The Power of When I started teaching at Otterbein University in the fall of 1984, I experienced lifelong learning firsthand.
Beth Rigel Daugherty, Ph.D., professor, English and former chair/director of the Integrative Studies program, 1994-2000
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My main teaching assignment was in the Integrative Studies (IS) three-course “comp & lit” sequence: Individual and Society; Dialogue of Men and Women; and Dilemma of Existence. I had to get up to speed quickly on Shakespearean plays I had read but never taught (Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear), on literature I had read only excerpts of as an undergraduate (Dante’s Inferno, Voltaire’s Candide), on works by authors I had read, but not those works (Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying), and on literary texts I knew nothing whatsoever about and had never read (The Lais of Marie de France, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi). It was an anxious time – I was often no more than half a step ahead of my students – but also thrilling. I was living an underlying IS principle every day in the classroom: it’s important and challenging and wonderful to wrestle with big ideas in the humanities (or sciences, social sciences, arts) with your students. When Cory Michael Smith ’09, known for his role as The Riddler on Gotham, came to Otterbein in the fall of 2005, he was hungry to learn and committed to theatre. But he, too, discovered the anxiety that often accompanies learning. As he put it when he accepted the 2018 Young Alumni Award for Professional Achievement, philosophy and English professors outside his major “completely disrupted me. They asked big questions, burrowed into my soul, and made me question everything. I questioned my motives for being an actor, why I was doing this. I questioned what my contribution to society would be.” But there is an “alchemy to a good education,” he said, and in that mysterious process, “it’s the liberal arts that supplies students with what they need.”
OTTERBEIN TOWERS FALL/WINTER 2019
Integrative Studies: 50 Years Old and Counting At its founding, Integrative Studies was called the Common Courses. Forged out of economic distress, national turmoil, and discussions in dean’s planning, curriculum, and faculty meetings between 1965 and 1968, the Common Courses were launched in 19681969. Called “a landmark in the academic life of the college” by college historian Harold Hancock, the Common Courses explored the
