As graduation approaches, there is always the temptation to go to the rhetorical well and draw out impassioned, reflective prose about one's own inner life and personal growth. Rather than sharing personal details of little interest to the University community at large, I thought it would be better to recognize the most beneficial and formative force in my academic experience at Princeton — the Program in the Humanities' Western Canon sequence.
Ranging from Homer to Marx, the "HUM Sequence" — as veteran's call it — is a two-semester march through the Western tradition. Covering art, history, philosophy and religion, the two double-credit classes are taught by teams of three professors, and the 25 or so students meet for two lectures and three seminars a week. Students interact regularly with some of the best teachers and scholars on campus. And, because the small class meets frequently during the entire academic year, a previously disconnected group of students transforms into a tight-knit community with friendships that continue long after the class ends.
Granted, much of that solidarity also develops because all students in the courses are burdened with an almost heroic syllabus, making The Sequence the academic equivalent of rowing crew — minus, of course, any streaking through Cloister after finishing biweekly papers. The benefits of this labor of love, however, are the works themselves. The Sequence successfully teaches two of the most important aspects of a college education: the appreciation of greatness and critical thinking. The works are simply wonderful to study and provide ample fodder for hard thinking and harder questions. Not only does The Sequence provide students with a grasp of the major ideas of Western civilization, it allows them to understand their evolution over time and within a cultural context, showing interrelationships across disciplines and eras.
Understanding ideas of the past also puts the present in a meaningful context, as so many "new" ideas and contemporary academic schools of thought have analogues hundreds, even thousands, of years earlier. By weaving various cultural threads into a meaningful tapestry depicting a living history, The Sequence does its students a great service.
Even greater, however, is the nature of the knowledge it teaches and the goal it serves. The knowledge gained in The Sequence is essential, not instrumental. It will not get you a well-paying job and the critical thinking it engenders only indirectly serves as a marketable skill.
What it does do for students, however, is help them become humane thinkers and persons. In exposing them to some (not all) of the greatest works in human history, it teaches them to appreciate the wonders of the human mind. In learning to critique and understand the flaws of those works, students also learn humility by understanding the limitations of even the greatest creators.
Most importantly, The Sequence serves as a powerful oration on the dignity of mankind. By exploring and celebrating the soul of a civilization, it reinforces the fact that a human being is an essentially feeling and thinking subject, not an object to be used and discarded. It is that understanding of humanity's infinite worth that will affect students long after they graduate from Princeton and longer still after their "real world" reading consists mainly of office documents and morning papers on commuter trains.
There is a growing trend among universities to shift from liberal arts curricula to more instrumental, career-oriented courses of study. Princeton has largely and rightly resisted this trend, though the new certificate in finance and courses in high-tech business are a nod in its direction.
If universities are to produce thoughtful citizens and not just efficient inputs into the economy, they should bolster support for classes like The Sequence. Fortunately, a recent sizeable donation to the Program in the Humanities ensures that this happy vestige of a still noble mission will change the lives of many future undergraduates. And, for what it's worth, it will be getting my donations for years to come. Jeff Pojanowski is a Woodrow Wilson School major from Ramsey, N.J. He can be reached at jeffreyp@princeton.edu.
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