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"My War Gone By, I Miss It So" by Anthony Loyd
A jaded British correspondent feeds his smack habit in Bosnia and Chechnya.
By Judith Coburn
[01/28/00]

Footloose in Florida
There are always dark doings in the Sunshine State.
By Jaqueline Carey
[01/28/00]

The black edge
Are athletes of African descent genetically superior?
By Gary Kamiya
[01/28/00]

Book Bag
Outskirts of the fin de siècle
Five underappreciated novels from the last time the century turned.
By Phillip Lopate
[01/31/00]

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"The Delicious Grace of Moving One's Hand: The Collected Sex Writings" by Timothy Leary
Acid wasn't the only mindblower the '60s guru preached.
By Jonathan Miles
[01/31/00]

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The course begins with an examination of the universality of violence and humankind's ceaseless fascination with it ... Topics include: war and warriors; industrialized violence; ethnic and racial savagery; violence in the name of God; political violence; terror; honor and violence; sexual violence; criminal violence; and self-destructiveness.

The course (called simply "Violence") is a new one at Williams College and on the cutting edge of curriculum change in higher education. American universities have discovered violence -- not as a rallying point for take-back-the-night marches or an occasion for lectures from campus security, but as the subject of serious academic scrutiny.

Williams, in Williamstown, Mass., is one of at least a dozen colleges around the country that introduced courses on violence in the last year or so. Several universities have even instituted full-fledged "violence studies" programs that undergraduates may take as a minor. Though still in its earliest stages, the emergence of this field reveals much about the state of the university -- and the state of American society.

One of its most passionate advocates is Michael Bellesiles, a brash young historian at Atlanta's Emory University. He came up with the idea of violence studies four years ago, "over a bottle of wine" with Arthur Kellerman, head of emergency medicine at Emory's medical school. As Bellesiles recalls, "We were having dinner one night and fantasizing about what a perfect program for undergraduates would look like."

And it looks pretty grisly: lectures on rape, genocide and guns, supplemented by readings on lynching and terrorism and screenings of "Pulp Fiction" and "The Matrix." Starting in Violence 101, "Introduction to the Comparative Study of Violence," and on through "The Causes of Crime and Violence" and "Violence in Film and History," students are encouraged to look at history, arts and sciences through a single lens: the infliction of injury and death.

The 3-year-old Emory curriculum has become a model for other universities, and the Williams course may be developed into a multimedia program available to other universities. But the success of violence studies has been controversial: Can it really tell us anything useful about the violence that plagues our nation? Is it just a cynical attempt to garner grants and attract students with an edgy-sounding premise? Might it replace real learning with mere titillation -- the academic equivalent of rubbernecking?

Next page | And it doesn't hurt that violence is a sexy subject