Academic boot camp aims to prep veterans for college
The topic was the Declaration of Independence as 13 students and Harvard lecturer Jonathan Hansen gathered at the Cabot Science Library to probe the document’s driving ideas. “As you’re reading this, does it seem over the top, does it seem convincing, are you skeptical, do think they made their case too strong?” Hansen wondered of the Founding Fathers who drafted the declaration. It was the type of question that Hansen, senior lecturer on social studies and faculty associate at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, might have asked in any of his classes on the Revolutionary era. But the students seated around him were not undergraduates or even graduates, but instead were current military and veterans, descendants in spirit of those who fought in the nation’s formative war. Monday’s seminar was part of the Warrior-Scholar Project, an academic boot camp intended to help provide members of the armed forces or those...