"The Great Works Symposium is an interdisciplinary course - focused on exploring subjects of the broadest possible interest and greatest societal impact—designed to bring Drexel University students, teachers, and visiting expert lecturers into collaboration. The Great Works Symposium strives to avoid the "textbook approach," with an emphasis on developing in students the active skills of interdisciplinary inquiry: reading, writing, critical thinking, methodological creativity, and argument. Through an intense examination of one topic, students are encouraged to see the University as an interconnected enterprise, and to imagine the University as one part of a larger spectrum of scholars in the communities of the city, the nation, and the world."