Humanities
The above statement was taken from the remarks made to the
Association of American Colleges by Richard F. Scholz, second
president of Reed College, in 1922. It remains a fundamental
commitment today. A major focus of that commitment is the
humanities program, which, since its inception in 1943, has served
as a model for many similar programs throughout the nation. In 1995
the program opened a new chapter with the inauguration of Chinese
humanities as an integral component.
Each Reed student's educational program includes one year of
humanities studies in the freshman year. The student may elect to
continue the study of humanities with courses in the early modern
and modern periods of European civilization or in the foundations
of Chinese civilization.
The humanities curriculum places primary emphasis not upon
information, important as that may be, but upon the development of
disciplined thinking and writing through the interpretation of
works of art, literature, or other means by which people have
expressed themselves and ordered their lives, individually and
socially. Courses acquaint students with poetry, drama, painting,
sculpture, music, religion, philosophical systems, forms of
political and social order, and historical works.
Students are encouraged to think about course materials in their
cultural contexts and from the perspective of a variety of
individual disciplines. For instance, in the plays of Aeschylus the
handling of aristocratic legends reflects the contemporary
political concern with tyranny, as in the Agamemnon, and
with the substitution of city justice for blood revenge, as in the
Eumenides. Similar methods of interpretation apply to later
periods in Europe, with such figures as St. Augustine, Shakespeare,
Locke, J.S. Mill, Flaubert, Conrad and Woolf. In the study of
Chinese civilization, Sima Qian's Shi Ji is examined both
for its philosophy of history and for its implications concerning
narrative theory, while the shi- and ci-poetry of the Song dynasty
are treated as embodiments of both an expanding aesthetic vision
and changing social values. All the courses attend to the fine
arts, for example the Acropolis as a focus of the city-state, the
sculptural program of Augustus’s Altar of Peace, architecture of
the Italian Renaissance, eighteenth century interior decoration,
funerary art of the Han period, and landscape painting of Song
China.
In a structure that allows Reed students to develop multiple
perspectives on a common body of learning, scholars from many
disciplines lecture and lead conferences in the course. One of the
three units of credit for Humanities 110 reflects the attention
given explicitly to developing analytical and writing skills, where
the representative works studied are effective subjects for
frequent papers, discussed in individual paper conferences.
Course Requirements
1. All freshmen are required to take first-year humanities (110),
as are those transfer students who have not completed equivalent
transferable courses.
2. It is recommended that sophomores take Humanities 210, 220, or
230.
Transfer student humanities: students transferring more than six
units may substitute one of the 200-level humanities courses and
one additional unit from Group A or Group B for the freshman
humanities requirement. Courses used to fulfill the humanities
requirement may not be used to fulfill other College distribution
requirements.
Humanities Course Descriptions
