Tess C. Wayland is an English concentrator and has taken Hum 10, Social Studies 10, History and Literature 10, and English 10. Vivian W. Rong is a Philosophy concentrator.

Homer. Sappho. James Joyce. Toni Morrison.

In a lecture hall in Harvard’s hulking granite Boylston Hall, 90 students — all first-years — listen attentively as six big-name professors usher them into the Harvard experience they’ve been waiting for.

In Q Reports, Harvard’s collection of course reviews, students laud Humanities 10 as “what I expected Harvard to be like” and “the best intellectual experience at Harvard.”

But though some conceive of it as a “quintessential Harvard course,” Hum 10 dates back only to the early 2000s.

In the spring of 2006, Dean for the Humanities Maria Tatar began an initiative to create a collection of interdisciplinary introductory courses that would attract students toward the humanities. The project was continued by her successor, Diana Sorensen.

Among the first professors to join the initiative were English professor Louis Menand, whom President Barack Obama recognized with a National Humanities Medal, and Humanities professor Stephen J. Greenblatt, whom a Harper’s Magazine reviewer once wrote “knows more about [Shakespeare] than Ben Jonson or the Dark Lady did.”

But Menand and Greenblatt’s course, which began in Fall 2006, soon had to answer to much more than Tatar’s initiative. The 2008 financial crisis spurred a decrease in humanities enrollment as students sought career stability, and the ensuing panic about this decline shaped curricular choices through the 2010s.

The course began as a pitch about literary “odysseys,” shaping into a list of texts that, one way or another, would tie into James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” It went through several iterations — with detours as “English 110” and as a General Education course — before reaching its current form as the year-long Expos alternative Humanities 10a and 10b: “A Humanities Colloquium” in 2015. The class is taught by six tenured professors from across humanities disciplines, with each professor lecturing on two texts they believe to be significant.

Hum 10 belongs to a canon of introductory “10” courses in the humanities and some social sciences: Humanities 10, History 10, Social Studies 10, History and Literature 10, History of Art and Architecture 10, and English 10. Though not all these “10s” are categorized as humanities courses — History and Social Studies are formally social sciences at Harvard — these disciplines are united by their common aim of theoretical and text-based education.

Whether they brand themselves as “prerequisite,” “gateway,” or “foundational,” an introduction to the humanities serves a multi-layered purpose: attracting students to the course, making a case for the disciplines, and providing a base of knowledge. But they often promise more to students — they might also make lifelong friends, gain direct access to the field’s top minds, and read the most essential texts. At the very least, they offer an initiation: come join us, you’re one of us now.

Yet methods of introduction vary widely across these survey courses, and across departments. In qualitative disciplines, an “introduction” is not as straightforward as gaining a set of agreed-upon foundational facts and formulas. Key texts and methods are debated — and some students we spoke to feel as if their chosen field’s status as a discipline is debated too. (A Harvard spokesperson declined to comment for this article.)

Against the constant hum of discourse about the humanities’ decline, Harvard’s introductory courses do not serve only as intellectual Edens. They must relay foundational knowledge while considering everything that disrupts that foundation — challenges to the future of their disciplines, the pressures of the post-grad labor market, par-for-the-course canon wars, and disparities in secondary schooling and course access.

In both form and content, these courses must market themselves while also justifying the viability of their respective disciplines.

The Harvard Students Who Read Books

Decades of discourse have warned that the humanities are dying and that the university is increasingly a technical institution. The humanities died in the early 20th century with the introduction of majors, they died in the 1960s with an increasing emphasis on science and technology, they died in the 2010s with a post-recession rattle, and they are dying all over again now.

Between The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, the English major has ended, the college students can’t read books, and the literary men have disappeared.

This perennial anxiety about the perceived decline of the humanities has reached the level of a moral panic. On the one hand, enrollment numbers are depleted, and students increasingly opt to study STEM subjects. On the other hand, students’ reading abilities have been sapped by post-Covid learning loss, excerpted readings in high school, the rise of generative AI, and social-media era attention spans. Our generation is perceived as not only less willing but less able to do the close reading and critical thinking that these disciplines demand.

Concentrators and professors alike seem to internalize the anxieties this panicked discourse projects onto them. Students worry about the job market, yes, but also whether their courses are effective in their missions to transmit an amorphous but essential body of knowledge.

These theoretical, text-heavy disciplines are sometimes perceived to be soft, impractical, and pursued for their own sake. They raise the age-old question — what are you going to do with that? — and thus warrant justification.

