Common Intellectual Reading

Odyssey 2006 begins your adventure as a University of Wisconsin Oshkosh student. During your first weeks on campus, we’ve planned activities to help familiarize you to the University, giving you a chance to get actively involved and share a Common Intellectual Experience with your classmates. The Common Intellectual Experience’s theme is "Social Justice," which will be explored throughout the year in a variety of ways.

A unique component of the UW Oshkosh student orientation, the Common Intellectual Experience, incorporates perspectives from many different disciplines across the campus, while exploring your own "Odyssey."  Because your college career and life beyond college will be filled with diverse opportunities to discover and weigh perspectives and information, often conflicting, the Common Intellectual Experience allow you and your peers a chance to reflect upon an ideal and the values that we embrace -or reject- as a result of that ideal.

In keeping with this philosophy, your fall semester begins with a cultural experience, the play, The Heidi Chronicles, at the Fredric March Theatre, during the third week of classes. Attendance at the play is a required part of the Odyssey program. Attendance is also a likely requirement for your TBIS 188, English 100, English 110, Communication 111 and Communication 112 courses as well, so please plan to attend. The play will start at 7 p.m.

The Heidi Chronicles, by Wendy Wasserstein
Comprised of a series of interrelated scenes, the play traces the coming of age of Heidi Holland, a successful art historian, as she tries to find her bearings in a rapidly changing world. Gradually distancing herself from her friends, she watches them move from the idealism and political radicalism of their college years through militant feminism and, eventually, back to the materialism that they had sought to reject in the first place. Heidi's own path to maturity involves an affair with the glib, arrogant Scoop Rosenbaum, a womanizing lawyer/publisher who eventually marries for money and position; a deeper but even more troubling relationship with a charming, witty young pediatrician, Peter Patrone, who turns out to be gay; and increasingly disturbing contacts with the other women, now much changed, who were a part of her childhood and college years. Eventually Heidi comes to accept the fact that liberation can be achieved only if one is true to oneself, with goals that come out of need rather than circumstance. As the play ends she is still alone, but having adopted an orphaned baby, it is clear that she has begun to find a sense of fulfillment and continuity that may well continue to elude the others of her anxious, self-centered generation.
                        - Text from Dramatists Play Service Inc. copy of The Heidi Chronicles

A Common Reading

The Common Intellectual Experience includes the book, The Mercury 13 by Martha Ackmann. Selected by a committee of UW Oshkosh faculty and academic staff, the book provides an additional shared experience for first-year students, who will read it for their TBIS 188, English 100, English 110, Communication 111 or Communication 112 class.

The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight, by Martha Ackmann

InJune 21, 2007ells the story of 13 female pilots who fought to become part of the nation's space program from its very inception.   Their tale is uplifting, a narrative of their dedication, and sacrifice in their attempt to aid their nation in the space race against the Soviets and experience the thrill of space flight personally.  These women, among the most accomplished female pilots in the world at the time, went through many of the same excruciating and challenging tests experienced by NASA's original seven astronauts.  That all passed all tests, often with scores exceeding those achieved by the males selected to fly, carried absolutely no weight with an entrenched bureaucracy.   (Excerpts from aJune 21, 2007 Michael  Zimmerman, former Dean of the College of Letters and Science at UniversityJune 21, 200706/21/2007