Dimensions of Culture
DOC Goals and Objectives-- Content and Writing (link)
The Dimensions of Culture program (DOC) is an introductory three-quarter
social science sequence that is required of all first year students at
Thurgood Marshall College, UCSD. Successful completion of the DOC sequence
satisfies the University of California writing requirement. The course
is a study in the social construction of individual identity in America and it surveys
a complex range of social differences and stratifications that shape the nature
of human attachment to self, work, community, and a sense of nation. Central
to the course objective is the question of how scholars move from knowledge
to action.
Perhaps unique among the UCSD college programs, DOC also provides its students with a full menu of academic and cultural enrichment opportunities. Since Fall 2004, DOC students have taken part in numerous events on and off the UCSD campus that have helped to establish connections between course themes and contemporary experience.
Outstanding among them, during the past three years DOC students have
- visited the Veterans Museum in Balboa Park and learned the rudiments of oral history with a group of former prisoners of war;
- met Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, Nobel Laureate Poet Derek Walcott, legendary film Producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr., renowned film and TV actor David Alan Grier, NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, Dr. Terrence Roberts (Little Rock Nine member) and NPR award winning author Juan Williams in intimate settings;
- enjoyed the annual DOC 2 Film Festival, entitled Cinematic Representations of Justice in America ;
- attended of a full-length play commissioned by the Thurgood Marshall Institute, The Haunting of Jim Crow, at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art
In November during Thurgood Marshall Week, students will attend keynote addresses from Broadway renowned Chicano playwright Luis Valdez(who also directed the hit film La Bamba), leading Harvard professor on International Human Rights Jacqueline Bhabha and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Gregory Nava (who will show a new 35mm print of his acclaimed El Norte - a 25th anniversary movie screening)
Update on DOC as of Fall 2008
Following up on the formal reviews of the Dimensions of Culture Program, by faculty and student committees, respectively, Thurgood Marshall College has begun to implement many of their specific recommendations. First, two TMC senior faculty have been appointed Co-Directors of the Program: Robert Cancel (Department of Literature) and Robert Horwitz (Department of Communication), representing disciplinary areas of arts/humanities and social sciences, respectively. Both Professors have a long history at UCSD and were instrumental in developing the first version of the DOC core sequence. In the short term, they have overseen some small changes in the orientation that teaching assistants undergo before the fall quarter, met with the lecturers for both DOC1 and DOC2 to set a mutually agreed upon tone and structure for the courses and interactions with students and TAs, and begun to look into recruiting a team of nine to twelve ladder-rank faculty to develop a new version of the sequence for the 2009 -10 academic year. As fall quarter progresses, TMC will appoint a Steering Committee to work with the Co-Directors and DOC staff in implementing more of the recommendations offered by the formal reviews. The Steering Committee will consist of faculty, TMC undergraduates, and DOC teaching assistants. Transparency and open dialogue will be fostered at all levels of the DOC Program as the new version of the sequence is developed.
Description of DOC's origins in Third (TMC) history:
Dimensions of Culture and Thurgood Marshall College
In early April 1968, as deliberations were taking place at UCSD to develop its "Third College," biology professor Dan Lindsley responded to one of the more horrific events of the decade by writing a proposal for the new college's direction: "The assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis on April 4 is one of the bitter rewards that we reap from our apathetic acceptance of social injustice and racism in our society." Within two years, Third College was born of the committed and strenuous efforts of concerned students and faculty, framed by concerns of identifying and achieving social justice by applying excellent scholarship to issues and peoples that had previously been silenced, ignored and thereby oppressed.
Coming into existence at the end of the turbulent sixties, the College would establish new, socially-engaged programs and provide a set of general education requirements that ensured all its students would share a common grounding in the issues and ideas that would make of them articulate and activist citizens of the world. By the end of the 1980s, scholarship and discourse had in many ways caught up to the earlier rhetoric and politics of confrontation as a necessary spur to social change, and as Third College became Thurgood Marshall College the Dimensions of Culture Program was developed to make the most of these new, progressive disciplinary approaches to those ongoing concerns.
The courses and activities in the DOC Program are seen as a natural and academic outgrowth of the struggles that initially brought Third College into being. Like all elements of our society and wider world, change is inevitable and so the number of approaches and kinds of critical thinking necessary to continue the pursuit of social justice and positive engagement must also evolve. Diversity, Justice and Imagination are courses in which students are expected to identify and wrestle with the pressing issues of our time and, in the process, develop the critical skills of research, analysis and writing that will allow them to express themselves clearly and effectively in the struggle for social change.
For information about DOC 100, our upper-division special topics course, please click here.
Click here for
the official description of the DOC program from the UCSD Course Catalog. To submit general questions
about the program, please click here: DOCInfo
