At the Abigail Adams Institute, the Resurrection of the English Major

The office is located on Arrow Street, in a brick building next to the Harvard Catholic Center and across from Berryline. Inside, it’s warm, cozy, with exposed stone walls. On one wall, painted avocado green, hang two portraits of Abraham Lincoln. Bookshelves line the room, filled with copies of Shakespeare, Plato, Socrates.

This is the Abigail Adams Institute. The organization, independent from Harvard and founded in 2014 by former Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics Research Director William English, is, per its website, “interested in reviving traditional humanities education at Harvard.”

Most of the organization’s events pertain to canonical arts and literature, but some also engage with contemporary politics — often from a more traditionally conservative perspective. Events include talks about “Pro-Life Feminism Then and Now,” given by three pro-life feminists, and “Heavy Metal, Society, and the Soul,” where a thinker argued that metal music is a “signifier of a sick culture.”

I am here to talk with the Director of the Abigail Adams Institute, Danilo Petranovich ’00, as well as its Director of Operations, Mathieu Ronayne. Petranovich and Ronayne are two of the three full-time AAI staff members: the other, Maura Cahill, Director of Communications & Marketing, is out sick.

Before we begin talking, Petranovich jokes about reclining on the couch, as if to be fed grapes like an ancient Roman. He then tells me (sitting up straight, no grapes) that he began working at AAI because the organization’s mission resonated with his experience at Harvard, where he was frustrated by the lack of a unified curriculum.

“I just think that’s what I expected from college, just a big basic liberal arts education,” he says. “The greatest that’s been written, the greatest that’s been thought — those kinds of things.”

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The humanities at Harvard have had a rough couple years. Last year, everyone was catastrophizing about “The End of the English Major.” This year, many have come out in full force against Harvard’s liberal slant, criticizing what they see as political bias in humanities and social science classes. This criticism has even seeped outside University walls. Just last week, I received a text from my grandmother — who’s 80! And lives in Florida! — complaining about Harvard’s Taylor Swift class.

The controversy over Harvard’s humanities is nothing new. In his 2005 book “Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class,” former Crimson Editorial Editor Ross G. Douthat ’02 criticizes what was then Harvard’s Core Curriculum. He critiques it for only allowing students to dabble in esoteric classes, instead of teaching students basic Western history.

Other students, however, have slammed Harvard’s curriculum for not being diverse enough. Four years ago, The Crimson’s Editorial Board lambasted Humanities 10, a “great-books course” offered to first-year students, for not including enough racial, gender, or regional diversity in its syllabus. Another four years before that, The Crimson described the trouble Harvard’s social sciences were facing regarding the perceived dominance of “Western” perspectives.

Over the cacophony of criticism, one thing rings clear: whether they’re teaching Taylor Swift or Tocqueville, Harvard’s humanities are leaving many unsatisfied.

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AAI sees itself as a supplement to Harvard’s curriculum, a place where students can go to engage with the traditional humanities — an opportunity Petranovich thinks is lacking in Harvard’s curriculum. It offers seminars on canonical authors like Plato and Shakespeare, weekly coffee houses, and an online series titled “The Great Conversation” which tours participants through the literary and philosophical Canon, from Genesis to Judith Butler.

They even offer a course guide for “the Harvard Humanist” meant “to offer some practical advice” on getting a “humanistic education” at Harvard. Courses range from the intro-economics staple “Economics 10” to the Islamic Civilizations class “Introduction to Islamic Philosophy and Theology” and an English course on Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”

Petranovich says that the type of students attracted to AAI are typically those with a love for “big questions” and “big books.” They’re not all from Harvard — Ronayne, the current Director of Operations, started coming to AAI when he was a senior in high school. Petranovich emphasizes that AAI encourages students from all backgrounds and political perspectives to come, but he says the current participants tend to skew male and “small-c conservative.”

Paul J. Chin ’24, a Cambridge local, has been coming to AAI since he was a senior in high school. Although Chin is a pre-med Chemistry and Physics concentrator, he is also a self-described “closeted humanities nerd,” which led him to take Hum 10 during his first year at Harvard. He finds that AAI offers a different environment to the Harvard classroom.

“From my experience in Hum 10, there’s a lot of controversy about what is considered part of the Western Canon,” he says. “At AAI, you kind of step away from any controversy, or any sort of the contentious nature of discussing these things. We can just sort of take these books that have been proven by history to be great. And just talk about them.”

Though stepping into AAI’s office can somewhat feel like being transported back to John Harvard’s personal study, Petranovich doesn’t see their work as entirely rooted in the past.

“We are, in some sense, harkening back,” he says. “I also see this as going forward.”

— Associate Magazine Editor Sage S. Lattman can be reached at sage.lattman@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @sagelattman.