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President Weiss to Teach Two Courses Next Year

As you’re browsing the Tri-Co Course Guide in the next week, keep an eye out for a class taught by a new professor: our very own President Dan Weiss.

President Weiss will co-teach Higher Education and the Liberal Arts: Mission and Trends with Swarthmore president Rebecca Chopp, a 200-level course cross-listed in the Independent College Programs and Education departments. The class, capped at 15 students, will be held from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. on Fridays during Fall 2014. Its location will alternate between the Haverford and Swarthmore campuses.

“The course is really intended to explore the small liberal arts college, and its role in society today,” President Weiss explained. “How is higher education changing? How does liberal education seem to be valuable in a world that is increasingly instrumental and vocational? What is the place of what we do at Swarthmore and Haverford?”

President Weiss and President Chopp have collaborated in the past as well. In April 2012, while president of Lafayette College, President Weiss co-hosted a three-day conference with President Chopp called “The Future of the Liberal Arts College in America and Its Leadership Role in Education Around the World.”

In addition to co-teaching this course, President Weiss is also in the process of writing a book with President Chopp. Weiss, who has authored five books so far, said that this course will explore a number of the issues that the book will discuss.

Higher Education and the Liberal Arts is not the only course that President Weiss will teach next year. Weiss, a “leading authority on the art of medieval Europe in the age of the Crusades” according to a May 2012 press release, will also be teaching an art history course on the Middle Ages in Spring 2015.

“[It’s] really about the ways in which people were interested in religiously motivated travel, beginning with innocent pilgrimage and ending with war,” President Weiss said. “How did that happen? How did Christ’s teachings lead to that kind of perversion of his vision?”

Prior to coming to Haverford, Weiss was a professor of art history at John Hopkins University from 1998 to 2001, and taught several courses while serving as president of Lafayette.

“I’m looking forward to it,” President Weiss said in regards to teaching at Haverford. “The students here are really terrific, so interacting with them will be fun.”

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