Great Books for All

The Wall Street Journal’s Lifestyle section recently profiled Humanities 10, describing the flagship course of the Harvard humanities as “brutal” with an “ungodly amount of reading” and incoming freshmen “vying” for a scant 90 slots.

In this age of declining literacy where — to hyperbolize the Atlantic, which in July published the melodramatic headline “The End of Reading Is Here” — college students don’t read books anymore, we should celebrate that so many students want to study the literary canon that many eager freshmen must be turned away.

But what this whole fervor actually clarifies is the absurdity that only incoming freshmen are given the opportunity to take a Great Books course at Harvard. There ought to be a survey course of great works of literature that upperclassmen can take too.

When I first came to Harvard, in the interest of studying something “serious,” I ignored my peer advisor’s advice and — far from applying to Hum 10 — enrolled in linear algebra and an engineering course.

But over the course of my freshman year, I discovered that many of my friends were Hum 10’ers, and I gradually found myself succumbing to my actual desire to take courses in philosophy and history. I soon developed a case of Hum 10 FOMO.

Latecomers to the humanities like myself stand at a disadvantage compared with our Hum 10 alum peers. I am a strong advocate of autodidacticism, but certain texts — say, “The Oresteia” or Dante’s “Inferno” — especially benefit from being read alongside teaching faculty and peers.

Nevertheless, I categorically oppose the model of Columbia’s mandatory year-long “Literature Humanities” Great Books course. It would be deleterious to the education of curious students to force them to share a section with students who simply don’t want to be there. Much of the appeal of Hum 10 is that everyone is there because they intrinsically want to be there.

Another appeal of Hum 10, friends tell me, is that it only enrolls freshmen, and so they object to allowing upperclassmen to take Hum 10. Yet, any downside to allowing their enrollment can be mitigated by establishing separate sections for upperclassmen — their attendance in lecture would likely have little effect on the quality of the lecture.

And whatever negative effect upperclassmen might have on the lecture experience of freshmen must be far outweighed by the benefits of having more students study Great Books.

The alternative would be to set up a separate, parallel Great Books course solely for upperclassmen, which seems a rather inefficient solution. It does, however, prompt the question of why there ever needed to exist a Hum 10? Shouldn’t it be obvious that Harvard should have a year-long survey course of the foundational literature of the humanities?

Why was it not until 2015 that Hum 10 found its way into the course catalog?

Meeting the need to arrest and reverse declining interest in the humanities is certainly part of the story, but for some time, an allergic quality has attended the notion of teaching any sort of curriculum that could be construed as “classical” or “Western canon.” Call it an overcorrection to what really was a 20th-century curriculum almost devoid of non-white and non-male writers.

I don’t think it’s by accident that Hum 10 disavows, by omission, terms like “Great Books” and “canon,” but they need not tread so carefully: They can simply communicate that a list of only twenty-some texts won’t include every “Great Book.” And in any case, attempting to create a list that perfectly represents all the Great Books is not the best way to design a humanities survey course.

Ideological conservatives have sought to own the Great Books issue, pushing the Classical Learning Test, an SAT replacement that draws more heavily on classical, predominantly Judeo-Christian, texts. Over the summer, the Texas State Board of Education was planning a core of classical texts for K-12 education that includes writers perhaps exclusively beloved on the right, like Ayn Rand and Thomas Sowell.

But we mustn’t let this become a partisan issue, nor indeed a cause of the right: Perhaps more than ever, there is universal value to reading the greats. Certainly, political choices are inherent in the selection of any canon of texts. Say one included the Marquis de Sade’s novel “Justine” but nothing by Saint Augustine: One cannot avoid the possibility of appearing to make, in effect, a political choice.

But we can apply reasonably non-partisan criteria: Which texts will be most useful to the humanities student in further study, and which texts are students most unlikely to read outside of class?

The former criterion is characteristic of Social Studies 10, whose texts provide concentrators with a theoretical groundwork for reading and understanding social theory. The analog in the humanities might be: Which texts are most heavily referenced or are most influential? Which texts will form a common language for humanities students?

Just as reading Rousseau is essential to understanding the many social theorists influenced by his “Second Discourse,” so can one better appreciate later writers by reading Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and Sophocles’s “Antigone.”

Survey courses offer one a ground: At the moment, too many in the humanities, like myself, are left groundless.

Let me, a sophomore, take Hum 10, please!

Andrew W. Shlomchik ’29, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Social Studies concentrator in Quincy House.