(excerpted from the Report of the Area One Design Committee, 2/19/97)
RATIONALE OF THE AREA ONE PROGRAM LEGISLATION
We recommend that Stanford's revised first-year Area One course sequence, Introduction
to the Humanities, require students to study intensely -- from various perspectives in the
humanities (the field being broadly defined) and in important texts from diverse sources
and different times and places taught by diverse faculty members -- significant ideas,
values, issues, intellectual traditions, problems, myths, imaginative constructs, and desires
that resonate in human experience and history, in our dynamic modern American culture,
and in this academic community. That means that the requirement will feature the study
of works and subjects that have cultural importance by virtue of their influence, enduring
heritage, power, relevance, representative significance, potential to shape the future,
aesthetic appeal, and/or arresting mode of expression, and ability to inspire fresh
scholarship from many perspectives.
The Area One Requirement shall consist of a one-quarter, team-taught course providing a
general introduction to humanistic inquiry, followed by two-quarter course sequences of
more specialized study exploring particular themes, issues, forms of experience, modes of
expression, and/or bodies of knowledge.
With regard to the specific implementation of the program and the legislation we are
proposing, we specifically recommend:
1) that the best and most dynamic teachers in the humanities continue to be encouraged
and attracted to teach in the Area One course sequences and that even more University
effort and resources be mobilized towards this goal (In the first quarter course, the
process of putting it together would require faculty from different disciplines to
discuss, agree, and set up particular goals for the course and plan, articulate and
exchange ideas about how these goals might be reached; for the two-quarter sequence,
the University must continue to recruit faculty in several departments or faculty from
similar areas of interest and expertise);
2) that small group instruction, since it is so central to the program's success, must be
increased from at least two hours per week (as is now mandated) to at least three hours
per week in at least two meetings, and that the size of the sections should not exceed
fifteen students;
3) that the discussion group leaders should all have earned the Ph.D., that their status
should be upgraded to the standing of a three-year, term-limited Assistant Professor,
with the possibility of a one-year reappointment, but no more, and that, following the
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recommendation of the 1988 CIV legislation and the model of some present CIV
tracks, these Ph.Ds, competitive in the job market, should be highly qualified,
outstanding post-docs identified and chosen for their excellence, promise and
productive capacities in a national search;
4) that the Freshman Writing Requirement should be integrated with the Area One
Requirement whenever it can be done in accordance with the positive Proposal to the
Provost from the Writing and Critical Thinking Program for "Linking the Writing
Requirement with Area One and Freshman Seminars" (we find evidence that when
both requirements are merged the potential academic and intellectual benefit for
students is substantially increased);
5) that the Area One Governance Committee and its chair must be actively involved in
recruiting faculty to teach courses for Area One; in implementing the requirement,
legislation, and program; in working with departments in the hiring of post-docs; in
evaluating courses and teachers; and in coordinating Area One with other segments of
Stanford Introductory Studies.
We believe a way to focus and implement the goals of Area One is to define the
requirement as something even more inclusive than Cultures, Ideas, and Values (CIV)
and at the same time possibly more manageable for practical instruction: namely, an
introduction to the humanities and inquiries into the nature of human being.
We support most of the goals and the spirit of the present CIV legislation (and
specifically we support its aim of making students aware of the range of human
experience and cultures), and we seek, by reforming the structure of the course sequence,
to promote more opportunity for faculty creativity and innovation and more choice for the
students in satisfying the requirement.
For good or ill, many students at the end of the twentieth century ask, "why should I study
the humanities or culture, ideas, and values?", "how should I study them?", "why study
the history of the past, the history of thought, the origins of culture?", "why study the arts
and literature?", "what is civilization?", and "what is human identity?" For them, these
questions no longer have self-evident value or answers, do not seem worthwhile, and can
even seem meaningless. That does not mean that this scholarly area and its subjects have
become less vital; rather, student perceptions are changing, and the nature of inquiry in
the humanities, is developing and growing more complex as it deals with proliferating
materials, new approaches to knowledge, and new forms of experience. We think,
therefore, that the relevance and expanding nature of the humanities must be explicitly
taught to all Stanford students in challenging courses of new design combined with the
effective modes of the present program. We see the need to promote and teach awareness
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of the analytical, aesthetic, and ideological issues that the developing study of the
humanities involves.
