On a Tuesday morning in October, philosophy professor Samantha Matherne paced in front of 90 Harvard freshmen and talked through Jane Austen's Emma, bringing in Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant along the way. She asked why Austen had made her heroine so hard to like, and why anyone should read novels at all. When the 75-minute lecture ended, the room applauded.
The course is Humanities 10, known on campus as Hum 10. Getting in takes an application essay, and this fall 180 incoming freshmen competed for 90 seats, about 40 percent more than last year. The work is heavy: a thick book every week, regular papers, and no option to take the class pass or fail. Phones and laptops stay outside the room. Someone checks who is in each seat, and late students get a pink slip. The year opens with Homer's Odyssey, jumps to James Joyce's Ulysses, and later returns to Homer for the Iliad.
Two English professors, Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Menand, sketched the idea over dinner in 2008, when interest in the humanities was sliding and they wanted a way to pull students back. A rotating team of senior faculty now shares the lectures, and every professor sits through every class, even books outside their own field. Greenblatt has said the pleasure is that he is not circling the same track for the 150th time. He had never taught The Wealth of Nations before, which is why teaching it here excited him.
The rush still puzzles some of the teachers. In their essays, students wrote that they wanted to be pushed through books they would never pick up on their own, and to repair attention that had been worn thin. Peggy Urdan, who is studying government and neuroscience, said a lot of what the class gives you is human experience, which you cannot get from AI. The only way to get anything out of Hum 10, she added, is not to use it. David Elmer, a classics professor who co-leads the course, has the sense that the wider culture is unfriendly to slow reading, though he does not know how much of that to blame on the machines.
Before one weekly seminar at Harvard's Fogg Museum, students choose a work of art that speaks to the week's book. In the room, a common way to start is "I want to disagree." Ellie Powell, who graduated in 2025, said it was the only Harvard class where classmates would tell you, to your face, that you had not done the reading. Nobody wanted to be the person who brought nothing.
Naomi Beinart, a freshman, compared reading Hamlet with Greenblatt to cooking beside a famous chef. These students already know how to ask a machine for a summary. What they came for is a room where the book has to be finished by hand, and where 75 minutes can still end in applause.