It’s possible, I suppose, that at some point in the next 10 or 15 years, some of the Puff-The-Magic-Dragon essays about the return of physical retail outlets, university education that isn’t spoiled by AI and on-the-cusp-of-illiteracy students and disinterested professors, and politics that isn’t dominated by fund-raising, will come to pass. It’s a hard sell: there was celebration about the “return of vinyl,” an uptick in start-up print periodicals and now the claim that people will eschew the internet and buy books at independent (or corporate) stores, and not just in major cities. Various “studies” quoted by “here’s-the-good-news!” (or just nostalgic) writers cite, say a 20 percent increase in the sale of new fiction from a decade ago. That’s niche buying, I think, since it wouldn’t take much to register a “boom” in cultural categories left for dead as this century progresses.
Recently I read, skeptically, a Wall Street Journal article by Pamela Paul (employed by The New York Times from 2011-2025, with an unhappy ending) about a switcheroo at the beleaguered Harvard University—constant dings to its reputation if not its finances. Headlined “The Brutal Harvard Class That Suddenly Everyone Wants to Take,” Paul begins: “Those who see the humanities, heavy coursework and value of a Harvard education as gravely imperiled can take heart in the phenomenon that is Humanities 10.” “Heavy coursework” was once a given at most universities, but let’s temporarily ride in Paul’s bullet train.
“The class is definitely not for padding the GPA,” Paul says. “Students read a hefty book a week and write regular essays. There is no pass/fail option. Digital devices are verboten, and attendance is taken in every lecture (pink slips for those who arrive late).” Sis Boom Bah for the banishment of “digital devices” at this outlier Harvard class, but gee whiz, isn’t that a restriction that should’ve been in place at every middle- and high-school (public or private) and college since around 2012? (Not to mention impolite imbeciles who chat on their phones at movie theaters.)
This snippet isn’t encouraging: “’I did get 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,’ said David Elmer, a classics professor and one of Hum 10’s co-leads. ‘Whether that’s because of AI encroaching on their autonomy as a writer or thinker, I honestly don’t know.’”
That’s not a very “deep” answer as to why Humanities 10 is fashionable at Harvard from the professor. Maybe he didn’t want to speculate that it’s just a fad or something for students to furtively (and anonymously) post about on TikTok. “Like, I’m 75 pages into Ulysses, that’s by James Joyce lol, and it’s so old-school and cool. I’m getting smarter every minute,” might be an example, although admittedly I possess limited facility with the slang that’s popular with students today.
Ellie Powell, who took Hum 10 last year, said: “It’s the only class I took at Harvard where people would call each other out for not having done the reading. You didn’t want to disappoint the seminar by being the one person who didn’t read or whose comment really didn’t add to the discussion.” Is it too harsh to think Powell was on her best behavior in speaking to a Wall Street Journal reporter? Maybe, but I definitely don’t remember any such cheerfulness when I was a college freshman in 1973.
An English Literature course I took in the first semester was brutal (taught by charismatic and fetching Professor Frances Ferguson): that fall students (about 60 for the once-a-week lecture and two teaching-assistant classes broken up into smaller groups) read Middlemarch, Little Dorrit, Tristram Shandy, Vanity Fair, Jude the Obscure and a few others I’ve forgotten. A novel was assigned on Monday and essays were due on Friday. There was some grumbling (although Little Dorrit expanded my reading of Dickens beyond just A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield), and some skimming to keep up. Plus four other courses and an active social life, 1970s-style. But no substantial carping (or “calling out” others for not participating in discussions), because no alternative was imaginable; for a sizable subset of American teenagers, you were expected to graduate from a college. End of story. Had anyone poked fun at another student for naïve or stupid comments—it’s a free country!—or arriving at class unprepared, he or she would’ve been ostracized.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023