Some departments try to provide justifications by marketing real-world applications and job stability. The English department, for example, introduced summer funding for “literary careers” and has leaned into its creative writing programming, their most explicitly pre-professional arm, in introductory courses and workshops.

They might also market intimate access to professors. Hum 10 offers students 15-person sections led by professors whose names sit on the New Yorker masthead or the New York Times notable book list. The Q Reports for the new History 10 course often comment more on the professors than the syllabus — the course may be more marketable for “die-hard Jill Lepore super-fans” than for future historians. In Social Studies, however, a large number of lecturers are time-capped faculty, working under non-renewable contracts for two-, three-, or eight-year periods.

Amidst tenure politics and the unstable reality of the academic job market, there is one pretext these courses can reliably offer: an air of prestige that lends their students respectability.

These courses harken back to the old post-WWII General Education system, when students could count from one through ten using only great books courses on topics so broad as “the epic” or “the novel.” Hum 10 and Social Studies 10, in particular, invoke notions of capital-H Harvard for underclassmen. Their reputations of rigor and gestures at a classical liberal arts education don’t function that differently from the H sweater students buy at the COOP during their freshman fall.

S. Max Fan ’26 is an English and Math double-concentrator who is so well-known for being well-read that his packed bookshelf, “Infinite Jest” and all, found its way into a Crimson article.

S. Max Fan '26 and his bookshelf. By Ellen P. Cassidy

He recalls going to Greenblatt’s office as a first-year in Hum 10 with anxieties that English wasn’t a “real discipline,” with no common set of facts or even texts that everyone agreed on.

Fan says he sometimes looks for “the most conservative, reactionary people” in the English department — not because he agrees with them politically, but because they promise a more “unmoving, solid approach” to the discipline.

According to Fan, Hum 10 brands itself as a rigorous and “very serious” course to claim the legitimacy that students seek. Whether or not that rigor is real, it generates demand and enrollment.

“If we don’t treat ourselves seriously as a discipline, then we’re not going to be a discipline,” Fan says.

Eve S. Jones ’25 has long known she would study English. Jones seems to have followed her origin as the kid reading through recess to all of its logical conclusions. She is the former Crimson Flyby chair, former fiction editor of The Harvard Advocate, aspires to be an editor at a publishing house, and has done her requisite time at n+1, a literary magazine founded by Harvard Advocate alumni.

Jones, rather than enroll in Hum 10, went directly to the English department’s introductory survey course: English 10, a survey of contemporary literature. She is wary of the idea that survey courses with an “unattainable amount of work” could offer her field the fixity or longevity many students seem to be seeking.

“It’s trying to legitimize the humanities by over-assigning, as if the harder you’re working, the more legitimate the field is,” Jones says.

Mapping the Humanities

Hum 10 and Social Studies 10 advertise themselves as book-a-week and thinker-a-week courses, respectively. This pacing functions as a pedagogical manifesto as much as a hook for students. It gives them a quantified shorthand for articulating rigor in the thinking work of the humanities.

But whether or not this “book-a-week” approach actually translates into rigor is up for debate. English and Social Studies concentrators say that this pacing is common in upper-level courses. And other students we talked to point out that page count can be easily evaded — readings can be skipped, shortcutted, or summarized by ChatGPT.

As a pedagogical tool, however, book-a-week still sets the tone for courses that emphasize breadth over depth.

Hannah W. Duane ’25-26 is a Social Studies and Philosophy concentrator and Crimson Magazine editor who came to Cambridge from cowpoking and critiques of pure reason at Deep Springs College. Deep Springs, on a cattle ranch in a remote California valley, teaches a classical liberal arts education alongside manual labor and student self-governance.

After her time at Deep Springs, whose largely text- or author-based courses might take up just Kant instead of all of German idealism, Duane finds that Harvard’s survey approach leaves students feeling “stranded.”

She feels that even if students can complete the heavy reading load of a survey course like Social Studies 10, they can’t spend enough time with the text to fully understand it — and as a result, lower their own standards for comprehension and analysis. That attitude leads to “pretty mediocre seminars” in Social Studies 10, Duane says.

David A. Sunshine ’28 chose Harvard over Deep Springs and St. John’s College, a four-year great books program. He is a devotee of Fan, his Hum 10 mentor, and plans to follow Fan’s recommendations to build a great books education for himself at Harvard.

