What the Freshman Class Needs to Read
8 min read
You’re in. You’ve been admitted. And soon your parents will drop you off at your new university. It’s thrilling. It’s daunting. But what will you actually be studying in your freshman year?
All universities claim to provide some kind of intellectual foundation for their students. Sadly, the reality of what freshmen and sophomores are required to study usually belies the admissions-office propaganda.
In our view, liberal education requires that students, like rowers, face backward in order to move forward. If they are to become active and reflective individuals, they must learn to regard the past not merely as the crime scene of bygone ages, but as the record of human possibilities—an always unfinished tapestry of admirable and shameful lives, noble and base deeds. They must develop an ear for the English language and the language of ancestral wisdom as well as the various languages of intellectual inquiry, including mathematics. They need a good grasp of modern statistical methods. But they must also allow themselves to be inwardly formed and cultivated by the classics—what the English critic Matthew Arnold called “the best which has been thought and said.”
A classic is an exemplary instance, a work with imperishable cultural vitality. The Hebrew Bible is a classic, as is Homer’s Iliad. They are taproots of the great branching oak of Western civilization. A liberal education must begin at the beginning, where strange, beguiling voices of the distant past speak with authority of what it means to be human.
Don’t expect to experience much of that at the Ivy League these days.
The idea that there should be some such foundation owes much to Columbia College, which introduced a single course, “Contemporary Civilization,” in 1919 with the objective of preparing students to face “the insistent problems of the present.”
In the subsequent century, Columbia’s Core Curriculum grew and mutated, as required classes were added and revised. Literature Humanities was added in 1937, followed by Art Humanities, Music Humanities, and Asian Humanities in 1947. With the introduction of distribution requirements such as the Global Core in 1990 and Frontiers of Science in 2004, the Core attempted the impossible: to be both the core and the frontier.
A core curriculum cannot be both foundational and comprehensive. The further Columbia has strayed from its original purpose, the more skewed the Core Curriculum has become, as the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently noted. The 20th-century readings, he writes, now cover “progressive preoccupations and only those preoccupations: anticolonialism, sex and gender, antiracism, climate.” Instead of reading George Orwell, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or Hannah Arendt, students read Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and the Combahee River Collective Statement—which, as Douthat argued, are “texts that are important to understanding only the perspective of the contemporary left.” This looks to us like a clear case of a university teaching its students what to think, not how to think.
But at least Columbia offers a genuine core. Pity the poor freshmen at Harvard and Stanford, who each year look in vain for anything remotely as coherent. One of us had a ringside seat as the Harvard faculty successfully nullified former Harvard President Larry Summers’s attempt to make its “General Education” requirements both general and educational. In theory, Harvard undergraduates must take one course in each of four categories: Aesthetics & Culture; Ethics & Civics; Histories, Societies, Individuals; and Science & Technology in Society. But they can fulfill these requirements at any stage of their four years as undergraduates. And in practice, it is perfectly easy to tick the boxes with four courses that combine extreme narrowness in their subject matter with extreme laxness in their grading.
For example, Harvard would consider your general education in Ethics & Civics complete if you opted for “The Power and Beauty of Being In-Between: The Story of Armenia.” The same would go for Histories, Societies, Individuals if you took “African Spirituality and the Challenges of Modern Times.” Here we see the preoccupations of the tenured specialists entirely prevailing over the promise of a general education.
At Stanford, the general-education requirements are even looser. Since 2022, students have been obliged to take two Civic, Liberal, and Global Education courses. Among those currently offered under the Global Perspectives banner is “The Ethical Challenges of the Global Climate Crisis.” Alternatively, they can sign up for one of two residence-based, yearlong programs: Immersion in the Arts or Structured Liberal Education, the readings for which recall the principles of text selection followed at Columbia these days (Karl Marx, Toni Morrison, Friedrich Nietzsche, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire). Still another option is a program called Education as Self-Fashioning. This nicely sums up the expectation that Stanford undergraduates will “fashion” their own general education from a smorgasbord prepared by an overwhelmingly progressive faculty.
A real general education begins with the development of the West from its archaic beginnings to late modernity. In exploring the tensions between reason and revelation, freedom and authority, intuition and scientific demonstration, students need to confront what the philosopher Immanuel Kant identified as the four most fundamental questions of human existence: What can I know? What should I do? What can I hope for? What is man?
