Freshman classes are getting hooked on the literary classics.

Freshman classes are getting hooked on the literary classics.
WASHINGTON POST
Six years ago, a faculty committee at Ursinus College near Philadelphia sat down to review its core curriculum. The usual results of such meetings, some critics of higher education say, are minor adjustments in a smorgasbord of courses that don't really have much to do with one another.
At Ursinus, with 1,500 students and a good reputation for medical sciences, something else happened. The committee thought it was time to make a radical move and decided to create a full course on the human experience that every freshman would be required to take.
Forcing all first-year students to read the same classic texts by Homer, Plato and Virgil used to be fairly common at U.S. colleges. But the academic rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s led to more student choice and less contact with dead white male writers of classic literature and philosophy.
Many colleges adopted core programs that were loose, except for a few stubborn enclaves, such as the St. John's colleges in Santa Fe, N.M., and Annapolis, Md., that make everybody read the same old books.
Enthusiasm for books
Ursinus President John Strassburger said he was not sure how students would react to the new required course, the Common Intellectual Experience, or CIE. He and his faculty soon learned that even for 21st-century undergraduates, the great works can be addictive.
"I discussed ideas from the 'Heart of Darkness' when talking about racism in a course about Hispanic literature and culture, and witnessed a heated argument about Simone de Beauvoir's take on feminism at a frat party," said junior Sally Brosnan. "I have walked in on my roommate reading the unassigned chapters of Nietzsche's '[On] the Genealogy of Morals,' instead of her usual Wednesday night reruns of 'Sex and the City.' At the end of the semester, several students kept their CIE books rather than selling them back to the bookstore for beer money."
J. Scott Lee, executive director of the Association for Core Texts and Courses headquartered at Saint Mary's College of California in Moraga, estimated that about 65 undergraduate institutions require all freshmen to take the same classics or core courses. Even so, he said, that is more than did so in the 1970s.
Lee said that when the group of colleges that form his association had its first meeting in 1995, those in attendance were surprised at how many schools had begun to have such freshman year course rules. This was in part, he said, a reaction to "the core being too much like a shopping mall, and there was a deeper and more fundamental concern over the very nature of what education should be for undergraduates."
Many still allow choices
Most colleges still give freshmen plenty of choice, in part because they think students are more likely to apply themselves to subjects that interest them. "The difference between courses where students are forced to be there and where students have chosen to be there is like night and day," said Paul Armstrong, dean of the college at Brown University, which does not have core requirements.
Barry Latzer, a political scientist at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and expert on core curricula, said several colleges seem to have common freshman course requirements but in reality don't. "Many of these courses seem to be seminars, small classes with term papers, the subject of which varied with the interests of the instructors, who were drawn from different departments," he said.
Among the colleges that have freshmen take the same course are schools as big and famous as Columbia University, with 23,800 students in New York, and as small and little-known as Oglethorpe University, with 1,029 students in Atlanta. Colgate University has two required courses, and George Washington University for the first time this year will require all freshmen to take a writing course, even if they had top scores on entrance exams.
Intertwined
At Ursinus, the incoming class of 2009 read the epic poem "Gilgamesh" over the summer and discussed it during orientation week. Later, the freshmen gathered in the evening to watch faculty and students perform a medieval cycle play about Noah, since the story of the great flood figures in both "Gilgamesh" and another Common Intellectual Experience reading, the book of Genesis in the Bible.
Ursinus students said they were excited to read a recent essay by Harvard University professor and minister Peter J. Gomes recommending the Common Intellectual Experience for other schools, including his own. Gomes said he thought Harvard's faculty would resist the idea, but "why should all of the creative and liberating ideas for liberal education be left to the small residential liberal arts colleges?"