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While browsing the Spring Course Selection this past term, I was delighted to find a particular spring humanities course on a topic that greatly intrigued me. The subject was one in which I had invested a great deal of previous independent research and had always been eager to pursue in a formal classroom setting alongside similarly dedicated peers. My elation, however, was short-lived – “You’re probably not going to get into that class,” I was informed. Apparently the class was popular among students eager for an easy six.
Sure enough, due to the random nature of the scheduling office and the overwhelming number of students who applied, I was ultimately denied the opportunity to pursue the course in question. This incident can hopefully allow for some insight into a much greater academic issue – namely, the general devaluing of humanities that permeates contemporary academic thought.
It is absurd that students with a proven commitment to the humanities, as well as a longstanding record of honors grades in these courses, are routinely unable to access high-demand classes in English, history or religion and philosophy, sometimes due to an influx of students taking the class for an “easy” or “popular” teacher. In contrast, many of Andover’s math and science courses, which are carefully categorized by ability level, are only accessible to students who have demonstrated a particularly high level of both interest and aptitude. For example, Biology 600, a course for advanced independent research, has both a 500-level Biology class and a Chemistry class as prerequisites.
Of course, it is worth mentioning that the humanities can be a fluid and versatile range of academic thought. As such, these departments often lack the capacity to clearly establish and maintain the specific levels of difficulty so easily instituted by, say, Andover’s mathematics department. Even so, the widely held notion that success in English, history or philosophy classes is dependent upon “inspiration,” while mathematics and sciences require more meticulous and analytical thinking, is intellectually degrading. As Pomona College’s Chair of the English Department, Kevin J.H. Dettmar, asserted in an article for “The Atlantic” entitled “Dead Poets Society Is a Terrible Defense of the Humanities,” “…Passion alone, divorced from the thrilling intellectual work of real analysis, is empty, even dangerous. When we simply ‘feel’ a poem, carried away by the sound of words, rather than actually reading it, we’re rather likely to get it wrong.”
Dettmar’s reasoning here is irrefutably sound. Proficiency in the humanities is contingent upon a whole host of important skills: a thorough and acquired knowledge of complex formulas of syntax and diction, the ability to synthesize large amounts of intricate academic material and the intellectual ability to grapple with a vast and wonderfully interconnected matrix of pedagogic interests that has captivated artists, writers and philosophers since the dawn of civilization.
Andover can no longer just accept science and math (and in some cases, music and visual art classes) as the only subjects that require skill and dedication and are worthy of high-level courses. This mindset is damaging to Andover’s harding-working humanities-oriented students, who are often excluded at random from the courses that matter deeply to them.
The first and most direct solution to alleviate the manifestations of this unfair thinking at Andover would be to limit the accessibility of high-demand humanities courses by prioritizing students with a history of interest and achievement. Naturally, this could result in its own range of repairable but significant setbacks, including the potential establishment of a rigid academic hierarchy that leaves no room for upward mobility, and a failure to allow the instructors of the courses in question to conduct academic affairs at their own discretion.
With these potential detractions in mind, I present a second solution: the construction of an advanced “Humanities 600” course, which would function as the equivalent of an Art 500 or Biology 600 course. The only comparable current option, the Independent Project, is insufficient, especially in that it almost always requires busy faculty mentors to take on yet another obligation on short notice.
An opposition to my initial solution, especially as some may feel that the result would be a damagingly gradient system of learning, is understandable; to oppose the second solution, however, is simply to deny humanities-oriented students a way to pursue their area of interest at the same level of academic rigor and selectivity already afforded to their math and science-oriented peers.
In my last term at Andover, I was denied the opportunity to formally pursue a field of knowledge that matters deeply to me, not because I was not qualified, but because in spite of my energy and my efforts, my love of the humanities renders me a faceless student ID number in the scheduling office. I implore Andover to prevent the continued infliction of this experience upon my fellow humanities-oriented peers by taking any and all necessary steps towards establishing a curriculum that holds all school subjects to an equal standard of academic merit, specifically by reconsidering the selectivity levels of 500- and 600-level humanities courses in relation to their mathematical and scientific equivalents.
