Freshmen Cristina Marie Richieri and Jackie de la Cruz signed up for the “love course,” a.k.a. Love and Deception, because they, well, loved Pride and Prejudice, one of the books on the syllabus. They chose the course over others such as Bodies in Place: Investigating Selfhood and Location, and Transformation: The Intersection of High Art and Contemporary Culture.
Will Greene picked Old-World Encounters out of the list of offerings that included Finding Voices, Forging Selves, and The Self, the Sacred and the Human Good. “I looked at the titles and I was, like, ‘You’re kidding,’” says the Massachusetts freshman. “I read the descriptions of the courses and looked over the texts, and I had absolutely no idea what they were about. They seemed lofty and detached and too esoteric for me.”
Freshmen get their first glimpse of the required yearlong Introduction to the Humanities—IHUM—in a course catalog mailed to them the summer before they enroll on the Farm. Some, like Jessica Lira, ask their parents for help in choosing from the nine-course fall-quarter menu because “they’re investing $40,000 [per year] in me.” And many who plan to major in science or engineering say selecting an IHUM can be pretty daunting. “I’m an engineer and I’m not a huge fan of literatures,” says Anand Subramani, who intends to specialize in materials science. “I picked Old-World Encounters because I enjoy historical works and I’d heard of Herodotus,” one of five authors on the syllabus.
Students’ varied responses to their first encounter with IHUM echo the debates that have flared for decades over what freshmen should be required to learn, and how they should be taught. Courses about the origins of Western civilization, like those launched by Columbia University in 1919 and the University of Chicago in 1931, are unique to the United States, according to English professor Herbert L. Lindenberger. In a 1990 article commissioned by Columbia University Press, Lindenberger noted that undergraduate education in this country was not, “as in most other countries, devoted to mastering one or two disciplines.” Instead, he said, it was designed to provide “what is generally called a ‘liberal arts’ background,” with students required to take a number of introductory courses in a number of different fields.
IHUM, launched by the Faculty Senate in 1997, is the fourth incarnation of a mandatory freshman curriculum at Stanford, following History of Western Civilization (given from 1935 to 1969), Western Culture (1980 to 1988), and Cultures, Ideas and Values, or CIV (1989 to 1997). Structured Liberal Education (SLE), a yearlong, residence-based learning experience, is another humanities option that enrolls about 90 freshmen each year.
Whereas Western Culture focused on a classical reading list and CIV embraced author diversity, IHUM approaches the study of human thought, values, beliefs, creativity and culture from yet another direction. Now in its seventh year, IHUM appears to have weathered initial misgivings of faculty, as well as the outraged slings of Daily columnists and letter writers and the mockery of the Band. In a 1,200-plus-page self-study submitted to the Faculty Senate last spring, IHUM administrators cautiously patted themselves on the back, concluding that “after a little over five years of existence, the IHUM Program is working reasonably well, and getting better.” But the congratulations weren’t unanimous. Among the senators asking questions were David Palumbo-Liu, professor of comparative literature, who wanted to know how the program would ensure diversity, and education professor Eamonn Callan, who challenged its educational rationale.
>> IHUM differs from previous programs in pedagogical goals as well as in structure. —IHUM self-study, p. 10.
While its predecessors were department-based courses, IHUM begins on a different path. Instead of a three-quarter survey course like CIV, IHUM is a so-called “one-two” program. In the first, autumn-quarter segment, nine to 11 courses are each team-taught by two or three faculty from different departments who come together because of a common intellectual interest. They agree on five texts for the syllabus but offer different interpretations of the texts in their lectures: they are encouraged to argue with one another, ever so cordially. In discussion sections, students learn to read books thoughtfully, stake out positions on characters or themes, search for textual evidence to support their points of view and argue for them in papers and in class.
