the days of the 500-student survey course aren't gone forever, but Paul Forage's first-year seminar "The Face of War: Emotion and Armed Conflict" is part of the new generation of small, highly interactive courses geared toward the neophyte student at Michigan. It is one of more than 100 seminars that paired first-year students with professors.
Forage, an assistant professor of history and of Asian languages and cultures, said the title of the seminar he taught this spring was a bit misleading, since he hopes to expand the course to include all internecine issues, not simply those between nations.
"Conflict by itself includes some very strong emotions," he said. "A subgroup of that---armed conflict---has another set of emotions. I hope to deal with the emotional
construction of conflict and the emotional environment that people in conflict have to deal with. Of course, it's very different to sit and think about the war experience than
it is to experience war. It's like reading about being mugged and being mugged."
In a typical class, Forage showed a film---Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, All Quiet on the Western Front---which then served as a springboard for class discussion.
"Oh, a class about war; we'll watch things blow up," Eric Porzadek of Redford, Michigan, thought when he first leafed through the course guide. Porzadek, a
School of Art student, says he was "pleasantly surprised" to find that the class was much deeper than his initial impression. "This is not a regular 'textbook' class where
you memorize certain things and say them back to a teacher; this class make you think. It's really what I've been looking for. This course is much more interactive than other small classes I've taken. I didn't feel like I had to 'study,' I felt like I had to 'think' to do well. I felt like I was actually gaining knowledge, knowledge of experience."
LaRuth McAfee, who is in the chemical engineering program, admitted that she chose the seminar because it fit in her schedule. "Since I'm not that into studying
war," she said, "I was afraid that it wouldn't be interesting at all. But because we focus on emotion, not just war, I really enjoyed it. It was also nice to have a class where you
got to express your opinion, where people didn't just say you're right or wrong like in my math and science classes. Professor Forage made sure the class was broad enough
that everyone could find an area of interest. I'm doing my final project on the emotions of gang violence, for instance."
Forage also brought war veterans to class to bring a personal face to the subject. Because so many of today's students have been exposed to war only through films,
he sensed that they might see war as a "cowboys and Indians game---just with real guns."
Bill Lowe,a 48-year-old Vietnam veteran from Ann Arbor, told the class what it was like when he was their age and found himself in a war. Lowe said he had volunteered under the sway of "romanticism" instillled by a Marine recruiter and "skepticism of my peers that I could survive Marine boot camp."
After listening to Lowe's account of his 13 months in Vietnam during a tour of duty from 1965-69 as an unloader of ships and a brig guard, the students peppered him with questions. "What did you think of the Vietnamese people?" "What did you feel when the US defeat became definite?" "What did you think of [former Secy. of Defense Robert] McNamara's book saying he had told others in the LBJ administration that the war was a lost cause?" "Were you aware of the anti-war movement while you were over there?" "Could you only relate to other vets when you returned?" "Did your family think
you had changed when you came back home?" "What do you think of the current military involvement in the former Yugoslavia?"
LS&A student Jessica Beiler of Chicago said that the speakers helped bring new perspectives to her understanding of war and emotion. "I'm pretty much a peaceful
person," she said, "so I've always thought that the Vietnam War was wrong, that we shouldn't have been there. But after watching films and hearing the man who fought
in Vietnam, I sympathize with the soldiers. They were my age. I'm beginning to understand that they felt they were fighting for their country and many of them felt it
was just the right thing to do."
Tad Dixon of LSA said he appreciated the new perspectives that other students in the class gave him. "Students with immediate family who have fought in a war understand the emotions of fighting better. They've heard war stories before, and they will tell us the stories. In a larger class we'd definitely lose some of the emotional feelings."
Military Studies Group
Undergraduates are not the only members of the U-M's academic community who take advantage of small groups to bounce ideas off one another. History
Professor Emeritus John Shy created the Military Studies Group in 1969 as an outlet for graduate students studying military history to keep in touch with him throughout the year.
The Department of History's U-M History Newsletter - 1995 called the Group "probably the oldest floating (i.e. unfunded) seminar" in the department. But after three decades of "interdepartmental, interuniversity, multicultural, irreverent, disorganized and free-floating discussions," the Newsletter reported, the group decided it was "stuffy, stagnant and whined too much." So last year, members took "vigorous action" of a scholarly sort by changing its name to the War Studies Group.
By whatever name, the group has evolved into an informal seminar every Friday
afternoon for about 20 professors, graduate and undergraduate students, and staff.
Sessions often begin with one of the members reading a research paper, book chapter or dissertation on which they are working. Then comes the feedback.
Paul Forage's presentation this term was on medieval Chinese military history; others addressed such topics as the 18th century Bosnian militia, the election of military officers, and the experience of lesbians in the military.
Shy says that the field of military studies is not looked upon kindly by many historians. "It has always been kind of a stepchild in the history profession---kind of like
a smoker's group. There is a feeling among many historians that people who study military history are bloodthirsty and hawkish. Our group runs the spectrum of
political views, though.
"This is not to say `poor us'---military history sells books and it is fascinating. But look at Bosnia, it's awful, it's terrible. Anybody who finds the subject sickening is
justified, but it is a part of human existence. But war is a repulsive subject, and some people can't get over that."---JB.
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. . . June 1996
By Jared Blank