COLUMN: Humanities 101 offers unique opportunities for exposure

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by Chris Thomas

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Do you think of that waste of time that you sat through your freshman year, back when you still had ambitions of becoming the next Albert Einstein; back when you figured on getting that double double-E, chem-E degree?

Remember taking the class, only to realize that you really didn't need it after becoming an English major all those years back?

Maybe you were one of the lucky ones; anticipating your uncertainties, perverting the intended purpose of the Foundation Courses; wandering aimlessly through college, not taking your required introductory courses until the final semester of your graduating year. What is the use of allowing someone to take an introduction course as little more than a denouement to your undergraduate career?

Did you take the course and find yourself left adrift in an embarrassingly Eurocentric interpretation of the historical development of culture and thought?

Were there too many white people in the reading material?

Were there altogether too many Christians in your assigned readings? (Heaven forbid!)

Did you skip class often enough so as not to be subjected to such offensive material, or did you attend religiously in order that you might express your opinions?

For some, though, HUMA 101/102 were the first classes they had ever taken that gave them the opportunity to read comic books(!).

Others discovered depths to Madame Bovary they never intended to probe.

Some were taken by the intricacies of Franz Kafka, while many were bogged down by the rantings of St. Augustine.

For every inconsistent experience recounted by a student of HUMA, you will find somebody's unique expectation for the class.

Structured rigidly and applied loosely, the organization of the course leaves a few jaded and bored, though this might be an exception to the norm.

In dealing with the large number of students that register for the class, section assignments are random, giving students no expectation of who will be teaching them until the first day they walk into the classroom.

From personal experience, this random assignment can have its difficulties. In transferring sections at the semester, I had the unfortunate luck of having an easy professor first and a hardass last.

Because of this, it took several weeks to realize that things wouldn't be as easy as I had thought. Still, it was just an adjustment problem. If I really had problems with the difficulty of my courses, I could have accepted that scholarship to the University of Nebraska at Omaha and left Rice behind.

I was proud to have learned several things during HUMA classes. Even though I had grown to learn the absoluteness of logical reasoning, HUMA demonstrated quite embarrassingly the mistakes that can be made when trying to fit metaphor to a rigid logical framework.

The course behaved as a castle made of Velveeta -- apply too much pressure and it oozes out from underneath you.

I learned that the execution of an idea doesn't have weight with your audience if it doesn't have importance to you. As a fellow human, I have the ability to create works as significant as those studied in class.

Whether others will respect my contributions depends heavily upon their ability to recognize the seriousness with which I execute my works.

I learned that, with perseverance, even bullshit can become golden.

Some people have criticized the course for its relative lack of minority voices and alternative interpretations.

Maybe this is a conspiracy on the part of our faculty to keep the undergraduates uninformed.

Maybe it is a gross omission that is tantamount to suppression of thought.

Maybe they didn't have time to put in ten percent of what they wanted to teach and they are simply trying to get as much of a background into the subject as possible without wasting time getting too specific.

In my experience, the course offers several examples of alternative interpretations of Western civilization: The Princess of Cleves as the first feminist novel, The Confessions of St. Augustine as a diary of a religious minority, The Metamorphosis as an expose of the treatment of the handicapped in nineteenth-century Europe, The Iliad remarking on homosexual love; the list goes on and on.

That each work allows for myriad interpretation demonstrates the slippery nature of our existence. If the course is able to demonstrate these points to those most needing it -- e.g., believers in the gospel of ones and zeroes, the binary absolutists -- the professors are doing their job and doing a service to the community.

NEXT WEEK: SCSI 102, or How I Learned to Hate Chem Lec.

Chris Thomas is a Sid Richardson College senior.

This item appeared in the Opinion section of the January 21, 1994 issue.

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