That focus shifts in January, when the second half of the “one-two” equation kicks in and freshmen must enroll in a new course that extends over both winter and spring quarters. The nine-odd winter-spring IHUMs are department-based: faculty from classics teach about Ancient Empires, while those from Slavic languages and literatures offer a course in Poetic Justice: Order and Imagination in Russia. Most of the faculty who teach the winter-spring sequence do not lecture in the autumn-quarter courses, and there is no attempt to link the two segments.
“Western Culture was about the core list, CIV was about multiculturalism, and IHUM is about coherence,” says English professor David Riggs, who has taught introductory humanities courses for more than 20 years. “That’s what they’re trying to do—to make the fall quarter an introduction to methods, and the winter and spring quarters an application. It’s a good idea, though it does mean giving up the whole notion of a common experience.”
The winter-spring sequence has particular appeal for small departments like philosophy and Spanish and Portuguese. Although, historically, they have not had enough faculty to offer a yearlong CIV track, they can consistently field two-quarter courses, which often turn out to be a vehicle for recruiting majors. “It’s one of the first things we think about staffing,” says IHUM director Orrin Robinson, ’68, a professor of German studies whose department has taught the popular Myth and Modernity: Culture in Germany for seven years.
>>In spite of substantial incentives, recruiting faculty to teach in the fall quarter remains challenging. —IHUM self-study, p. 28.
The autumn-quarter courses are seen as IHUM’s flagship, and development has come at a high cost, according to some faculty. “There are financial incentives, to be quite blunt, for teaching in the program,” says English professor Martin Evans, who lectures in IHUM and who has taught required humanities courses for the past 40 years. “One gets a certain number of thousands of dollars for teaching in the second and third quarters, and a rather larger number of dollars for teaching in the first quarter.” There’s also the cost of recruiting, in a national search, postdocs who serve as IHUM teaching fellows, leading the discussion sections and grading papers—and who are paid substantially more than graduate students who used to teach most CIV sections.
“We’re hired for slots in the winter-spring disciplinary courses, and shuffled around a bit in the fall,” says Jim Marino, a Shakespearean scholar who taught Love and Deception in the autumn quarter along with Kara Cooney, an Egyptologist. This quarter Marino is back in more familiar surroundings, teaching in the English department’s Literature into Life: Alternative Worlds. A former high school teacher, he looks back at the first day of the IHUM year with visible fondness. “Freshmen are just fun to teach,” Marino says. “They’re also scared silly, and it’s important to have Kleenex in your office.”
There are understandable fears and tears, but most of the freshmen interviewed for this article were less concerned about the structure or pedagogical goals of IHUM, and more enthused about what they were actually learning. Richieri and de la Cruz could be cheerleaders—wait, make that Dollies—for the program. In autumn quarter, the roommates regularly took advantage of their teaching fellows’ office hours, started papers a week before they were due and talked long into the night about thesis statements.
“We agonized over which prompts [essay questions] to choose, then bounced ideas off each other, argued and attacked,” Richieri says. De la Cruz nods her head in agreement, and says the papers were more analytical than anything she wrote in high school. “My TF asked for ‘original and controversial’ theses, and the prompts called for such close readings of the texts.”
The pair quickly picked up the lingo of intellectual discourse, and they say they loved the way Robert Harrison and Thomas Sheehan argued with each other during their lectures. Whereas Harrison, a professor of French and Italian and a literature scholar, read Plato’s Symposium as poetry, religious studies professor Sheehan saw it as a foundational work of philosophy. The effect of their disagreements was to shake students up as they discovered there is no one right answer in the humanities.
“You find yourself unsure of the views you have of a piece of literature,” de la Cruz says. “People in section see it so differently than you do, and you battle back and forth, and usually there isn’t a winner. But you’re open for allowing for other possibilities.”
And that, say IHUM proponents, is one of the program’s goals—to prepare freshmen for university work by teaching them analytical skills, and by teaching them to question texts, professors and one another. “The idea is to jumpstart college-level thinking, to get students to the point where they’re not simply repeating what a lecturer says, which is the high school mode, but learning to make their own arguments,” says IHUM associate director Cheri Ross, MA ’85, PhD ’85.
