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A foundation for education:
the humanities program at Reed (continued)

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Humanities 110
Reed legendary humanities program was founded in the 1940s, when faculty members united two seminal classes, in history and literature, into one required common course for all first-year students, Humanities 110, beginning with a study of the Iliad and Greek history and culture. The course—always under intense scrutiny from the faculty—has changed often with new demands and emphases in scholarship and teaching. (In fact there is serious discussion now about adding the rise of Islam to the course.) But the core idea is still the same; as acting president Peter Steinberger described, “It is the interdisciplinary study of a culture, a study in which various works are examined explicitly and pointedly in the context of one another. Humanities 110 provides students with a background of materials—a structure of erudition—that percolates throughout the rest of the curriculum.”

Living through Humanities 110
By Margaret Boyle ’05

When I applied to the college, I wrote my “Why Reed” essay on the magnetic pull of the thesis tower. It was a highlight of my visit to the campus, as it appeared to be the physical embodiment of the academic intensity of Reed College—an intensity I had been longing for throughout high school.

In the summer before coming to Reed, I received my copy of Homer’s Iliad and began the coursework for the prestigious Humanities 110 course. I cherished my copy of the work. I had the summer to leaf and linger through the pages and felt my intellectual capacity growing by the minute.

Towards the end of summer, we received the syllabus detailing the reading ahead. I was in awe at the sheer number of works. I read over the list several times, impressed by the fact that I could not pronounce half of the authors’ names. Little did I know what I was in for.

For many students, the course is one of their first true multidisciplinary endeavors. It is admirable for the academic fervor it inspires with its delving into the literature, history, art, and philosophy of the Western world. The thrice-weekly lectures allow students to glean insight from a number of professor’s perspectives. Humanities conference allows for more intimate and in-depth discussion on the work. It has forced me to better formulate and communicate my ideas, both vocally and in writing. It also continues to broaden my perspective to the opinions of my fellow students.
Essentially it is that newfound bridge between minds that has been most appealing about Hum 110. It offers common ground to all first-year students. The night before our first midterm exam, my dorm floor organized a reading of Antigone in preparation for the exam. And whenever I am overwhelmed with the number of pages assigned for the night, it’s comforting knowing I have so many to share in my troubles.

My roommate and I frequently have a conversation that goes something like the following:

“I can’t believe how much reading we have,” I say.

She responds, “And we have a paper due next week.”
“This is impossible.”

“There’s no way we can do this.”

And then we do.

Margaret Boyle, a first-year student from Los Angeles, California, is a student intern in the news and publications office at Reed.

Humanities 110, which carries 50 percentmore credit than any other yearlong course, brings together faculty members in literature, history, art history, philosophy, and religion; they all of present lectures to the students in Humanities 110 as well as lead their own conferences of approximately 16 students. This brings to students an understanding of the ways these different disciplines approach the world and lets students see that no one discipline has the ability to explain everything. Says classics professor Nigel Nicholson, Humanities 110 chair, “We encourage people to be able to write within the particular forms that each discipline has: a philosophy paper is going to look different from a history paper. You’re going to ask different kinds of questions in these different papers.”

The 24 faculty members in Humanities 110 (as well as the other humanities courses) place great emphasis on developing better writing skills. The 110 curriculum demands seven papers across the year, with a one-on-one meeting with the faculty conference leader after each paper. Professors often develop ways for students to work with each other on writing, using techniques such as editing groups. The improvement in a student’s writing abilities after going through Humanities 110, they say, is often dramatic. Reed also maintains a great resource, the writing center, to help students who may need help with their papers. The center, which is housed in the library and staffed by student peers, coordinates its schedule closely with paper assignments in Humanities 110. Any student at Reed may walk in and get help from the peer tutors in the writing center, but the most frequent visitors are Humanities 110 students.

The workload in Humanities 110 can be heavy for both faculty members and students. There are ways to cope with that, says Nicholson: “It does worry students the beginning of the year, but by the end of the year almost all the students recognize that they can deal with the workload through a combination of judicious selection—being able to work out where the really important things are happening—and just finding the time. If they can get through that amount of reading, they really are ready for anything the sophomore year’s going to throw at them.”

Greece, Rome, and early Christianity is the current focus of the course. This framework works, Nicholson says, because a lot of the texts are foundational to a number of disciplines. “ Philosophy students get to read Plato and Aristotle and Augustine; historians get to read Herodotus and Thuycidides and Tacitus and Livy,” says Nicholson. “Literary scholars get to read Homer and Virgil and things that could well be of significance to them in whatever period they choose to focus on eventually in their major.”

“In many ways, we think of Greece and Rome as being quite like modern Western culture,” Nicholson continued. “But when you start reading the stuff they produce, there are some very obvious ways in which they differ radically. . . . That leads us to recognize the assumptions that underpin our own beliefs about society. Someone once said that one of the things you learn in college is to question all the things you have been told by your parents or your teachers. I think there’s a lot of truth in that. You learn to be very critical, critical in a positive sense, positive in a sense that it makes you a better citizen, a better member of your community, when you can understand your own blind spots and your own prejudices.”

The perspective and emphasis on the Humanities 110 material is always shifting, though, as scholarship on these periods evolves. “What we’ve tried to do is construct a course that provides a model of how to study any civilization,” says English professor Robert Knapp, chair of the humanities program. “We’ve been fortunate in that the study of the classics has been one of the liveliest and intellectually and politically engaged fields in America over the last two or three decades. Even though we’re studying, for the most part, dead white men, they don’t look at all the way they looked in 1940.”