In 1980 I
was offered a rare opportunity and a pedagogical challenge: the department I had recently joined at San
Francisco State University asked me to prepare to teach a semester-long (15
weeks) course “on” New York City. It
would become part of a group of courses
constructed around this unifying theme:
a city is a specific, cultural artifact,
and the study of a selected city (in a humanities context) helps serve
one of the educational missions of a large state university, namely to
introduce