Do you feel you have the liberty to study philosophy or the right to study painting, poetry, and music? Or must you choose something more “useful”?
“I must study Politicks and War,” John Adams wrote anxiously in a letter to his spouse Abigail from Paris in 1780, so “that my sons may have liberty to study Painting and Poetry.” An author of the Declaration of Independence, Adams saw contests between freedom and constraint everywhere. The “liberty” to study art and literature could only come with national liberation.
But then Adams changed his mind. He crossed out “Painting and Poetry” and wrote “Mathematicks and Philosophy” instead.
“Philosophy,” a term that encompassed natural science as well as logic, ethics, and math seemed more appropriate. The republican United States needed the “Usefull” arts more than those “fine Arts” Adams encountered in the palaces and gardens of monarchical France. And so, the future president pushed the study of painting and poetry into the third generation.
“My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture,” he continued, “in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, [and] Architecture.” Overseeing the educations of his sons John Quincy and Charles, Adams did not say if their older sister Abigail had the liberty to study anything.
I study the American Revolution. I also oversee the humanities Core here at the University of Chicago. I’ve been considering Adams’s thoughts as I reflect not only on the meaning of the American experiment at 250 years, but on current trends in higher education and on what my own students tell me about how they approach their studies.
As a new student in the College, your UChicago journey begins with the humanities Core. These small courses are your passport to the world’s ideas, arts, languages, and cultures. You’ll encounter great minds from around the world—your classmates—and together you’ll confront great works of human culture. What should you expect? And how should you approach the coming year?
Here are ten things to consider:
- Prepare to be transformed. College alumni, no matter what they studied, often point to experiences in the humanities Core as foundational and eye-opening. It’s a site for “aha” moments, for entering our special academic community, and for developing those habits of mind that will carry you through your studies here and your lives when you leave.
- Write in your books. Many College alumni hang on to their books not as trophies but as elements of their intellectual biographies. They move marked-up copies of Homer’s Iliad or Plato’s Republic from location to location and reread these works as they make other transitions through their lives. You are a part of a scholarly tradition now. Visit the Special Collections Research Center at the Regenstein Library if you want to see centuries-old annotated copies of some of the texts you’re reading.
- Embrace your humanities experience as one of the key differentiators of a UChicago education. These life-changing courses can be, and should be, fun, but we take them very seriously; helping you cultivate your creative intelligence, develop your global fluency, and access the cultures of the world is our business. And business right now is good, at least here. Think on this: the College graduated 74 students with a bachelor of arts degree in philosophy in June 2025. That’s nearly as many individual students as Princeton (21), Harvard (29), and Yale (28) graduated that same year altogether.
- If you like what and how you learn in the humanities Core, keep exploring. Across the last decade, one in five students has graduated with a major in a program in the Arts & Humanities Collegiate Division (AHCD) and nearly one in three students has a degree (a major or a minor) in the AHCD. These metrics are the envy of peers. UChicago leads alongside other schools ranked in the top 10 by U.S. News & World Report in 2025 in the training of students in the arts and humanities. Our students frequently combine studies in one collegiate division with coursework in another, leading to comparative advantages both in the marketplace and in the competition for prestigious postgraduate national scholarships. Career Advancement has also made it a special mission to ensure graduates of the AHCD land appealing internships and compelling jobs.
- These are discussion-based courses, so talk and listen. Developed in the 1930s, the humanities Core has changed significantly over time. In smaller ways it changes year over year, as we welcome new students, new instructors, and new texts. Early on, we used to put all first-year students into a single space—say Mandel Hall—and parade a series of leading experts to lecture to them. At the end of the year, we’d give everyone a comprehensive test. That’s a great way to deliver information and to assess its delivery. Many schools still employ this model for introductory courses in the humanities. But a UChicago education is not about receiving information, so take an active role in shaping the conversations in your section.
- Your instructor doesn’t know everything. Over time, we developed a different mode to meet the needs of general education with a supply of scholarly specialists. We broke students into small groups. It remains important for the person at the head of the class to have expertise, and every instructor in the humanities Core has a Ph.D. But with 5,000 years of recorded human history, no instructor can cover everything. Increasingly, the instructor’s job was no longer to tell you what to think—what to think about Homer or Plato, say—but to help you develop how to think.
