The course covers the impact/effect of journalism on American society, with an introduction to the history, freedom, technologies, ethics, and functions of the news media. Students will learn how to assess news value, develop news judgment, and analyze news stories.

This course introduces students to the principles and practices of gathering, evaluating, investigating, and presenting information to general audiences. Rights and responsibilities of the press will be analyzed. Although special emphasis will be given to writing and reporting for print publications, other media will be addressed. Special attention will be given to the qualities of writing, especially organization, accuracy, completeness, brevity, and readability. Assignments must conform to Associated Press style.

Opinion Media teaches students how to craft persuasive personal essays, commentary and op-eds, and get them published on news sites, in trade magazines, in newspapers and on influencer blogs. By drawing upon the ethical deployment of evidence, including argument, anecdote and statistical data, student authors will learn how to become influencers and thought leaders through the deployment of the written word and multimedia texts, including writing scripts, and producing video, for their own social media channels. This course is ideally suited for those seeking to sharpen their persuasive writing skills to sell their ideas, vision, expertise and life experience to a targeted media audience.

Law is pervasive and shapes our daily lives in a multitude of ways. This course examines the relationship between law, social institutions, and society using an interdisciplinary social scientific approach. Students will examine theoretical frameworks used to understand how law shapes society and how society, in return, can shape the law and legal institutions. Consensus and conflict perspectives of the origins and formation of law will be contrasted and applied to an understanding of the practical applications of law. Throughout the course the role of law as an instrument of political and social change will be examined with a particular focus on historical and contemporary issues including topics like, privacy and surveillance, the tension between public social control and civil liberties, and the disparate application of law and its relationship to racial and economic inequality.

Students will work with a supervising faculty member on a project of mutual interest. Project design and evaluation will be determined through discussion with the supervising faculty member and documented through completion of an independent study form to be filed with the department of computing security.

This course will provide a mechanism for teaching topics within the field of humanities and/or social sciences on an ad-hoc basis. This course will serve as a shell to allow the College of Liberal Arts flexibility to allow faculty across the college to teach a short-term course in their area of expertise. These short-term courses can take the form of • a course surrounding a professional opportunity, such as a conference or field study; • a short-term course developed to teach students skills not ordinarily offered in the curriculum, which may lead to a skills-based certification • a pop-up course developed to address a current event. Faculty who wish to stand up this course must have the permission of the department chair as well as the dean’s office.

This course is a study of politics and government on the state and local levels, as well as the relationships between these levels and the federal government. The first focus of the course is on the federal system of government, including the interdependence of the three levels of government. The course continues by examining the state level followed by a focus on local government. A final topic is policy-making, including revenues and expenditures, which again illustrate the interrelationship of the three levels.