At Harvard, one of the toughest classes on campus has become the hottest ticket. Pamela Paul at the Wall Street Journal drops into Humanities 10, a yearlong, reading-heavy examination of classic texts that's drawing twice as many first-year applicants as it can take—and no, it doesn't offer an easy A or even pass/fail. Phones and laptops are banned, attendance is mandatory, and students crank through roughly a major work a week, from The Odyssey and Dante to Baldwin and Ulysses, while writing frequent essays.
Co-led by philosophy and classics professors Samantha Matherne and David Elmer, the course was originally cooked up in 2008 by literary star professors Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Menand to counter sagging interest in the humanities. It's since turned into a kind of anti-AI, anti-short-attention-span boot camp, where students say they want to be forced into "deep reading."
- "A lot of what we get out of this class is the human experience, and you can't get that out of AI," says government and neuroscience major Peggy Urdan. "The only way to get anything out of this class is to not use AI."
- "I did have the sense that a lot of students feel that the culture at large is not hospitable to deep reading, deep thinking, or deep engagement with writing," Elmer says. "Whether that's because of AI encroaching on their autonomy as a writer or thinker, I honestly don't know."
Faculty call it "magical" to teach engaged freshmen; alumni say it's the only class where you get shamed for skipping the reading. "From the faculty point of view, part of the fun is that this isn't a course in which one is going around the track for the 150th time," says Greenblatt, who has taught at Harvard since 1998. "I've never taught The Wealth of Nations before but that's what made it so exciting for me to read." For more on how "Hum 10" became a campus institution, read Paul's full piece in the Wall Street Journal.
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