There are plenty of good reasons a student might want to go to Harvard. One is its long history, at least by American standards; another is the formidable accomplishments of the professors hired to teach there. But on some level, a teenager looking to come up in the world — or, in many cases, parents looking to put their teenager up in the world — understands full well that much of what an institution like Harvard offers comes down to its selectivity. Considering how few get in versus how many apply, it would be easy to believe that most of a student’s battle is won at the point of acceptance. Imagine the despair, then, of a newly arrived Harvardian facing another entrance exam and written application just to get a seat in Humanities 10.
Its unintimidating name notwithstanding, Humanities 10 is the opposite of one of those introductory courses through which a vast, darkened lecture hall full of freshmen can doze. “Students read a hefty book a week and write regular essays,” reports Pamela Paul in a recent Wall Street Journal article. “There is no pass/fail option. Digital devices are verboten, and attendance is taken in every lecture.” This year’s syllabus, which the WSJ has also published (also find it below), “begins with The Odyssey, travels forward in time to James Joyce’s Ulysses and then backward to end with The Iliad. In between are assignments on Montaigne, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Baldwin, Dante and Plato.” Amid these great books of the Western world appear works by Lady Murasaki, Sor Juana, and Cao Xueqin.
With certain exceptions — Baldwin’s essays, three installments of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog — this curriculum could be a century old. In fact, Humanities 10 dates back only to 2008, when the English professors (and acclaimed writers) Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Menand put it together “as a Harvard twist on a famed Columbia senior seminar and Yale’s Directed Studies program, and a way to combat plummeting student interest in the humanities.” But in a way, its roots run back to 1945, when the university published the report “General Education in a Free Society,” which made the case for providing all students with the same non-professional, non-specialized intellectual foundation. Around the same time, it introduced Humanities 2: The Epic and the Novel, a demanding two-semester course that nevertheless drew 850 students a year at its peak.
Its successor Humanities 10 accepts only 90 freshmen, and the resulting competition has drawn public attention. So has the admitted students’ willingness to actually do the reading — and their apparent disdain for peers who would look over a few AI summaries and call it an education. In the video above, Deep Work author Cal Newport discusses the truth this reveals, one that recent technological developments have occluded. Relying on shortcuts to feelings of reward — cultivating social media instead of a social life, watching a travel video instead of making a journey, prompting an LLM instead of actually writing — strips our activities of not just their friction, but also their context, and ultimately their meaning. Like any worthwhile human experience, these books don’t hide their value under layers of difficulty; their difficulty is their value.
FALL 2026
9/8 Homer The Odyssey
9/15 Aeschylus The Oresteia
9/22 Montaigne, Essays
9/29 Shakespeare, Hamlet
10/6 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise
10/13 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
10/20 Jane Austen, Emma
10/27 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
11/3 Walt Whitman, selected poems
11/10 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality
11/17 T.S. Eliot The Waste Land
12/1 James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time and Notes of a Native Son
SPRING 2027
1/26 James Joyce, Ulysses
2/2 James Joyce, Ulysses
2/9 Virginia Woolf, essays and stories
2/16 Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
2/23 Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man
3/2 Ueda Akinari, Tales of Moonlight and Rain
3/9 Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron
3/23 Eihei Dōgen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye
3/30 Dante Alighieri, Inferno
4/6 Longus, Daphnis and Chloe
4/13 Plato, The Symposium
4/20 Homer The Iliad
4/27 Homer The Iliad
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