The dictionary definition of the "humanities" this century has evolved from "learning or
literature concerned with human culture, a term including various branches of polite
scholarship, as grammar, rhetoric, poetry, and esp. the study of ancient Latin and Greek
classics," through "the study of literature, philosophy, art, etc., as distinguished from the
social and physical sciences" to the most recent definition in Merriam Webster "the
branches of learning that investigate human constructs and concerns as opposed to natural
processes," a definition which certainly includes anthropology, feminist studies, religious
studies, ethnic studies, and political theory as well as literature, art, classics, and history.
Our proposal recognizes the changes in the field of the humanities. Students need to
confront directly the problems and the power of the developing humanistic enterprise in
modern culture.
Like CIV, the revised Area One courses will focus on the need to understand the
complexities of human interaction as represented and expressed in compelling language;
the need to focus on evolving and shifting ways of looking at human constructs and texts
and see how humanistic inquiry makes them relevant to a culture and its various peoples;
and a need to teach and make students understand the relevance of the past and how the
past is constituted in the present. It will also directly address what it often treats
implicitly or tangentially now: the need for a general introduction to the traditions and
developing functions of humanistic inquiry and the subject matter of the humanities; the
need for explicit inquiry into and knowledge of humanistic ways of looking at experience;
and the need to study the motives and aims of various peoples engaged in the work of the
humanities.
The revised Area One Requirement must stress the need and importance of teaching
entering college students to read complex and significant works closely, carefully, and
patiently. Again and again, in the survey on CIV we conducted of graduating seniors, the
gist of this remark appears: "Close readings of texts should be further emphasized even at
the expense of the number of texts read." The opinion motivating that statement was
almost universal in the respondents. Here is just a small sample of typical answers to our
question on "how to make CIV better": "Fewer texts to be studied in depth," "fewer works
in more depth," "CIV needs to focus on fewer, more important works," "by about the
middle of the 2nd quarter, students give up on reading it all -- it would be better for the
faculty to select the more important readings & assign only those." That is why we
recommend focusing instruction on intensive, various readings of a limited number of
important texts in the first quarter of Area One.
We favor for the three-quarter Area One Requirement the "one-quarter, two-quarter"
pattern because this structure offers basic grounding in the study of the humanities from
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multiple perspectives, followed by a variety of course sequences in major subjects and
concerns in the humanities. It allows the process of instruction to move from the general
to the particular and thematic in humanistic inquiry. It offers close, common focus on a
few representative texts, chosen from different traditions, interpreted in light of key, but
different disciplinary approaches in the humanities (e.g., aesthetic, historical, and
philosophical) and then it moves to more diversified subjects studied from more specific
approaches. And students would have some choice during autumn quarter in selecting
their two-quarter course sequence for Winter and Spring.
The principle that guides the introductory course is the principle of beginning with close
reading from various points of view and for multiple purposes: If students can read
thoroughly, from many perspectives, a single rich and complex work, they can learn to do
the same thing with other texts. The point of an introductory humanities or CIV course
ought not be illusory coverage, but really learning how to approach, see and feel the
radiating qualities of a significant work and then applying that knowledge to new texts
and subjects. The great humanist Henry David Thoreau wrote "Time is but the stream I
go a- fishing in," and -- to continue the metaphor -- the principle of this requirement is not
to give the students examples of each and every kind of nourishing fish, but to teach them
the art of fishing, the reason for fishing, the means of recognizing and judging fish, and
then to take them out fishing.