Sunshine says that in a Hum 10 seminar, a Wordsworth poem instructing the reader to return to nature when social systems fail sparked a temporary “existential crisis” — he couldn’t understand why he had given up the chance to read Rousseau on a ranch.

But Harvard, Sunshine says, is now “home.” He is happy with Hum 10, breadth over depth and all.

The case for breadth seems to be compelling enough: every fall, Hum 10 and Social Studies 10 fill their lecture halls. There are courses where you can spend an entire semester reading Dante’s “The Divine Comedy” or deep-diving with Hegel and Marx — but that’s not what these courses are trying to do.

David F. Elmer ’98 is Faculty Dean of Eliot House, a Classics professor, and has been course head of Hum 10 since 2023.

Hum 10 proclaims in its 2022-23 syllabus that the course does both “too much” and “too little.” This compromise between breadth and depth is, to some extent, part of the design of the course. Elmer says that students in Hum 10 are meant to “engage deeply, but not exhaustively, not just in the individual texts but in the dialogue of the texts.”

History professor David R. Armitage, the chair of the Committee on the Degrees in Social Studies and the course head for Social Studies 10a — which focuses on 18th- and 19th-century social theory — sees his course similarly.

A student's shelf containing the Social Studies 10 booklist. By Rachel L. Reynolds

“It can give you a conceptual map. It can give you a chronological map. It can give you a methodological map,” Armitage says.

For Armitage, these courses are meant to be maps of an intellectual tradition, not destinations in and of themselves.

From Homer to Who?

Jonathan A. Schneiderman ’25 met his girlfriend discussing Faulkner at Brain Break in Annenberg after the two of them walked over from late-night Hum 10 office hours. Schneiderman, a Crimson Arts editor, has served on Hum 10’s student board and the English Student Advisory Committee.

He is part of a faction of students whose answer to the breadth versus depth debate is a vehement vote in favor of breadth. He’s conceptualized his ideal path through the field of English: a seven-semester series of survey courses. Beginning with Medieval Literature, moving through “The Long 19th Century,” and finishing with “Literature after 1968,” Schneiderman’s series would form a canon track for students who want a more comprehensive generalist education.

Schneiderman acknowledges that this track brings up issues of both student demand and syllabus diversity. Even though he notes growing student desires for canon-centered survey courses, he knows that this demand is “subject to change.”

“Students one year will be like, ‘we want more of the canon,’ and then students five years later will be like, ‘we must decolonize the curriculum,’” Schneiderman says.

On the perennial charge to decolonize the curriculum, the 2021-22 Hum 10 syllabus featured a slate of non-Western canonical texts such as “The Tale of Genji” and “One Thousand and One Nights,” read alongside Persian poetry and Japanese haibun. But several of these texts never returned to the syllabus again.

The format of Hum 10 necessitates an engagement with contemporary literature — the course posits that the literary colloquium has come “from” Homer and is moving “to” someone. In recent years, the Hum 10a syllabus has offered up Derek Walcott and Valeria Luiselli. But it also has to account for diversity in the interim — of race, gender, discipline, and genre — which is achieved with varying success each year.

For Social Studies 10, which teaches social theory, constructing the canon is both about deciding who should be included in the canon and what the role of the canon should be.

Armitage, who leads Social Studies 10a, says that the way classic thinkers are being taught is shifting. Adam Smith’s classic account of capitalism is reframed with the recent addition of Frederick Douglass and Ottobah Cugoano, who wrote about the brutalities of slavery through their firsthand experiences.

“There are some major figures, unavoidable figures who we have to engage with, who are never going away, but they find themselves in very different company, and they’re approached in different ways,” Armitage says.

While 10a covers political thought before the 20th century, 10b teaches modern intellectual turns that often contest the very notion of canon and static knowledge.

Joel Suarez, a labor historian, is new to the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies and began leading Social Studies 10b this spring.

“There’s very much a self-awareness of how tenuous some of this stuff is, which I think is why they don’t call themselves a great book program,” Suarez says.

Since the course’s first iteration in 1960, the committee has experimented with what this not-a-great-book book list should look like. Its early preceptors — including the philosopher John Rawls — also played with the course’s pacing. In the fall of 1964, the course spent two weeks on Tocqueville, four on Marx and his ilk, and another four weeks just on Max Weber.

A 1960s Social Studies 10 course advertisement. By Daniela Nogueira

Early versions of Social Studies 10a syllabi feature many of the same thinkers taught today: Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill. But the 1960s 10b syllabi have little overlap with today’s thinkers, many of whom came to prominence after the inception of the course.