>> We would like to change the student culture that views IHUM as bad precisely because it is required. —IHUM self-study, p. 30.
In a survey of seniors in the Class of 2002, who had taken IHUM when it was still getting off the ground in 1998-99, students were critical of the program by a margin of almost 3 to 1. However, a survey of freshmen at the end of autumn quarter 2001 produced “highly encouraging” results: from a sample of 117 students, 70 percent of them were either extremely positive or positive about their IHUM experience, 12 percent were neutral, and 12 percent were either negative or extremely negative.
Since the program began, students have argued that the discussion sections are too long—at 90 minutes—to sustain interest. Many students interviewed for this article say that because the lectures and sections often seem unrelated, they stop going to lectures and instead focus on the sections, where they are graded on their participation. Many object to the fact that the 15-unit IHUM takes up as much as one-third of their freshman course work, and they also criticize what they see as unequal workloads among IHUMs. But the overriding complaint has to do with the fact that the program is mandatory. “It’s odd, because in the rest of the GERs [general education requirements], you have so much flexibility, but you’re so limited with IHUM,” says freshman Maureen Montgomery. “It seems like two different administrations must have dreamed up those two programs.”
IHUM’s Ross refers to such complaints as the “requirement tax,” the “large-course tax.” And, she adds, “there’s another factor—a national phenomenon—that says students don’t learn as well as they used to in an auditory environment, because their attention spans have been shortened by all kinds of media.” That’s not a reason to pander to freshmen, Ross says. Instead, “we have to teach them the skill of learning from lectures.”
Those who have been on the front lines the longest look back at the culture wars of the 1970s and conclude that content trumps format. “I’ve been through all these debates for almost 50 years,” says Lindenberger, who began his teaching career at UC-Riverside in 1954 and came to the Farm in 1969. He has taught in all of Stanford’s iterations of introductory humanities courses, and he has probably heard all the arguments for and against various approaches. “There was, ‘Dante is more important than X,’ and there was, ‘You can’t teach a text a week—you need three weeks,” Lindenberger says. “Well, I’ve taught in so many tracks that I’m convinced there is no best way of doing it.”
Lindenberger co-teaches a course in autumn quarter with associate religious studies professor Hester Gelber. Like many faculty who taught in previous humanities courses, Gelber had qualms about the book-a-week format of both Western Culture and CIV. “By the time [freshmen] finished the end of the year,” she says, “we had taught them how to read really important works of literature way, way too quickly.”
Today, there are fewer books on each course syllabus, but all IHUMs have a common goal, as their predecessors did: developing reading, writing and oral presentation skills, and giving freshmen a taste of the foundational ideas of a number of different disciplines. “The first paper is a real rite of passage,” says teaching fellow Marino. “It takes a while for the ‘Since the beginning of time, poets have showed us the beauty of love’ introduction to wear off.” Because freshmen typically want to retell the stories they’ve read, Marino says TFs have to take away options that allow them to summarize plots. “Rather than learning a set of answers by rote, or learning an appropriate interpretation of Madame Bovary, it’s about what they do with the next book, when we’re not around.”
Jessica Lira says she’s already applying what she learned in IHUM to her other courses: “I can have an interpretation that’s completely different, and that’s okay—as long as I can defend it.” Her introduction to the humanities has also encouraged her to “think on a fuzzie track.” Lira came to Stanford assuming she would major in chemistry, but she’s now leaning toward human biology. She’s already signed up to take a seminar with Sheehan, one of her autumn quarter IHUM professors, and she also wants to study with his teammate, Harrison, as she looks ahead to studying abroad in Italy.
“Upperclassmen had said IHUM was so horrible, but I had a really good experience,” Lira adds. “Everyone has to go through it, and you can’t change it, so there’s no point in getting angry about it. It’s not like you can rebel, so you might as well get into it, complain together and get it done.”
Professor Herbert Lindenberger’s correct middle initial is S.