Once the rationale of a "culture" or "civ" course was to read particular works forming the
core of Civilization, but with the assault on cultural parochialism and superficiality, a
better one seems to us a broad-gauged study of what constitutes the humanities, how and
why they matter and change, and what humanistic inquiry is. Popular conceptions of
"culture" or "civilization" courses now suffer from two opposite stereotypes, both
ultimately shallow: that such a course tends to feature the out-of-date literature of an
oppressive white patriarchy ("dead white males"), or, alternatively, that such a course
should present the indispensable authors of Western Civilization -- or "civilization"
generally -- who form a -- or "the" --" canon" and/or our cultural history.
Our committee, then, is alive to three basic criticisms of our proposal: 1), that our
recommendations, because they eschew some of the prescriptive language of the 1988
legislation (SenDoc#3307) and set up a set of broadly based criteria that the Area One
Requirement should meet, might be misconstrued as an abandonment of the opening to
diversity and a return to a course with a prescribed canon that supposedly constitutes
culture; 2), that, from an another point of view, in failing to prescribe the content of the
course and a common core of texts, we are abandoning the heritage of the past and the
responsibility of teaching the foundations of civilization and culture that an educated
person needs to know; 3), that, in the "1 + 2" structure, we will lose continuity, historical
focus, and a comprehensive sense of human development.
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To the first criticism, we say that we strongly support the opening to study cultural
breadth and a new inclusiveness enacted in the Area One Requirement, and we can not
conceive of, and would not sanction, an introductory course sequence in humanistic study
that didn't include, for instance, multicultural perspectives, attention to gender, race,
religion, social identities, and significant texts by women and men of various cultures and
ethnicities. We charge the Area One Governance Committee to note carefully the
language of the new legislation and to insure that the spirit and principle of inclusiveness
established by the 1988 Area One Requirement is maintained.
To the second objection we say that by recommending an introduction to, and forms of,
inquiry into the humanities, we intend the teaching -- through representative texts, chosen
carefully by individual faculty members under the oversight of the Area One Committee,
for the significance of their content, rather than through a flurried attempt to choose and
cover "the" great books and "our" or "others'" cultural history -- of precisely the
foundations of culture that an educated person at the end of this century needs. We mean
to ensure that the wording of the legislation, the judgment of the faculty, and the
oversight of the Area One Governance Committee will insure the study of major texts of
enduring influence, power, and pedagogical relevance that help make students aware of
their complex cultural and humanistic heritage. In the present stage of humanistic
inquiry, reducing civilization -- or the humanities -- to a single book list (think how many
"great," "seminal," "indispensable" books there are) seems both arbitrary and impossible.
The committee intends to move away from the specification of content in so far as
possible. In this, we aspire to something analogous to the science requirements, in which
the University does not specify, say, statistics or calculus, but math; not biology or
physics or chemistry but natural science. Thus, while we certainly need to provide
examples of potential courses, we have decided that the specifications need to be put in
more general terms in order to give the faculty freedom to engage significant issues as
they see them and to respond to changing needs on the part of the students. With freedom
goes responsibility and trust in colleagues to do a good job as they devise courses to meet
the specifications and live up to the spirit of the requirement.
To the third criticism, we say that we hope the benefits of basic instruction in humanistic
inquiry outweigh any loss in continuity, but that sequences can be designed with
continuity; that historical focus can be stressed in some courses, that historical focus in
the present CIV varies greatly, as it will in the new Area One; and that whether
comprehensiveness is illusory or not, the grounding in modes of humanistic inquiry can
certainly be an effective way to study human development and the relationship of past and
present.
It is time to redefine the core of an introduction-to-the-humanities, "CIV"-type course: It
is not a fixed content, a token core list of authors and works that nobody can quite agree
on, or "the common intellectual experience of broadening students' understanding of
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culture, cultural diversity and the process of cultural interaction" (though it could and
should foster such experience), but the study of the making and manifold understanding
of important articulations and expressions -- significant in the historical and aesthetic
memory that makes the future -- of what it is, and how many ways there are, to be human.
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