1 agos 1937 anni - Frosh Humanities A,B sequence (Van Doren)

Descrizione:

They started planning this in committees in 1934

Humanities A only is required at this point, due to practical problems. Concerns are expressed about students' inexpertise and inexperience in dealing with complicated materials.

Cross, Oasis of Order, ch. 2:
"WITHIN THE FACULTY, it was widely felt that a required course in the humanities would complement CC's introduction to the social sciences and would reaffirm the College's commitment to making men, not businessmen. The College did not rush to introduce the second great pillar of the core program, however. Discussions about a humanities sequence began with the appointment of a committee headed by Edman in October 1934. Later two subcommittees - one headed by Van Doren and another by John H. Randall - played major roles. As much as Contemporary Civilization, the Humanities element of the core curriculum was the result of careful deliberation and the work of many faculty.

The original plan was to offer courses on literature, music, and the fine arts in a single two-year course. "In the field of the Humanities a student has no opportunity in the first two years of his college work to get a generalized picture of the relations of literature and the arts to each other," stated a memorandum from the Edman committee, "and all of these to the civilization of which they are an expression." Here the success of Contemporary Civilization provided a crucial model: "A course in the Humanities would be designed to do for the field of arts and letters (including philosophy) something analogous to what Contemporary Civilization does for the social sciences."21


ON 23 SEPTEMBER 1937, the College began its new Humanities sequence designed specifically for underclassmen. The names of the courses were unimpressive. Humanities A, a yearlong course required of all freshmen, covered a series of classic texts of Western literature and philosophy from classical antiquity to the end of the eighteenth century. Humanities B, an optional course for sophomores, was devoted to the visual arts and music in the West. In 1947, Humanities B would become required, changing its name to Art Humanities and Music Humanities. Much later, Humanities A would become Literature Humanities. But these were changes in name only, for there is a fundamental continuity in the humanities courses that has persisted to the present.

After its first year, Jacques Barzun stated four crucial beliefs supporting the new course: "First, that a college granting the Bachelor of Arts degree should not merely pave the way to professional training, but should try to produce educated men. Second, that if educated men are those who possess an inner life of sufficient richness to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, they must have learned to feed their souls upon good books, pictures, and music. Third, that the memorizing of labels, catchwords, and secondhand judgments about art and books is not educative in any real sense. And lastly, that to know and to be at home with books a man must at some time or other read them for the first time."23 Overall, Humanities A focused on important books read as humane texts rather than as adjuncts to courses in literature, philosophy, or history. The course emphasized that these books "address themselves primarily to man as man, and only secondarily to man as philosopher, historian, or college undergraduate."24

These assumptions combined the liberal civic-mindedness of Van Amringe and Coss with the humane and cosmopolitan aspirations of Woodberry and Erskine. Like the founders of CC, the planners of Humanities A recognized that the purpose of a college education went beyond preparing for a career. Like Woodberry and Erskine, the planners committed themselves to the study of important books that could provide the basis for discussions of the human experience. No one thought that Humanities A would exhaust these texts or satisfy the desires of students; instead, the emphasis was on, in Professor of English James Mirollo's words, "introducing students to the critical reading and comprehension of a powerful and resonant work.

Those planning Humanities A wanted students to purchase their books, for they believed firmly that "some books must be read alone, in bodily comfort, and at a sitting the length of which follows desire rather than the clock. Besides, books densely packed with ideas must be marked, underlined, and annotated by the reader."26 Nevertheless, to keep up with the heavy reading load, students would have to follow both desire and the clock.

The reading list owed a great deal to Columbia's earlier humanities courses, though it had somewhat fewer books because everything had to fit into one year. It emphasized Greek and Latin classics more than the earlier lists, not because any classical texts were added but because fewer were cut to create the one-year list. The fall semester concentrated exclusively on the heritage of Greece and Rome. From Greek culture, students studied epic (the Iliad), drama (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes), and philosophy (Plato and Aristotle). From Roman civilization, students read Lucretius, Vergil, and Marcus Aurelius. In contrast to this deliberate march, the spring semester of Humanities A sprinted fifteen hundred years, from St. Augustine's Confessions through Goethe's Faust.

The Humanities A syllabus was never intended to represent a fixed canon of texts. Indeed, the College avoided describing Humanities A as a "great books" course precisely because of the unwelcome dogmatic associations that the phrase conjured up.27 As the College's Committee on Plans observed, "What tradition suggests, when one comes down to it, is remarkably changeful."28 And tradition did change.....As Professor John Rosenberg recently observed, of the 150 titles that have been included in the Humanities since 1937, only a few titles have never left the list: the Iliad, the Oresteia, Oedipus the King, Dante's Inferno, and King Lear....

Humanities A called on students not simply to read one work each week, but to read all of it whenever possible. "Nearly everyone on the staff . . . concurs in the opinion that whole books are better than parts," stated the College's Committee on Plans in 1946. "And where parts have to be chosen the consensus is: the longer the better." The rapid pace and the heavy reading load placed special burdens on students, who after all were new to college. The instructors recognized that they would also have to help students learn how to read, so learning "mechanics of success" in dealing with coursework became integral to the experience of Humanities A.30 There are signs that instructors realized that they might be expecting too much; prior to the spring of 1938, instructors advised students to begin both Don Quixote and Tom Jones during Christmas break.31 In later years, only the first part of Cervantes, or excerpts from both parts, were read.

From General Honors and the Colloquium, Humanities A inherited an unswerving devotion to close reading and discussion of important texts, approached from the perspective of an enthusiastic amateur. In structure and staffing, however, Humanities A followed Contemporary Civilization. There was a common syllabus, though it was much simpler than the CC syllabus since it only listed the one book to be read each week. In 1937-38, sections met four times a week, though this was reduced to three times a week in 1941. (Now all core classes have two-hour sessions twice a week.) There were weekly quizzes and four papers spread across the two semesters. Despite considerable strains on the College's resources, sections were kept small, averaging only twenty-four students. In its first year, there were only twenty sections (compared with fifty-three today). Each section had only one instructor, who remained for the entire year. Like CC, Humanities A relied on staff, drawn from different departments, who met each week to discuss the assigned text.

At the start, those departments contributing instructors for Humanities A overlapped with those teaching CC. Instructors were chosen from the departments of English, philosophy, history, classics, and modern languages. While in later years the Humanities staff and the CC staff could often become estranged, initially the College encouraged faculty to teach both courses.32 And some of Columbia's most famous professors did teach both, such as the historians Carman, Barzun, and Brebner and the philosopher Edman. This community of purpose is hardly surprising, for there was widespread acceptance among the faculty of the goals that both courses shared. On a practical level, both were introductions to the offerings of the College's many departments. But since these introductions went beyond academic guidance, they were foundational in a much wider sense, providing incoming students with ideas and information that would be valuable for a lifetime."

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