Experimental Course Takes Global View of Civilization : Education: The two-year program offers an ambitious look at the sweep of mankind. It is designed to improve teaching of past civilizations and to show how different traditions developed and led to the modern world.

How is Lucy, a 4-million-year-old human fossil from the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, related to the prehistoric individuals who painted caves at Lascaux, France, about 15,000 years ago?

What can be said about the teachings of Buddha in Nirvana, India, in 483 BC, about the time the Persian War was being fought at the city of Troy in Ionia?

What comparisons can be noted about the teachings of Martin Luther in Germany in 1517 with the Incas who were flourishing at Cuzco, Peru? And what is the connection to be made between Galileo’s revolutionizing astronomy in 1604 in Pisa, Italy, while the warrior Tokugawa was consolidating his country under his rule in Edo (now Tokyo)?

For the last two years, students in the new Fifth College at UC San Diego have wrestled with these questions and others as part of a wide-ranging experimental course designed to improve teaching of past civilizations and cultures and to show how different traditions developed and led to the modern world.

The two-year “Making of the Modern World” course offers an ambitious--some of those involved even say audacious--look at the sweep of mankind, from the earliest anthropological evidence to classical Greece and Rome, the great dynasties of Islam and China, the Renaissance and colonialism, and on to the 19th and 20th centuries with their domination by Western technology and culture.

Twenty professors from several UCSD departments have pursued a conscious interdisciplinary approach for the course, using philosophy, literature, art and the media, as well as history and politics. They have also centered the course on world ideas and civilizations, rather than exclusively Western traditions.

As such, the six-quarter course attempts to straddle the contentious national debate over whether universities must put more emphasis on the study of Western civilization so that American students will understand their cultural heritage--or whether non-Western cultures need more attention in today’s multicultural, multiracial, international world.

That debate exploded into the public eye several years ago with the publication of the book “The Closing of the American Mind” by University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom, whose arguments summarize the views of many that the failure of students to study the great works of the West leaves them ignorant of their own civilization.

A major conflict ensued at Stanford University when the faculty voted to change a longstanding Western cultures course to include the study of works in other cultures and by women, blacks, Latinos, Asians and American Indians.

Meanwhile, plans for the “Making of the Modern World” course--required of all Fifth College students--proceeded quietly and without the glare of publicity as the centerpiece to the international curriculum designed for UCSD’s newest college, which began enrolling students in September, 1988.

Fifth College Provost James K. Lyon suggested in an interview that the concept of Western culture alone is too restrictive in a diverse world, and he argued that all students must be grounded in a global culture.

“We believe that a course needs both a Western and a non-Western focus,” said Lyon, a literature professor who, as provost, oversees undergraduate education requirements for Fifth College. “We believe you have to examine traditions and values in all cultures, to think globally and cross-culturally across world time lines, not just Western time lines, to understand why, for example, the peak of (the) Han (Dynasty) in China was in the 8th Century while that of Greece was in the 5th Century BC.

“Ultimately, our hope is that students will have a far better understanding of their own Western traditions as well as those non-Western ones” that are so important in understanding today’s world, Lyon said. “We agree with many of the things said by (Lynn) Cheney,” head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, who has argued for more study of world curricula while not neglecting Western heritage.

But putting flesh on the UCSD concept has proved difficult, and at times daunting, for Lyon and his colleagues. He called the course different from any other in the United States and without real precedent. The closest model at UCSD itself is the five-quarter humanities sequence at Revelle College, a traditional Western civilization offering with which the Fifth College course is being informally compared.

The course planners have encountered problems in several areas: what to include and leave out of the curriculum; whether to team-teach; how extensive the reading lists should be; how to ensure continuity from quarter to quarter with different professors, and how to handle conflicts between professors--at times personal--over ideological approaches.

“Self-assessments are always painful,” said Lyon, who has continued to make modifications quarter by quarter to refine specifics of the course. He said a new academic offering, especially one of such wide breadth, can take three years or longer to acquire its sea legs.

