The Liberal Arts and Management Program (LAMP) is an interdisciplinary certificate program offered by the College of Arts and Sciences in cooperation with the Kelley School of Business. Its purpose is to give students the opportunity to combine a liberal arts major with an education in business management. Students are selected on a basis of merit, with approximately 75-100 accepted into the program each year. The program's curriculum and career-oriented extracurricular activities prepare strong students with wide interests and leadership potential for careers in business, medicine, law, and education.

L216, Business and the Humanities, is a course that offers instructors a very high level of autonomy in course planning. Its only requirements are that the class be structured as a seminar and that it incorporate aspects of both the business world and the humanities, preferably focusing on those areas where the two subject areas intersect. For many L216 students, exploration into the broader world of the humanities is either new or relatively new territory. Most are familiar with the business side of the curriculum, and perhaps one focused area of the humanities, but have little experience with an interdisciplinary approach.

Because of the high standards for admission and LAMP's high selectivity, L216 students are more motivated and better prepared than the average sophomores at Indiana University. Unlike other students I had taught in similar classes, L216 students routinely arrived to class well prepared to discuss the day's assignment. Although class discussions sometimes flagged, oral work done by students during class meetings was generally of a very high caliber. In addition, students were much more organized and meticulous in submitting their work than I expected based on my experience with other students at Indiana University. With the exception of the work of one or two students, the quality of written work was very high and students rarely asked for extensions. As I reflect on their final grades (which averaged higher than I was comfortable with), I am led to believe that LAMP sophomores might benefit from a higher level of academic challenge in L216, even though most students reported they were significantly challenged in the class.

In spite of their intellectual acumen, however, LAMP sophomores -- like their peers at large at I. U. -- remain young adults who were raised on American consumer capitalism. Rationalized business structures, such as ubiquitous fast food restaurants, super stores, and shopping malls constitute their social, economic, and political reality to the extent that alternate ways of conceptualizing society are unimaginable for students when entering the class. For many, if not most, therefore, the values and assumptions of our consumer-capitalist world remain transparent and hence inscrutable. The overarching course goal for my section of L216 finds its genesis in this observation about students born and raised during the last quarter of the 20th century. This observation also explains some of the greatest challenges I faced (and probably will continue to face) while teaching the course.