During the spring semester of 2006, most IU undergraduates who were enrolled in Department of Biology courses were asked to participate in a study in which they were asked to respond to the following question:

"One role of higher education could be to promote critical thinking. Another role could be to promote the common good. Taking these two ideas together, it might be reasonable to presume that higher education could be concerned with helping people to become more aware of and to think more critially about topics that are relevant to the common good. But, what are such topics? For example, What do you consider to be some topics that are important for society and/or for humanity, about which you think that it might be good for college graduates to be knowledgeable and to be able to think critically?"

Participants' responses to the above question