Nothing symbolized Reed College’s commitment to teaching the intellectual and artistic heritage of the West more than its freshman seminar, Humanities 110.
Reed, a private liberal arts college in Portland, Ore., which is well-known for being Steve Jobs’ almost alma mater, required all freshmen to take a course on the classics of the Judeo-Christian canon and Greco-Roman antiquity. Reed was one of the rare colleges that continued to require freshman students to study the foundations of Western humanities.
However, that was the past. Starting next fall, this course will no longer really exist and in its place will come a course where student protesters have paved the way. Last year, a student activist group called Reedies Against Racism began a near-daily protest of the course’s lectures (there are three each week). In addition to calling for scholarships exclusively for black students and mandatory anti-oppression workshops for all students and faculty, the student group demanded that the Humanities 110 syllabus be “reformed to represent the voices of people of color.” There was no point in teaching a foundations course because, according to Reedies Against Racism, “’Foundational texts’ are subjective.’”
During the course of the protests, Reedies Against Racism forced a professor to give his lecture outside and also took over the lecture hall on the first day of the course in 2017.
“This is an important part of your education about Hum 110,” a Reedies Against Racism protester said as she talked over professors who left the room.
“We believe the first lesson students should learn about Hum 110 is that it perpetuates white supremacy by centering whiteness as the only required course at Reed,” another protester said.
Reed has caved to their demands.
The freshman course will now have four distinct sections on historically, culturally, and geographically disparate cities including Greece, Rome, Mexico City, and Harlem. Nonetheless, after terrible displays of behavior such as shutting down professors and still getting what they wanted, Reedies Against Racism is still dissatisfied.
Writing on their public Facebook page, Reedies Against Racism said that the new syllabus should not include Greece or Rome. Rather, the new “cities should be outside of Europe, as reparations for Humanities 110’s history of erasing the histories of people of color, especially black people.”
A multicultural approach that expands voices is not enough. These students want the erasure of the Western tradition that the course was until this year.
Teaching the foundations of the West at Reed was never about white supremacy or erasing anyone’s experience. It was about introducing students to the intellectual milieu they would be occupied with for the rest of their time in college and the historical, philosophical, and literary foundations of the culture that Reed, like all Western colleges and universities, exists within.
Replacing the course is a sign to future college protests that professors will listen to them even if they disrupt classrooms. It’s a sign to college professors that student activists may be even more radical than they initially claim. But most importantly, it is a sign that the justification for teaching the West’s intellectual foundation is precarious enough as to bend to the political pressure of undergraduate students with emptily alarmist racial rhetoric.
