August 26, 2022

In fall 2021, Pennoni Honors College launched a pilot of its Program for Civic Foundations (PCF), using a planning grant from the Teagle Foundation, which supports and strengthens liberal arts education. Now the College is expanding PCF to address more students, using a Teagle Implementation Grant for 2022-2025.

The program involves a three-term first-year “core” sequence of courses that covers:

1. Plato’s Republic
2. the founding documents of our nation alongside readings in Enlightenment philosophy, and
3. texts representing women, Black and indigenous people who have been left out of our historical narrative.

Additional courses beyond the first year are being developed to enlarge on this core and support a purpose-driven education, grounded in a sense of history and civics. One is a global exchange course between Drexel and Amsterdam University, which explores the many variables which support health and perpetuate injustice. Another course deals with the history of art and medicine in Philadelphia, site of one of the first women’s medical colleges (now Drexel School of Medicine). Here, we hope to link the course to existing medical education and to art history, using Thomas Eakins’ great works, The Gross Clinic and The Agnew Clinic, as touchstones. These paintings, which hang in the Philadelphia Art Museum, deal with the major shift in the prevention of sepsis in surgery. Courses on such topics as argumentation and debate, current events, and the writing of effective opinion pieces are also being planned.