US Golden Bridges Community Luncheon at the Boston Seaport Hotel on November 11th. The event featured Gerry Adams, who played a pivotal role in reviving the Irish Peace Initiative. The event was attended by Northeastern University Honors students enrolled in Mr. MacDonald’s First Year Inquiry Series course – The North of Ireland.

In fall, 2011, I taught the course “What Makes Music Work” to 33 Honors students as part of the Honors First Year Inquiry Series. The course covered a vast range of musical styles and eras and unlike a music appreciation class, was not organized in a chronological fashion. In fact, many of the examples we looked at were submitted by the students themselves, who were told to bring any music that they wanted to talk about to class.

For more than a thousand years scientific thought has been dominated by the principle of determinism, the belief that the future behavior of a system can be be completely determined from its current state. That is, a problem can always be solved if the initial state is known, the rules that govern the system are known, and sufficient computational resources are available.

This past Fall semester, I taught my honors course on Environmental Justice Politics in the New Millennium. A major theme of the class is the notion that “not all people are polluted equally.” For example, communities of color in Massachusetts contain 23 times more waste sites per square mile than white communities.  Similarly, these communities of color receive more than 10 times the amount of toxic chemical pollution. In fact, of the twenty most environmentally overburdened towns in the state, sixteen are communities of color.