Alums who took the NSCI and SOCI foundation courses are not surprised to learn of their demise. “There was nothing in NSCI that inspired me to try harder, and the fact that I’d already been over the material in greater detail than was offered there made it horrifically boring,” complains Karin Kross, a 1996 English grad.

So why has the humanities foundation course survived? For one, HUMA 101/102 never pretended to provide a foundation in everything about the humanities. Even though students read texts generally considered important, the course focuses on skills, on imparting an understanding of rhetoric, textual analysis, and writing. Hutchinson describes HUMA as creating an experience, while its NSCI and SOCI counterparts focused on “exposure.”

The HUMA experience goes beyond skills. Even during its heyday in the early 1990s, enrollment was capped at around 25 students per section, making it the only small-group course a science or engineering major would take freshman year. Elisa Verratti ’94, who took the Big Three (MATH 101, CHEM 101, and PHYS 101), HUMA, and SOCI in 1989–90, admits she “really enjoyed HUMA. Dr. Zammito [the John Antony Weir Professor of History and history department chair] was great, and it was a small class. SOCI was too broad, too boring, and too huge.”

As Verratti observes, HUMA’s professors are another key to the experience. Lucky freshmen find themselves interpreting the crazy chalkboard of circles, arrows, and scrawl generated during the dynamic lectures of award-winning English professor Dennis Huston. Huston, who has taught the HUMA course since its inception, admits that one benefit of not having “17 sections of HUMA is that now we have nothing but good teachers and, sometimes, better than good teachers.”
The word gets around. “I’ve heard wonderful things about Dennis Huston, and they proved true this semester,” says Sarah Baxter, a premed biology major who enrolled in HUMA as a senior. She was told it was required. It wasn’t, yet Baxter remained. “I was enjoying it too much to drop it.”

The texts, too, prove a compelling draw. Though the reading changes from semester to semester, the emphasis is always great works in Western philosophy and literature. The relaxation of the general education requirements has spawned other humanities courses covering Greek, medieval, and Asian civilization and more esoteric topics like the representation of the self in art and literature. Even so, at least six sections HUMA 101 and 102 are still offered each semester. Lauren Vanderlip, a freshman planning to double major in sociology and religious studies, calls the reading hard and demanding, but reveals, “I love how the works that we read are applicable and representative of humanity today.”

Times being what they are, the fall 2002 reading list included The Qur'an. And because the course is no longer required, professors have more freedom to vary the texts between sections. “For the last five years, folks were finishing up with Dante’s Inferno,” Huston explains. “But the last thing I need is a bunch of people in the Last Circle on the last day of class, so I did Chaucer.”