On a Tuesday morning in October, a philosophy professor paced in front of 90 Harvard freshmen. Samantha Matherne's subject was Jane Austen's Emma. Along the way she pulled in Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant. She asked why Austen made her heroine so unlikable. She asked, “Why read novels at all?” When the 75-minute lecture ended, the students applauded.
The class is Humanities 10, or Hum 10. The Journal's Pamela Paul calls it the surprise hit of Harvard's lineup. Getting in takes an essay. This fall, applications jumped 40%, with 180 incoming freshmen chasing 90 seats. The professors admit they can't fully explain the rush. The workload is heavy. It's a thick book every week, plus essays. Nobody can take it pass/fail. Phones and laptops stay out of the room. Someone takes attendance at every lecture, and latecomers get a pink slip.
Why they want it hard
The year opens with Homer's Odyssey. It jumps ahead to James Joyce's Ulysses, then goes back to Homer to finish with The Iliad. Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Spinoza and Baldwin come along the way. In their applications, students said they wanted a push through classics they'd never pick up alone. Many said their attention had frayed and they wanted it back. Several were annoyed that people outside the class ask why they don't just let AI read the books for them. Peggy Urdan, a government and neuroscience major, said what you get from the class is the human experience, and AI can't give you that. David Elmer, a classics professor who co-leads the course, said many students feel the wider culture isn't friendly to deep reading. Whether AI is to blame, he said, he honestly doesn't know.
Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Menand, two English professors, dreamed up the course over dinner in 2008. Interest in the humanities was falling and they wanted a counterweight. Today a rotating team of senior faculty each gives two lectures and runs a weekly seminar. Every professor attends every lecture and leads discussions on books from outside their own field. Jay Harris, a Jewish Studies professor, has taught it since 2015. Naomi Beinart, a freshman from New York, said reading Hamlet with Greenblatt is “like being able to cook with Julia Child.” Ellie Powell, who graduated in 2025, said it was the only class where students called each other out for skipping the reading.
Our read
This is a Career and Behavioral story, and the skill at the center of it is attention. These students aren't rejecting technology. They've signed up to practice something a machine can't do for them. They sit with a hard book until it gives something up. We think employers notice that skill too. In an office full of AI, the scarce person reads a long document all the way through. That person holds the argument in their head and writes back clearly. That was valuable before chatbots, and it may be rarer now.
Here's where it touches your own money. The same frayed attention that makes a freshman skim Dante makes an investor check a brokerage app a dozen times on a red day. Friday, Oct. 30, was a selloff day, by our own pull at midday Friday. So this week, run a Hum 10 exercise on yourself. Count how many times you opened the 401(k) or brokerage app during the drop. Then put the phone face-down and read your written plan, all of it, the way those freshmen read The Odyssey. The plan was written on a calm day for a day like this one. If you don't have one in writing, that's the first thing to fix. We'd rather write it with you before the next hard chapter.