Imagine if, in the summer before you matriculated, you were expected to read the Iliad. Homer’s epic of war and civil strife would show you how cosmic, psychological, and political orders emerge from—or collapse into—chaos. Suppose in your first semester you then moved on to read Hesiod’s Theogony, in which rough order spontaneously materializes out of chaos, but the hearts of gods and men remain wild and unruly. The Book of Genesis tells a similar story, except that a transcendent God transforms primordial chaos into a habitable world that is nevertheless repeatedly polluted by eruptions of evil. Homer’s Odyssey, Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Euripides’s Bacchae, and Plato’s Apology all tell of heroes who seek to tame the dark forces of aggression and appetite. Civilization, you and your fellow freshmen would come to understand, is a series of temporary victories won by resolute defenders of love, loyalty, decency, and the capacity to remember.
What else might you study in an ideal freshman year? We would suggest an introduction to politics. What is politics? Are human beings political animals? How does a city differ from a pack of wolves, a herd of sheep, or a band of robbers? What is law? From Herodotus and Aeschylus, you would have the chance to learn how democratic Athens defeated the imperial despotism of Xerxes, a man-god who ruled subjects, not citizens. And Thucydides’s History would teach you how Athens itself became an oppressive empire in the space of a lifetime, leading to its defeat in the Peloponnesian War.
These tales establish the cyclical pattern of history discerned by ancient Greeks and Romans alike: a repetitive story of rise and fall, in which a free and courageous people defeats its overreaching enemies and then, sated with power and wealth, becomes just like them. By contrast, Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics argue that political life is a dignified, distinctly human activity centered on logos: intelligent speech in which citizens share their perceptions of what is advantageous and disadvantageous, just and unjust. But the Book of Exodus suggests that politics in the Aristotelian sense can be sustained only by divinely revealed law, absent which there is no escape from the tragic cycle of history.
Our next foundational course, on religion, would follow the tension between classical philosophy and biblical faith from Jerusalem and Rome to Mecca and beyond, by way of the Gospel of John, Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Augustine’s Confessions, the history and teachings of Islam, and the travelogues of Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta.
With these foundations, you would then be well equipped to embark, in your sophomore year, on critical reflection about modernity, technology, ideology, and the American experiment. Acquainted with ancient and medieval thought, you would be ready to consider what it means to be modern, what has been lost and gained in comparison with premodern life.
A sound freshman foundation would also require an introduction to the modes of cognition, including intellectual and moral intuition and scientific demonstration. Aristotle, informal logic, and Karl Popper would introduce you to ta mathemata, the preeminently learnable and knowable things. Margaret Edson’s Wit, C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, and Matthew Crawford’s “Shop Class as Soulcraft” would show the nature of practical and productive knowledge. And Plato, Job, and the Epic of Gilgamesh would reveal the limits of all knowledge from the perspective of ancient wisdom.
Even in its heyday, the old classical core curriculum was an insufficient basis for a modern education. Students today also need the fundamental skills of numeracy that are essential to making informed judgments and decisions: how to formulate mathematical problems, quantify uncertainty, use techniques of estimation, and interpret graphical information. They need a good grasp of the frameworks of scientific thinking in physical and life sciences, as well as of the differing intellectual traditions that shape contemporary economics and social science.
What should first-year students read? We would suggest not only Solzhenitsyn but also François Furet, Leszek Kolakowski, Vasily Grossman, and Czesław Miłosz. Rather than imbibe a just-so story about colonialism and anti-colonialism, freshmen need to understand the true nature of totalitarian empires.
Today’s students tend to value social influence more than human excellence. Worse, they pay more heed to antiheroes—people who tear down civilization—than heroes: those who protect, repair, and rebuild it. So, at the outset of their studies, we think undergraduates should encounter not just thinkers and writers but also founders, doers, leaders, and pioneers such as Abraham and Socrates, da Vinci and Mozart, Lincoln and Churchill. They should study the works of great men, to use another unfashionable phrase, but also of great women: Sojourner Truth and Malala Yousafzai, Ada Lovelace and Lise Meitner. It is no small part of a liberal education to show students the broad range of meaningful lives they might aspire to lead.
No matter what they are obliged by their professors to read, most intelligent 18-year-olds will wrestle with what the creators of the Columbia Core called “the insistent problems of the present.” But a true educational foundation draws on ancient as well as modern wisdom, enabling students to understand the difference between the timeless and the ephemeral.
Any edifice that rests on the shifting sands of contemporary academic fashion is bound sooner or later to fall. The university of the future will, paradoxically, need to offer its students an education with deeper historical roots.
