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A More Rigorous Humanities
By Spencer W. Glassman, Contributing Opinion Writer
Spencer W. Glassman ’23-’24, an inactive Crimson Editorial editor, is a History concentrator in Leverett
House. His column “A More Human Humanities” appears on alternate Fridays.
December 10, 2021
The humanities are easy. Or so goes the cant of most Harvard students. And
who can argue with them? One can reasonably be worried about failing an
organic chemistry exam, but such a feat would be almost commendable on an
English essay. Our STEM classes expect a lot more out of our students than our
humanities classes do because there are tangible things that any student who
completes Stat 110 or Physics 16 must know. The humanities are not inherently
easier. In fact, they are far from it; after all, a brilliant philosopher is much rarer
than a math genius.
It is all too common to sit through a section discussion on the weekly reading
where at most 25 percent of students have actually done the reading. Why
should they? If they don’t turn in their Math problem set, they will fail. On the
other hand if they don’t do the reading their teaching fellow won’t hound them
other hand, if they don t do the reading, their teaching fellow won t hound them
with questions to prove that; it won’t even affect their grade. When the time
comes they can glance through one of the books and write an essay that is good
enough, by virtue of their natural intelligence, to earn an A-, meanwhile they’ve
not learned anything the whole semester. Such a story must become foreign to
the experience of any Harvard student.
Consider high school art class. Art, not being as academic as the other subjects,
or so we were told, cannot expect students to be expert painters or masterful
actors. Therefore, As are given to any student who tries hard. Does art not
require just as much natural skill as any other subject? The equivalent skill in
science is just more closely tied to traditional markings of intelligence like IQ,
which, according to those who want Harvard to only admit those with the best
of test scores, is some sort of magical superiority index. Of course, IQ is no more
valuable than being an outstanding ceramicist, and we should treat both
competencies equally. As an awful artist, I should not have received a good
grade in high school art class. Students should not expect to get As in subjects
in which they are not particularly gifted, and very few of us are gifted in many
things. A skilled writer may rightly fail a high-level math class, but it would be
exceedingly rare for the reverse to happen.
Ultimately, we are scared of ranking anything which isn’t objective. Math has
right and wrong answers, so a teaching fellow could never give an A to a student
who wrote that 2+2=5. A math class also has a more straightforward set of
information that must be known by the student. Selecting which interpretation
of Augustine is correct or what scenes from “The Tempest” a student should
have remembered is subjective.
Yet professors and teaching fellows know more than us. They have to be
confident in their assertions about what is necessary to know and what is a
reasonable or unreasonable argument to make. One must understand the
subjectivity of the humanities, but simultaneously hold that there is Truth out
there, and expect students to make a decent stab at it.
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