A few months ago in these pages, our Ethan Epstein rhapsodized about his alma mater, Reed College (“My Old School,” November 10). He praised its rigorous academics and one particular course, the decades-old mandatory freshman humanities class that covers ancient Greece, Rome, and the Bible. Because nothing good lasts in this fallen world, Reed has now announced plans to gut that foundational course, dubbed Humanities 110 (“Hum 110” for short), in deference to the student agitators known as Reedies Against Racism. (It’s racist, you see, to read Aristotle.)
Rather than provide a coherent, holistic course in the ancient Mediterranean, the school announced, Hum 110 will now be broken into “four modules . . . each examining a separate city during a significant period of historical change.” At least one “module” will cover a city in the Americas. As one friend of The Scrapbook, another Reed alum, noted acidly, “Ikea furniture is modular. Versailles is not.”
Reed, then, is becoming more academically malleable, following in the tradition of other liberal arts colleges that have slowly gutted their core curricula. A strategic merger with Brown had not yet been announced as we went to press.
