Public health is coming to undergraduates this fall.
This semester, Columbia College is collaborating with the Mailman School of Public Health to offer the University’s first course in public health that caters to undergraduates. With the several more courses planned for the future, Mailman hopes to eventually offer a concentration in public health to undergraduates, and potentially a major.
The course, Social History of American Public Health, will be taught by Dr. David Rosner, the Ronald H. Lauterstein Professor of Sociomedical Science and History and co-director of the Center for the History & Ethics of Public Health at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. The course is scheduled to meet on Mondays and Wednesdays from 4:10–5:25 p.m. in 503 Hamilton Hall.
Rosner, a renowned public health historian, said the class will focus on “how we build worlds that ultimately kill us,” and an “understanding of how we got into recent crises”—referring to pandemics such as the swine flu. He hopes to explore the social and physical history of the United States and encourage discussion about future health problems.
Rosner said that this class was chosen as the first undergraduate public health course mainly because it “bridges the gap between the scientific aspect of public health and the liberal arts side.” Rosner has taught a similar course to graduate students for ten years.
Next semester, professors from Mailman, the School of International and Public Affairs, the Earth Institute, and other schools will offer a course on global health fundamentals.
According to Mailman dean Linda Fried, the school plans “to steadily increase offers to undergraduates” as they “assess the level of student interest” in the field.
Eventually, Mailman also hopes to offer a “4-1 program” to students, which would allow undergraduates to earn their Bachelor of Arts and Master of Public Health degrees in five years.
Ian Lapp, the Mailman School associate dean for academic affairs and education, said that “public health embodies the intellectual spirit of the College,” since Mailman relies on an interdisciplinary faculty including professors with backgrounds in history, philosophy, and many other fields.
Many Ivy League schools—Brown, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale—already offer undergraduate majors in public health called health and society majors. By teaming with the College, Lapp said that he would like to see Columbia “set new standards” for undergraduate work in the field.
To inform students about this new course, the Mailman School sent e-mails out to all pre-medical and pre-law students in Columbia College and the School of Engineering and Applied Science, as well as relevant majors in the School of General Studies and Barnard College. So far, according to Lapp, they have received over 20 e-mails from interested students.
One anthropology and history double major, Zachary Levine, CC ’12, is particularly excited about the new class.
“The course description and reading list, alongside the fact that David Rosner is one of the sociomedical scientists with the most real influence outside the University, was what made me so excited about the class,” Levine said. “I think anyone who has a passion for public health and who finds the United States’ history with health policy fascinating—albeit freighted—should definitely take the class.”
Discussion about this initiative for undergraduates first started last May when Mailman hired a new dean. According to Lapp, Dean Fried had a vision that “public health be an essential part of a great university” and that “our school should provide undergraduate opportunities.”
Mailman also met with several members of the student group Universities Allied for Essential Medicines to gauge the level of interest in this course.
“Everyone should have an understanding of public health,” Fried said. ”Public health has changed dramatically for the past 100 years, and we need to educate our students to make sure it keeps changing and improving for the next 100.”
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