The Dean's Book Course Mission:
A Message from Dr. Linda Slakey, Dean of Commonwealth College 2000-2006 and Originator of the Dean's Book Course
(This Mission Statement is given to all Dean's Book instructors;
we strive to adhere to these ideas in every semester of the Dean's Book Course.)
 The Dean's Book Course is about working with a book as a means of creating an intellectual community. Commonwealth College students pursue every possible major and extracurricular activity. This rich menu of opportunities is one of the elements we use to market the College. The down side of how varied their lives are is that it can seem as though being a member of the College is about meeting requirements rather than having an identifiable intellectual experience, or being part of a known group. Thus the first objective of the Dean's Book Course is simply that our students work on a common intellectual task that is identified as a Commonwealth College activity. At the simplest level of community, students will come to know others who are members of Commonwealth College, whom they might not otherwise have met.
In a deeper sense, the course offers the opportunity for students to experience being a member of a community of scholars, by  working together on close reading of a book, under the guidance of a more experienced scholar. There are some values implicit in this description. Making them explicit, and promoting understanding of them, is a key part of meeting the first objective of the course. One is the value of openness of mind, defined here not only in terms of listening respectfully to others' points of view, but also as being willing to take up a text that may not be to one's taste and work with it as a tool for learning. Another is the practical value of profiting by the thinking of others so as to get more from a rich source than you have time to mine on your own.
The second major goal of the course is to teach oral communication skills. The curriculum approved for Commonwealth  College by the Faculty Senate included a statement that students should demonstrate three kinds of foundation skills; writing, computer literacy, and oral communication. The most challenging of these to implement is oral communication, if we are going to take it at all seriously, and we think we should. We don't have the resources, either in money or numbers of qualified personnel, to provide instruction and evaluation analogous to the Writing Program. The Faculty Senate agreed to move oral communication skill from being a foundation requirement evaluated in the first year to being a feature of the whole curriculum, that is, we are committed to making every effort to see that all honors courses emphasize oral communication skills. The Dean's Book Course is the one place in the Commonwealth College curriculum where the College itself manages a course taken by all our students, and can monitor its pedagogy. It also happens to lend itself to teaching at least a subset of important oral communication skills. Thus we felt we could in good conscience make a commitment that the Dean's Book Course would be the vehicle for making sure that our students receive explicit training in oral communication skills. Hence the emphasis on this as a major goal of the course.
There is also a significant writing component. Writing is a critical support for both interpretation of the text and classroom communication. It isn't our primary intention to teach writing, but we do use in-class writing as an aid to listening and interpretation, and we do expect that the two major written assignments will be done to honors standards.
Students meet this three-credit requirement by taking Dean's Book in three one-credit parts over the time they are members of the College. Roughly half the College will be working formally on each semester's book and the students will have this experience iteratively as they mature as scholars.
The books are chosen by a group of students, the Dean's Readers, working in a three-credit seminar under the Dean's direction. This  group uses the guideline that books chosen should be engaging and at the same time offer a rich array of themes for discussion. The Fall '05 group narrowed a list of forty-four books to thirteen, and then reviewed and presented these books to each other before finally settling on Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill as the Fall 2007 book and A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons for Spring 2008.
So, we are here to enjoy reading a book together: perhaps liking the book or perhaps not, but still taking pleasure in sharing the experience of responding to the reading. And we are here so that Commonwealth College students develop openness of mind, practice working together with colleagues, and grow in their ability to communicate gracefully and effectively in both speech and writing.
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