Suarez notes that the Social Studies 10b syllabus is contingent on “practical concerns.” With what he sees as a rising pre-professional priority in academia, “this kind of education is dying.”

Writing the syllabus is as much about finding people equipped to teach each thinker as it is about passing down a perfect lineage from the Social Studies forefathers. In an academic market that rewards hyper-specialization, it’s hard to find someone to teach all the way from Hobbes to Nietzsche.

“It’s a live document, but there’s constraints on how alive it can be,” Suarez adds.

There’s another answer to the canon wars, however: swerve them. In an alternative approach, History department professors Maya R. Jasanoff ’96, Jill Lepore, and Kirsten A. Weld piloted a new introductory course this year. Until 2006, a course under the same name offered a year-long survey of European history. Now, History 10 offers “a history of the present.”

Jasanoff says this is as much in response to debates about the “canon” as it is about catering to a class of students who have normally taken some version of AP World History. Instead of reteaching this content, History 10 helps them pursue the how and why of history as told through current events headlines.

History 10 also offers an answer to student anxieties — the humanities aren’t “nebulous,” Jasanoff says, but instead “big-tent.” Although multiple conclusions can be reached from the same set of facts, History 10 tries to demonstrate that this comes from methodological diversity, not “fuzziness” or “bias.”

Part of the importance of the humanities, Jasanoff posits, is in telling the difference between deep and shallow thought — and that work need not begin with European history.

“I don't think that people should confuse the absence of very obvious prerequisite structures for an absence of rigor. Ever,” Jasanoff says.

Gateways and Gatekeepers

Students arrive at Harvard from a wide range of socioeconomic and educational backgrounds, which shape the choices they make from their first days on campus.

Adreanna E. Dillen ’25, a Social Studies concentrator who attended an underfunded public high school in Massachusetts, believes there are high barriers to entry for theoretical concentrations. She would recommend Social Studies with reservations to people “who came from a public school like mine that didn’t really foster open dialogue.”

Dillen thinks that the pressure to become financially independent following graduation for first-generation, low-income students explains the low percentage of those students in theory- and discussion-based concentrations.

“A lot of my FGLI friends tend to be pre-med. A lot of those kids are in those hard science classes,” Dillen says. “The students I’ve been surrounded by in Social Studies in my personal sections have typically tended to be legacy students.”

Beyond financial considerations, professors’ assumption of prior knowledge can also create issues of accessibility and exclusivity in intro courses.

Suarez, who teaches Social Studies 10b, also points out that historians often make assumptions about students’ backgrounds. For example, he says, students don’t always know “exactly what the French Revolution was about,” but lecturers may teach as though they do.

Joseph C. Mariani ’28 was waitlisted after applying to Hum 10, but successfully advocated for a spot in the course. “First day in section in Hum 1o, there were people bringing out ‘The Odyssey’ in its original Greek,” Mariani says. “And then me, in Minnesota, where, not even joking, one year in English class we only read two books.”

After a semester in Hum 10, Mariani says the course is helping build his confidence in the humanities. He sees Hum 10 as standardizing knowledge across educational backgrounds. In fact, some students we talked to who came from feeder private or public schools felt they could bypass Hum 10 because they had already read much of the syllabus.

One argument in favor of establishing a fixed canon of humanities texts, as Mariani points to, is the promise to develop a shared vocabulary across related disciplines.

But sharing this language does more than level the playing field — it connects across it. Some of the professors and students we talked to identified intellectual community as a central aim of introductory courses.

Hum 10 explicitly advertises “lifelong friends” and “community” in promotional materials. According to Armitage, Social Studies tries to cultivate cross-pollination between its small tutorial section as part of pedagogical practice.

David E. Lewis ’24-25, a former Crimson Editorial editor, is a Social Studies concentrator and self-described “expat” from the Government department. He sometimes found Social Studies 10 lectures and tutorial meetings to be confusing or even shallow — but the social component can make up for that.

“The intellectual discussions that you have about the readings, casually when you run into friends in the d-hall or in somebody’s suite, are ten times better than the actual section,” Lewis says.

Louise Kim ’27 is an English concentrator and current chair of the Hum 10 mentorship program, which pairs students in Hum 10 with upperclassmen alumni of the course. Kim acknowledges that Hum 10 students emerge from the course sharing both a “language” and an “aesthetic.”

