Open Up, Hum 10

Getting into Harvard is hard enough. Getting into one of its flagship humanities courses shouldn’t be.

During Visitas, Harvard’s weekend preview for admitted students, two courses are advertised as emblems of the Harvard experience: Computer Science 50: “Introduction to Computer Science,” and Humanities 10, a two-semester introduction to over two thousand years of literary history. Prospective students likely leave eager. Many may pull up their color-coded spreadsheets and add either or both courses before taking their high school graduation photos.

This excitement may eventually be deflated by the reality that enrolling in these two courses looks nothing alike. CS 50 requires no application, no petition, no email — just enroll and show up. Hum 10, however, requires placement through the College-wide writing exam and a separate application with short-answer questions.

This year, 180 first-years applied to take Hum 10, a jump of 40 percent over the past year. Half of them were turned away.

Hum 10 can be a flagship course at Harvard for those who get the chance to take it. But for those who don’t, it is an early signpost of the University’s culture of artificial scarcity. And at a time when meaningfully engaging with writing and art matters more than ever, unnecessary exclusivity in the humanities is self-defeating.

Harvard’s culture of selective entry is well documented. Various clubs and performance ensembles run competitive application processes, and freshmen quickly learn to absorb a string of “no’s.” But those are extracurriculars. A course that satisfies the College Writing requirement holds a separate institutional function, and thus ought to operate differently.

Part of the purpose of having students apply is to keep retention high: Because Hum 10 is a yearlong course and students receive expository writing credit only upon completion, the application is meant to filter out students likely to drop at the semester mark.

What it’s selecting for, then, is enthusiasm for an intensive course. That’s a reasonable thing to want. It’s also nearly impossible to evaluate fairly across almost two hundred short-answer responses, and it produces outcomes that are difficult to explain to students turned away. Being denied entry to a course one is genuinely interested in — without clear reasoning — is a disorienting experience that may discourage academic risk-taking down the line.

Our proposal: replace the application with a lottery and expand the size of seminars.

The placement exam already assesses students’ writing competency. Signing up for a course well known as one of Harvard’s most demanding introductory offerings demonstrates sufficient interest on its own. A lottery offers seats without claiming to measure enthusiasm through a few hundred words.

As for the course cap, the 90-student limit is intertwined with the course’s structure: Six professors and specially trained teaching fellows teach small sections where discussion can thrive. Each professor who teaches Hum 10 may forgo a course in their home department, meaning Hum 10 can cost other departments several courses per year.

But these constraints don’t rule out expansion altogether. For example, sections could grow slightly larger without restructuring the course. More ambitiously, the College and relevant departments could ask what it would actually take to uncap the course entirely. Perhaps faculty lines could be restructured, and interdepartmental costs redistributed. Given the course’s evident value to the College, these are efforts worth pursuing.

One could contest that rejected applicants can find elements of Hum 10 elsewhere: English department survey courses for breadth, small seminars for discussion, Expos for writing instruction. These alternatives exist and are often wonderful opportunities.

But the fact that the components of Hum 10 can be disaggregated and found elsewhere doesn’t justify making students assemble them piecemeal. What makes the course special isn’t its writing component, seminar experience, or syllabus breadth — it’s the sustained, yearlong experience of all three at once, and the enduring intellectual community it creates. A unified, rigorous introduction to a humanistic education is worth the effort to open it to more than 90 students a year.

In 2025, Dean of Arts and Humanities Sean D. Kelly launched nine additional introductory courses in the humanities aimed at freshmen. The goal was clear — boost interest in the field, and hopefully encourage sustained engagement. This effort, though laudable, seems incomplete when the centerpiece of the freshman humanities education retains a manufactured aura of exclusivity. Especially in an era of declining nationwide humanities enrollment, continuing to gatekeep a course that cultivates humanistic inquiry is misguided.

Hum 10 is by almost all accounts an excellent course. Taking Expos instead isn’t the end of the world, especially for students with three more years of education ahead of them.

But the fact remains: No student should be turned away from a course that was, after all, advertised to them as a reason to come here.

Ananya Gautam ’29, a double concentrator in Computer Science and Economics, lives in Leverett House. Anniyah H. Rizvi ’29, a double concentrator in Government and History & Literature, lives in Dunster House.