In summer 2007, Nicolas van de Walle and Heike Michelsen faced the task of divining which foreign affairs issues would make headlines in the months ahead. The Russian elections were a given, along with Darfur and terrorism. They selected 14 weekly topics that undergraduates in their popular new course, Issues Behind the News: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Current Events, would study this fall through independent reading, a lecture and a question-and-answer session with a Cornell faculty expert.

"I think we got it wonderfully right a couple times," said van de Walle, director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. "We covered Iraq the same week Gen. [David] Petraeus testified before Congress. [Professor of government] Ron Herring came in the week that Benazir Bhutto was going back to Pakistan and there were riots in the streets. This class caters to undergraduate interest and provides a critical analysis of what's happening on the front page of The New York Times."

Even though the events list was finalized too late to appear in the print catalog, about 80 Cornell undergraduates signed up for the two-credit pass/fail course. "These are self-selected students who are interested in these issues, and most of them are very well informed," van de Walle noted. "This class isn't going to help anybody further their major."

Said Luis-Francois de Lencquesaing '10, a College Scholar, "The class is a great window on the world. It gives us some analytical perspectives on a broad range of topics in the news, and offers us tools to understand the current events. It offers us an interdisciplinary approach to international affairs by breaking the firewalls that separate different departments, and gives us a better understanding of the world."

Small groups called task forces were assigned to research one course topic each and to lead questioning of lecturers. Students informed each other by posting links to online articles (The Economist and The Washington Post were favorite sources) to the course's Blackboard Web site, which also housed syllabuses, lecture notes, multimedia presentations and group e-mail lists.

The success of the course depended on faculty participation. Van de Walle and Einaudi Center research associate Michelsen turned to members of the Einaudi Center's Foreign Policy Initiative. Fourteen professors, including eight from government, readily agreed to teach.

"The faculty commitment has been marvelous," said Michelsen, who is coordinator of the foreign policy initiative, "and as the course went on, students warmed up tremendously, overcoming their hesitation to talk about these issues in front of an expert."

This foray into undergraduate teaching is part of the Einaudi Center's strategy to build a larger audience for foreign relations issues on campus. "We are not a department," van de Walle said. "We don't give a degree. We don't have our own classes. Our primary mission is faculty and graduate student research. But doing a small number of targeted things for undergraduates helps fulfill that mission." (The center does offer an undergraduate concentration in international relations.)

The Einaudi Center and associated international programs sponsor an average of 10 campus lectures or presentations each academic week, and the course requires students to attend three such events during the semester. Warren (Skip) Kessler '67 and Joan Kessler made a gift in support of the course. Plans call for Issues Behind the News to be offered every fall.

"This was fun. I'm keen to do it again," said van de Walle.