Students who “desire to be seen as intellectual, as literary” are often the most visible representation of the class’s culture, Kim says.

As Hum 10ers flood out of Boylston Hall on their way to Annenberg, the aesthetic markers amount to an algorithmic checkbox — wool peacoat, check, girl with a mug in hand, check, Harvard Art Museums tote bag, check.

Student programming can sometimes lean into this sensibility with events like the “Alice’s Restaurant Listening Party,” — napkin bib optional — a Frankenstein séance, or a Oedipal black-tie screening of Psycho.

Hengzhi Yang ’27, a Hum 10 alumnus and English and Philosophy concentrator, is a literati-of-one at Harvard after founding the literary magazine House House. Yang believes that not all Hum 10 students take the same approach to the humanities, especially if they don’t see a career path in it.

“They would take Hum 10 as a way of fulfilling that desire and getting rid of it so they can launch into their banking or their finance classes,” Yang says.

As students decide whether and how to engage in the social world of the humanities, these courses act not only as gateways but also as gatekeepers.

To declare Social Studies as a sophomore, a brief application is required. Though largely ceremonial now, the department’s origins as a small honors concentration are retained in this extra bureaucratic flourish. This legacy seems to translate into the department’s self-conception today: some students and professors we spoke to still conceive of Social Studies students as being of a particularly high caliber.

Hum 10 also requires students to apply for the course, as it is capped at 90 students. In an email to students who were not accepted to the course in the 2023 - 2024 academic year, Hum 10 course staff wrote that the acceptance rate for that year was 69 percent.

For William E. Martin — a PhD candidate in the English department and a previous teaching fellow for Hum 10 — the course’s application process can steer away those who could benefit most from the course. For those who make it in, Hum 10 becomes a “privileged memory.”

“This prestige comes from the inaccessibility,” Martin says.

Noting Hum 10’s exclusivity, History professor Philip J. Deloria started an introductory survey course with no enrollment cap. History and Literature 10 was designed to be “big and broad.”

Since its founding in 2022, Deloria has adapted the HL 10 course template for both American Studies and Medieval Studies, featuring guest lecturers and a new lens every week. Assignments are structured to mimic New Yorker-style nonfiction writing.

Its unconventional design reflects Deloria’s philosophy that the humanities should be approachable and inclusive.

“We needed something beyond Hum 10 in the humanities,” Deloria says.

***

Hum 10 may create the illusion of being a Harvard staple, but it is still tied to the two men who created it. Menand and Greenblatt took time away from the course in the 2023-24 academic year and handed it off to Elmer and English professor Namwali Serpell. Menand and Greenblatt have since returned and are set to teach the course next year.

Hum 10 students and course staff say they believe that the course would have a future beyond Menand and Greenblatt’s tenures (though they say the syllabus may no longer center “Ulysses”). A canonical literary education, in one form or another, is apparently here to stay.

But while Hum 10 — and humanities intro courses writ large — tries to construct a rich, unencumbered intellectual world within their classrooms, the prospect (or diminishing prospect) of post-grad careers looms constantly over the heads of students.

The English department is currently looking into developing a new introductory course. Though department enrollment has declined, the interest in the department’s creative writing program is consistently high. Its 12-person application-only workshops are also plagued by claims of inaccessibility and exclusivity.

Journalist and Creative Writing professor Michael Pollan is working with colleagues to develop a new survey course to introduce freshmen to creative writing, with a different instructor covering each of six genres: fiction, poetry, essay, playwriting, screenwriting, and journalism. The course will aim to teach students how to workshop and read with attention to craft. Pollan wrote in an email that he also aims to “prepare students to become professional writers” with an understanding of “how the publishing world works.”

If these courses work in part to market themselves and their disciplines, sidestepping the canon for career expertise may be an increasingly bankable offer. But Pollan’s pitch is especially persuasive for students entering Harvard with humanities doomerism in their ear.

It remains to be seen if a crash course for creatives will be a better sell than a critical colloquium. But no matter the future of these courses, students, professors, and departments will continue to grapple with debates surrounding viability, pedagogy, canon, and accessibility. As discourse tries to shift the question “from Homer to who?” into “if Homer” and “for who?” — these questions keep these courses in conversation with the changing world of higher education.

—Magazine writer Tess C. Wayland can be reached at tess.wayland@thecrimson.com.

—Magazine writer Vivian W. Rong can be reached at vivian.rong@thecrimson.com.