There are plen­ty of good rea­sons a stu­dent might want to go to Har­vard. One is its long his­to­ry, at least by Amer­i­can stan­dards; anoth­er is the for­mi­da­ble accom­plish­ments of the pro­fes­sors hired to teach there. But on some lev­el, a teenag­er look­ing to come up in the world — or, in many cas­es, par­ents look­ing to put their teenag­er up in the world — under­stands full well that much of what an insti­tu­tion like Har­vard offers comes down to its selec­tiv­i­ty. Con­sid­er­ing how few get in ver­sus how many apply, it would be easy to believe that most of a stu­den­t’s bat­tle is won at the point of accep­tance. Imag­ine the despair, then, of a new­ly arrived Har­var­dian fac­ing anoth­er entrance exam and writ­ten appli­ca­tion just to get a seat in Human­i­ties 10.

Its unin­tim­i­dat­ing name notwith­stand­ing, Human­i­ties 10 is the oppo­site of one of those intro­duc­to­ry cours­es through which a vast, dark­ened lec­ture hall full of fresh­men can doze. “Stu­dents read a hefty book a week and write reg­u­lar essays,” reports Pamela Paul in a recent Wall Street Jour­nal arti­cle. “There is no pass/fail option. Dig­i­tal devices are ver­boten, and atten­dance is tak­en in every lec­ture.” This year’s syl­labus, which the WSJ has also pub­lished (also find it below), “begins with The Odyssey, trav­els for­ward in time to James Joyce’s Ulysses and then back­ward to end with The Ili­ad. In between are assign­ments on Mon­taigne, Shake­speare, Spin­oza, Bald­win, Dante and Pla­to.” Amid these great books of the West­ern world appear works by Lady Murasa­ki, Sor Jua­na, and Cao Xue­qin.

With cer­tain excep­tions — Bald­win’s essays, three install­ments of Krzysztof Kies­lowski’s Deka­log — this cur­ricu­lum could be a cen­tu­ry old. In fact, Human­i­ties 10 dates back only to 2008, when the Eng­lish pro­fes­sors (and acclaimed writ­ers) Stephen Green­blatt and Louis Menand put it togeth­er “as a Har­vard twist on a famed Colum­bia senior sem­i­nar and Yale’s Direct­ed Stud­ies pro­gram, and a way to com­bat plum­met­ing stu­dent inter­est in the human­i­ties.” But in a way, its roots run back to 1945, when the uni­ver­si­ty pub­lished the report “Gen­er­al Edu­ca­tion in a Free Soci­ety,” which made the case for pro­vid­ing all stu­dents with the same non-pro­fes­sion­al, non-spe­cial­ized intel­lec­tu­al foun­da­tion. Around the same time, it intro­duced Human­i­ties 2: The Epic and the Nov­el, a demand­ing two-semes­ter course that nev­er­the­less drew 850 stu­dents a year at its peak.

Its suc­ces­sor Human­i­ties 10 accepts only 90 fresh­men, and the result­ing com­pe­ti­tion has drawn pub­lic atten­tion. So has the admit­ted stu­dents’ will­ing­ness to actu­al­ly do the read­ing — and their appar­ent dis­dain for peers who would look over a few AI sum­maries and call it an edu­ca­tion. In the video above, Deep Work author Cal New­port dis­cuss­es the truth this reveals, one that recent tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments have occlud­ed. Rely­ing on short­cuts to feel­ings of reward — cul­ti­vat­ing social media instead of a social life, watch­ing a trav­el video instead of mak­ing a jour­ney, prompt­ing an LLM instead of actu­al­ly writ­ing — strips our activ­i­ties of not just their fric­tion, but also their con­text, and ulti­mate­ly their mean­ing. Like any worth­while human expe­ri­ence, these books don’t hide their val­ue under lay­ers of dif­fi­cul­ty; their dif­fi­cul­ty is their val­ue.

FALL 2026

9/8 Homer The Odyssey
9/15 Aeschy­lus The Oresteia
9/22 Mon­taigne, Essays
9/29 Shake­speare, Ham­let
10/6 Spin­oza, The­o­log­i­cal-Polit­i­cal Trea­tise
10/13 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
10/20 Jane Austen, Emma
10/27 Mary Shel­ley, Franken­stein
11/3 Walt Whit­man, select­ed poems
11/10 Friedrich Niet­zsche, On the Geneal­o­gy of Moral­i­ty
11/17 T.S. Eliot The Waste Land
12/1 James Bald­win, The Fire Next Time and Notes of a Native Son

SPRING 2027
1/26 James Joyce, Ulysses
2/2 James Joyce, Ulysses
2/9 Vir­ginia Woolf, essays and sto­ries
2/16 Edith Whar­ton, The House of Mirth
2/23 Friedrich Schiller, Let­ters on the Aes­thet­ic Edu­ca­tion of Man
3/2 Ueda Aki­nari, Tales of Moon­light and Rain
3/9 Gio­van­ni Boc­cac­cio, The Decameron
3/23 Eihei Dōgen, Trea­sury of the True Dhar­ma Eye
3/30 Dante Alighieri, Infer­no
4/6 Longus, Daph­nis and Chloe
4/13 Pla­to, The Sym­po­sium
4/20 Homer The Ili­ad
4/27 Homer The Ili­ad

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load The Har­vard Clas­sics as Free eBooks: A “Portable Uni­ver­si­ty” Cre­at­ed in 1909

The Open Syl­labus Project Visu­al­izes the 1,000,000+ Books Most Fre­quent­ly Assigned in Col­lege Cours­es

How to Read Five Books Per Month & Become a Seri­ous Read­er: Tips from Deep Work Author Cal New­port

Har­vard Lets You Take 133 Free Online Cours­es: Explore Cours­es on Jus­tice, Amer­i­can Gov­ern­ment, Lit­er­a­ture, Reli­gion, Comp­Sci & More

W. H. Auden’s 1941 Syl­labus Asked Stu­dents to Read 32 Great Lit­er­ary Works, Total­ing 6,000 Pages

Why Amer­i­cans Stopped Read­ing Books

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.