To the students of Directed Studies 2015–2016/Yale College class of 2019:
On behalf of the Directed Studies faculty and staff: Welcome!
You worked hard to reach Yale and you have chosen to start Yale in Directed Studies. For various reasons, something about the opportunity to study intensively some of the most significant texts of the Western tradition appeals to you and is a part of what you want to take from your college experience. We are thrilled that you feel this way, and will do our best to ensure that you are not disappointed.
We don’t study these texts to emulate or indoctrinate; we study them because they play a fundamental role in shaping the ideas that we encounter every day in politics, law, social relations, philosophy, and in literature and the arts. We study them because we want to know the history of the ideas that we have inherited, where they come from and the controversies and problems that they raise, in order to better understand how to confront and engage those ideas in our own words and on our own terms. We view the study of a tradition not as restrictive, but empowering.
You are about to embark on a year-long journey in the company of like-minded student colleagues and teachers. Like the characters in the dialogues of Plato, your fellow DS students will become your intellectual companions on this journey, and you will find that the experience of studying intensively a shared body of texts will forge unexpected and irreproducible ties. We often hear students voice regret over not having taking DS, but we rarely hear anyone say, “I’m sorry I spent my freshman year in DS.”
You will find on our new website announcements about meetings to be held during “Opening Days”, syllabi and schedules for the fall semester, a history of the program, links to the Humanities Program and Major, the DS summer reading assignments, and more.
We look forward to welcoming you to Yale and Directed Studies in person at the DS Orientation on September 1st. In the meantime, if you have questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact the Administrative Assistant for Directed Studies and the Humanities Program, Connie Pascarella, or the DS Director of Undergraduate Studies, Kathryn Slanski.
We are going to have an amazing year!
Kathryn Slanski
DUS Directed Studies