“But I think the course so far has succeeded better than what I would have hoped for,” Lyon said.

Every quarter, the course is divided into three sections, with a professor each. The professors collaborate on the course syllabus and required readings, but each handles his or her section individually and therefore provides students with a unique perspective, depending on academic background.

“At first, it was hard to know where the course was going,” said sophomore Charles Santore, now completing the two-year sequence with the “Our Century & After” section. “It’s easier to look back now and say the stuff I learned was pretty interesting, but at the time you would say, ‘Why the hell am I learning this?’ ”

Sophomore Gloria Ahn added: “Sometimes I wish we had more time to get into the nitty-gritty, since there’s so much information we have been given; it’s almost mind-boggling. It’s history, but not really. It’s kind of humanities, but not really. It’s kind of this, and kind of that--it’s hard to explain.”

For example, in the second-quarter course, “Great Classical Traditions,” the three professors include one from the history department, one from literature and one from sociology.

“There’s been a lot of debate as to how we do the course, since we can’t include everything, and some feel that we are still looking at other cultures through a basic Western narrative,” literature professor William Fitzgerald said.

As one example, Fitzgerald cited the classical texts of Greece and China, which the second quarter emphasizes, to show that a text comes to be seen as a canon for a society or culture.

“With Confucianism in China, we look at what (Confucius) was trying to do in his own historical times and how his ideas have been used in China, as well as comparing the different kinds of attitudes that might be expressed between the Greek and Chinese texts.”

Fitzgerald added: “I think that students come here thinking we will give them all the answers, but it isn’t that kind of course; there is no one way to survey world civilization, and I hope we have been able to resist spoon-feeding students.”

The professors in the three courses taught to freshmen have now had two years to hone their approaches and stress certain themes that occur throughout, such as an individual’s relationship to authority, the tempo of violence, the effect of the environment on civilizations.

“We are still working out what the story is to tell in a course with such a sweep,” said political science professor Tracy Strong, one of three who teaches the third-quarter “Medieval Heritage” section. “We can give a story outline, but the picture that students will develop hopefully is richer than whatever the framework we provide.”

This year, using at times poetry, linguistics and other examples apart from his political-science background, Strong has compared authority and rebellion among ancient Romans and early Christians with 9th-Century China, where there is the magical figure of the Monkey King, a fabled animal that challenges the status quo.

“We’ve also tried for better integration between our course and the material in previous quarters, and also we’ve pared down the readings. We simply had too much the first time,” Strong said. In addition, professors have spent additional time preparing themselves in subject areas not central to their academic training.

“I’ve read stuff I never saw before, I’ve learned things I never came near to before--that has been true for all of us,” said Stanley Chodorow, dean of the UCSD arts and sciences division and another third-quarter course professor.

The last three quarters of the course, being taught for the first time this year, have encountered some rough waters. The three professors who taught the fourth-quarter course, titled “The Age of Expansion,” when Western exploration and colonialism first took hold, will not return next year as a result of critical student evaluations and disagreements with their colleagues.

The professors taught the sections from a feminist, non-Western point of view, stressing the life of women, workers and others traditionally considered on the margin of great events, and arguing against what they believe has been the predominant interpretation of that historical period.

Lyon said some students were turned off by the reading list, which they considered far too demanding, others by the agreement among the three professors to read an exact lecture verbatim each session, and others by the strong ideological argument. Students were particularly bothered by the stilted presentation of a professor who was reading a lecture prepared by a colleague.

“There were some strained relationships and some very nasty meetings with me,” said Lyon, who early in the quarter was asked by the professors not to attend their lectures. “I just don’t think the course was historically grounded, which it has to be, and that carried over into problems for students in subsequent quarters.”

None of the fourth-quarter professors contacted by The Times returned telephone messages.

“Yet, despite everything that went wrong, there was a lot learned by a lot of students,” Lyon said.