We tend to emphasize new courses in our newsletters, so you might wonder what has happened to our Great Books seminars. Rest assured: they are alive and well!
HUEN 1010, Humanities for Engineers. Over the last year, we taught 29 sections of 1010, for a total of 345 students. Class size remains small: 12 for regular sections and 10 for ESL sections. Today’s 1010 seminars tend to be theme-based, focusing on leadership, for example, or identity. No single text is read in every section, but all sections still entail close reading and open discussion.
HUEN 3100, Advanced Humanities for Engineers. Last year, we taught 20 sections of 3100, including four summer sections, for a total of 235 students. These seminars are capped at 12 students. The various sections of HUEN 3100, though not identical, have a great deal in common, and what they share will be familiar to you. In 3100, students still meet Frederick Douglass and Socrates; they still contend with Stoic philosophy and with the Grand Inquisitor’s harangue. They still perform Shakespeare and attend cultural events. Finally, they all still do the art assignment, combining a trip to the Denver Art Museum with a reproduction of a piece of its artwork. These familiar features of 3100 remain unchanged.
Furthermore, the format of the 1010 and the 3100 seminars remains the same: constructive class participation counts for 25-35 percent of the semester grade; students continue to negotiate the open-ended questions raised by their texts. Instructors help students weed out wrong answers, but they still don’t hand out any right ones. In other words, the heart of the program remains the Great Books Seminar.
We have extended the notion of “Great Books” to mean foundational and/or deeply worthwhile texts in any cultural tradition, however. Moreover, we have expanded the notion of “texts” to include music, art, architecture and film. The results have been very successful. Broadening our scope has not diluted our curriculum; rather, it has helped us all gain new perspectives on the human condition.