- It’s not what you read, it’s how you read. While some peers, such as Columbia, have preserved a core curriculum in the humanities in which all students read the same books in the same order, we launched separate sequences in the mid-1970s. Students now read across time and space in their humanities Core classes. In the middle of winter, you’ll find students engaging Plato’s Phaedrus in Media Aesthetics, Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics and St. Augustine’s Confessions in Human Being and Citizen, Homer’s Odyssey and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in Reading Cultures, Descartes’s Meditations in Philosophical Perspectives, contemporary work from the Middle East in Poetry and the Human, Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Greece and Rome, Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book in Readings in World Literature, and Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory in Language and the Human. You’ll find great books in every sequence, but the reason we’ve allowed such variation is because we believe, at heart, that these courses are not simply about the animating questions, topics, and texts, but about helping new students discover new ways of thinking.
- All sequences are equal. The sequences have each developed their own identities, followings, and histories. In 2027, our oldest continuous sequences, Human Being and Citizen and Philosophical Perspectives, will turn 50; and our youngest, Poetry and the Human, will turn 10. But despite the different texts and areas of focus, they all have the same basic objectives.
- Develop habits of mind. The courses are less concerned with this or that text or discipline than with helping students develop habits of mind through reading, writing, and conversation with their peers. We want students to learn to ask a question or to reconstruct an argument the way a philosopher might, to hear a line of poetry with the help of a literary scholar or a poet, to see a painting or a film with the eyes of an art historian or a film scholar, to hear a piece of music like a musicologist or a composer, and to put ideas into context like a historian. Most of all, we want you to improve your ability to analyze, interrogate, and express your own viewpoints.
- Make the campus your classroom. You’ve just arrived, so take the opportunity to get to know some of the places that make this campus special. Your section may visit the Smart Museum of Art to experience artworks directly or see a performance and talk with the artistic team at the Tony–award winning Court Theatre. Students in my section of Human Being and Citizen visited the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures to see 3,500-year-old clay tablets with text from the Epic of Gilgamesh. At the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, we encountered 2,000-year-old fragments of the Iliad on papyrus, early printed Bibles, the first edition of Sophocles’s Antigone, a copy of Plato’s works from the late 16th century that reached our campus before any students did, an early printing of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and former UChicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins’s annotated copy of Plato’s Apology. (We puzzled over one of his notes, made in the context of the House Un-American Activities Committee: Was Socrates “un-American?” Hutchins wondered.)
So that’s my list. But last autumn, as my section of the humanities Core concluded, I asked my students a pointed question on an exit survey: What advice would you give a future student about this course or about the humanities Core in general?
They were all candid then, and a few of them spoke with me more recently. Here are ten things they wanted you to know:
- “Take HUMA seriously, read and read well. Most important, take part in discussion.”
- “Listen to the people around you in discussion!”
- “Bring an open mind if you don’t consider yourself to be a ‘strong reader’ (or a ‘fast reader’). You will still really enjoy this class.”
- “Read these texts actively.”
- “Keep your mind young and stay curious.”
- “Eliminate previous knowledge that could lead to misinterpretation.”
- “Be creative. Think hard when deriving meaning from these texts.”
- “Write down significant passages. It helps a lot for discussion when you need to refer to the text.”
- “Have confidence in your opinions and be open to changing your mind based on peer disagreements. The strongest arguments should be countered a hundred times.”
- “Focus on learning how to think.”
Whatever Adams might have said, I believe that the humanities Core can be a space both of liberty and liberation. In 1977, the founders of the Human Being and Citizen sequence, six faculty who had each graduated from the College, first described the mission of their course as an attempt “to liberate the student from a thoughtless adherence to unexamined opinions and for the more careful consideration of his or her life as a human being and citizen.” They saw their educational mission as the cultivation of “the liberating skills of careful reading, speaking, listening, and writing.” That course included Homer’s Iliad, a text still on the Human Being and Citizen syllabus. In a concurrent section then offered as part of the social sciences Core, students read Plato’s Republic.
Adams himself didn’t read Homer until he was 24, devouring all of Alexander Pope’s translation in a week and estimating in his diary that he would need half a year to go through the whole in Greek. In his late 70s, Adams traded letters with Thomas Jefferson on Plato’s Republic, which Jefferson had just read for the first time. Jefferson called it “nonsense”; Adams agreed. Adams believed in writing in his books, and you can read his own lightly annotated copy online. The first thing he underlined was a passage written by the translator, a sentiment he fully endorsed: “Education… [is] the foundation of government.”
Here at Chicago, we see the humanities as a foundation for your education. We are committed to supporting your liberty to study philosophy and your right to study poetry and painting. These disciplines are not, as Adams might have thought, pleasures to be deferred in favor of the more “useful” arts, but necessary components of your intellectual liberation.
The Maroon independently verified all claims for which evidence was not publicly available.
Eric Slauter is master of the Arts & Humanities Collegiate Division and a deputy dean of the Division of the Arts & Humanities at the University of Chicago.
