Campus News

Humanities Collective Fosters Rigorous Inquiry

by Michelle Simmons

January 2, 2010

Students in Professor of Music Blake Wilson’s first-year seminar debate Ideas That Have Shaped the World.

In the midst of a global economic slump—and a tight job market—just how much time should one spend mulling over Plato’s Republic or Shakespeare’s The Tempest? Shouldn’t students be focused on more practical pursuits?

According to Melinda Schlitt and Marc Mastrangelo, co-founders of the Humanities Collective, students actually need Plato and Shakespeare now, more than ever.

“The only way you can understand your situation and the present is to get into the habit of thinking about things outside your own special interest,” says Schlitt, professor of art history and William Edel Professor of Humanities. “Great writers and thinkers give you a model for doing that.”

Schlitt and Mastrangelo, associate professor of classical studies, are part of a growing coterie of Dickinson faculty members who are reinvigorating the humanities as the foundation of a liberal-arts education. The aim of the Humanities Collective is to reintroduce students to a “legacy of ideas,” imbue courses with rigorous examples of intellectual inquiry and offer a shared learning experience that challenges students and faculty alike.

Last summer, 15 faculty members representing nine disciplines developed a first-year seminar titled Ideas That Have Shaped the World. Seven of the 15 professors then taught their individual sections in the fall—using the same syllabus and covering the same material on the same days. Six plenary sessions held throughout the semester brought together the 100 students in all seven sections in the Stern Center to hear top-notch guest lecturers.

The current syllabus includes works by Homer, Shakespeare, Descartes, Nietzsche and Marx, as well as leading lights of the 20th century such as Marguerite Duras and Chinua Achebe. Assigned readings and texts may change each year, depending on the group of faculty teaching the seminar.

“What we’re interested in is qualitatively high material—it doesn’t matter who’s writing it,” Schlitt says. “There is a reason why we still read Plato and Homer, and it’s not just because they’ve been around a long time. If their ideas didn’t matter, we wouldn’t read them.”

In one of Professor of Music Blake Wilson’s classes, the students’ energy is palpable as they compare the experience of reading The Tempest to watching a performance. Occasionally talking over each other, they debate choices in staging, lighting, music and costume. The group moves on to the sonnets of 16th-century poet Louise Labé, which leads to a history lesson on the Petrarchan sonnet. By the end of class, they have argued vociferously for one interpretation or another, discussed gender politics in late-Renaissance France and parsed the problem of translation from Italian to French to English.

Wilson confesses that a course like this stretches not only students’ intellectual muscles, but the professors’ as well. “We’re all living outside our comfort zones,” he says, explaining that the wide-ranging seminar encourages them to bone up on topics outside their area of expertise. This can lead to new ideas themselves, says Mastrangelo, who is considering writing an article comparing the fifth-century poet Prudentius with the Italian Renaissance poetry of Petrarch.

Schlitt and Mastrangelo plan to expand the Humanities Collective to include professors in all divisions, with the aim of establishing a regular rotation every fall. They also see an opportunity for a conference in the future, most likely on the humanities and technology.

“We’re not so much interested in getting students to major in the humanities. That’s not what we’re about,” says Schlitt. “If you want to foster understanding and a mentality through which the student is going to become a mature individual and be in a position to take action, [you need] to have models of ethical and civic virtue. … And why not address those things in a beautiful art form?”

Mastrangelo adds, “What we’re doing is very forward-looking. Through understanding and developing a historical consciousness, the history of ideas [and] what has brought us to this point, we’re better prepared in looking forward, no matter what we do—as doctors, lawyers, politicians, business people, educators.”