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Let's get into it:
There's an article in the Wall Street Journal about a tough class that's "all the rage" at Harvard. The course is called Humanities 10, and it features hard books, lectures, exhaustive papers, and it's not pass/fail. In other words, it's the type of course most people who went to college in the 20th Century would have called "normal."
The course featured readings of books by Jane Austen, Kant, The Odyssey, Ulysses, The Iliad, Montaigne, Shakespeare—not the graphic novel version—Spinoza, Baldwin, Dante, and Plato. These are real books that require real reading. CliffsNotes can't get a student through these offerings.
In fact, when I studied philosophy, the only "Cliffs Notes" that made any sense were from Frederick Copleston, a Jesuit priest with an amazing ability to explain what the hell all these philosophers were talking about. (If you know someone taking classes of this kind might I recommend the full compendium.)
Reading the article made me wish I had the kind of time to dig deep into old words and spill out ideas all night both to friends and on paper. Not that my life has lacked for that sort of thing, there's been plenty of it. I've always liked to be the person with a stack of books under my arm—the book I was currently reading, the book I wanted to read next, and the book I would read if I got bored of all of those.
But reading alone doesn't just make you a good student. When I was in college, I took a year off, exactly one year, and that year was 1995. I went home over Christmas break, my leave of absence letters signed by the dean, and moved back into my mother's house.
I spent the year working, goofing off, reading, and writing but when I got back to campus the next January and saw my friends all ahead, having a full extra year of studying under their belts, I just felt so dumb. My year off seemed wasteful and ungrateful. I felt so far behind.
I decided I would take the hardest courses campus had to offer and so that's what I did. The two I landed on for extra difficulty were Philosophy and Art, which had the added difficulty of meeting at 8 am, and a course on James Joyce and Marcel Proust. Both were, well, not easy courses. The professors were exacting, with high expectations. I was always showing up at office hours just to make sure I was on track. I was writing lengthy papers that I would read back over and just hope they made sense.
I worked out a routine where I would study, write, and read until about 6 pm each night, then eat, chill, whatever, and wake up at 5 am to finish whatever wasn't done. Little by little, I started to gain my academic confidence. And finally, one day in Professor Danny Kaiser's office I said something about how much I was annoyed by Proust and he just threw his head back and started laughing.
I'd had to talk my way into the class—by the time I'd signed up there was no room left. On the first day, I walked into the seminar, and the table was one seat short. I had to wander down the hall until I found a chair in an open, unoccupied classroom and drag it back down the hall to Kaiser's room just so I'd have somewhere to sit.
In front of the whole room, he said "I didn't want you in my class." The only way I got in was by having my Philosophy of Art teacher write a special letter to Kaiser telling him to let me in—and to be honest, it was just dumb luck that I kept showing up right on time at 8 am ready to talk philosophy and art with all my reading done. Kaiser had let me in then taken repeated opportunities to humiliate me.
I did not dare ask him why he was laughing. And then he simply said "I get it now, you're a Joyce person and I'm a Proust person." Now, to be fair, I think I'm honestly more a Hawthorne person, but I didn't even know that then. I took home an A in that class and another one in Philosophy and Art. I ended up graduating with honors somehow, I think, or at least that's what lives in my memory.
My point is I'm glad the kids are reading again. For a minute there I was really worried that AI slop and smooth brains were going to take over everything. But if they're showing up desperate to study real ideas, to dig deep into the history of what mankind has left behind, to understand the stories we have told each other about ourselves and who we are for millennia, then perhaps academia is healing and humanity still has a chance.
Libby