This required course teaches principles and practices in corporate finance, with a particular emphasis on evaluating levels of risk and rates of return on corporate investments and resource allocations. Topics in the course include risk/reward assessment, the time value of money, interest rates, discounted cash flow analysis, rates of return, the capital asset pricing model, sources of funding, capital structure of a firm, stock insurance and buy-backs, dividend policy, and cash management.

Shakespeare’s history plays are his own “game of thrones” in which ambition, power plays, and bloody revenge abound. These are at once family dramas—replete with love, jealousy, and betrayal among parents, children, and siblings—and political sagas in which Shakespeare shows us usurpers who themselves are threatened with usurpation. As Henry IV observes, “uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” In this class, we will read all of the history plays in the order of the reigns of the monarchs rather than the order in which Shakespeare wrote them.

Note: No class April 26 & May 24

Family legacies often have unintended consequences.  Through the close reading and discussion of fiction and non-fiction works and the consideration of two films,  this course will explore the types and consequences of family legacies and consider the ways in which such legacies can be designed to help and not hurt.  Texts will include: Hughes’s Family Wealth, Hausner and Freeman’s The Legacy Family, Williams and Preisser’s Philanthropy, Heirs and Values and Condon and Condon’s Beyond the Grave as well as Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons, Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and William Shakespeare’s King Lear.  

This is the third course of a three-quarter series; each quarter may be taken separately.

This course is open to all.

Note: No Class April 15

Seneca’s talents and influences are wide ranging.  He was the tutor of the young Emperor Nero, and helped govern the empire for what have been called the best five years of Rome’s history.  His literary corpus includes treatises on nature and science, tragedies, satire, letters and essays on philosophy. Early Christian writers like Boethius and Augustine were influenced by his Stoic philosophy, French and Elizabethan English dramatists (including Shakespeare) by his plays.  Readings for the class will include Thyestes, Medea, On Providence, On Anger, The Apocolocyntosis, On Earthquakes, and selected letters.

Note: No class April 15

Each course consists of a seminar, covering three or four texts, and a tutorial, which involves in-depth analysis of one or two texts. Students take the entire four-year curriculum in order, progressing with their classmates from quarter to quarter and year to year.

Open to all

No class April 15.

Each course consists of a seminar, covering three or four texts, and a tutorial, which involves in-depth analysis of one or two texts. Students take the entire four-year curriculum in order, progressing with their classmates from quarter to quarter and year to year.

For the first class please read “To the Reader,” “On Idleness,” “On Fear,” “To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die,” and “That it is madness to judge the true and the false from our own capacities.”

No class April 15.

Strong scenes, especially strong initial scenes, are passkeys that screenwriters must maximize to get their scripts past the first gatekeepers, the Hollywood readers.  Scene sequencing is a neglected method that helps writers organize structure to serve story while control of subtext draws reader and audience in and binds them inexorably to the character’s journey. In this workshop, participants will learn to amplify the drama in their scenes, gain control of structure through scene sequencing and heighten character identification – strengthening story and conveying theme – through masterful use of subtext.  Participants should come to class having read two screenplays to be assigned and be prepared to read, support and critique each other’s new or in-progress work.

No class on April 19 or May 24.

“There a dog was lying, Argos, infested with ticks. But at that moment, when he noticed Odysseus nearby, he began to wag his tail and let both his ears droop down; but he no longer had the strength to come closer to his master…” A son returns home from abroad; a father finally meets his full-grown child; a dog dies seeing its master one last time after twenty years; and a mysterious beggar arrives at the house of Odysseus. Our journey into the Greek of the Odyssey continues, reading carefully together 120 lines of the poem each week.

We will undertake the careful consideration of narrative voice and prose style. Among our objectives will be the furthering of a lucid, metered, and precise language in “telling story” (i.e., bringing the stories “off of the page”). We will examine student manuscripts closely, considering such matters as sentence structures, syntactical precision and word choice in seeking to heighten the rhythm and cogency of your narrative language. On two occasions, you will submit distinct 15-20 page (or single chapter-length) excerpts of your manuscript for workshop discussion.  Along with readings/review of peer work in the workshop “round,” students will also complete two brief course assignments; a 2-3 page analysis of an outtake from a student-selected published novel during the early portion of the quarter; and later, a 1-2 page self-analysis of the student's own prose and its efficacy at forwarding narrative within the student's work-in-progress.

No class April 14th or May 26th.