Reading As an Act of Resistance (Notes on Harvard’s Hum 10)

In our current age of smartphones and AI, have college students basically given up on trying to read full books or write on their own? Well, the answer depends on who you ask. So remember back in 2024, Rose Horowitz wrote a blockbuster article for The Atlantic that had an alarming title. It was called The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books. Now this article painted a pretty grim picture about collegiate literacy. Let me read you the introductory paragraph of that piece from 2024. Nicholas Dames has taught literature humanities. Columbia University's required great books course since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they're assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames' students now feel bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college, even at highly selective elite colleges prepared to read books. All right. So that was a sort of a depressing article when it came out. But just last week, Pamela Paul published an article in the Wall Street Journal that shed a ray of hope. This article was titled The Brutal Harvard Class That Suddenly Everyone Wants to Take, and it's about a freshman humanities course that's nicknamed Hume 10. Here is how Paul describes it. This class is definitely not for padding the GPA. Students read a hefty book a week and write regular essays. There is no pass fail option. Digital devices are verboten, and attendance is taken in every lecture. So Hume 10 feels like the type of course that the students described in that 2024 article in The Atlantic would try to avoid at all costs. Yet at Harvard, it's a hit. Paul actually calls it the surprise hit of Harvard's academic lineup. You have to write an essay to try to get in. Over a 180 students applied for only 90 slots in the most recent semester. So what has changed between these two articles for those kids? Well, I have a theory here, and I think it's an important one to discuss because it gives us some insight into how to resist some of the most dehumanizing forces from big tech. So I thought I would jump on the mic here and record a quick episode to explain my idea. So let's get into it. Alright. So what's going on with this HUM 10 course at Harvard? First, I want to read a couple of students from a couple of quotes rather from students from the piece that establish what it's like, what the attitude is like for the students taking this course. All right. So here's the first one. It says, if you don't have the work ethic, I don't think you should be taking this class, said Jaden So, an aspiring opera singer from Chicago. Most students complete most of the …