We do not look at marginalized groups.
No, this was not a Mitt Romney caught-on-tape gaffe, an Antonin Scalia originalist tirade, or a Stephen Colbert in-character satirization. This message from Professor Howard Bloch, Chair of Yale University’s Humanities Program, was what welcomed the Directed Studies Class of 2017 at the start of the school year.
Directed Studies (“DS”) — the 125-student freshman-year survey of the Western canon in History and Politics, Philosophy, and Literature — has a storied history at Yale. The program, originally deemed a “planned experiment” in liberal education, came into being in 1946 as the brainchild of George Pierson, the famed Yale academic and the first official historian of the university. According to Justin Zaremby ’03, GRD ’07, LAW ’10, a former DSer, DS professor, and author of Directed Studies and the Evolution of American General Education, the program sought to correct several trends in college education, principally “the fact that universities were becoming increasingly specialized in terms of academic focus.”
Pierson considered the general undergraduate program of studies to be “too standardized, too inflexible, and geared too closely to the average and not very serious students.” DS would be a “radical experiment,” Zaremby explained, in returning to the roots of the liberal arts education.
In Pierson’s time, Yale was a very different institution: more homogenous in every sense. When the first DSers got their wings, the typical Yalie was white, male, Christian, and pretty well off. At Yale and its peer schools, heavy, ornate gates separated the Ivy-covered towers from the surrounding community.
The ensuing years have made Yale’s classes more diverse by all measures: race, gender, geography, sexual orientation, and so much more. But as the makeup of today’s student body better reflects the outside world, DS has changed more slowly. This year’s DS class, like those before it, reflects the Yale of Pierson’s time to a greater extent than the Yale of our time.
Ben Marrow ’17, who is white, said, “The vast majority, I believe, [of DSers] are Caucasian and much more so than in most Yale classes. In other terms of diversity, no matter how you look at it, it’s much the same feeling.”
For some students, the blast from the past is jarring. “It kind of was a nightmare, I think, the first few days. I didn’t even see, but I think I felt, the lack of diversity. It was uncomfortable,” said Hayun Cho ’17, a DSer of Korean heritage, of her initial experiences with the program.
Yale does not keep records of the demographics of DS, so The Politic sent a survey to this year’s DS class. In the survey, which received a 66 percent response rate, not a single student identified as African-American. On the other hand, 64 percent of respondents classified themselves as white, 16 percent as Asian American or Pacific Islander, 7 percent Latino or Hispanic, 10 percent “other” or “mixed race,” and 2 percent Native American.
Yale as a whole is not quite a multicultural utopia, but the demographics of the Class of 2017 paint a substantially more colorful picture. According to university statistics, this year’s freshman class is 10 percent African-American, as well as 62 percent white, 20 percent Asian American and 10 percent Latino or Hispanic. (Several freshmen indicated two or more ethnicities.)
Why, then, aren’t more minority students pursuing Yale’s premiere and selective humanities study program?
A possible explanation lies in the DS curriculum, which features authors who are overwhelmingly homogenous: Plato and Aristotle, Homer and Dante, Thucydides and Augustine. All white and all men. There are a couple of notable exceptions, including a work by Virginia Woolf and the addition of W.E.B. Du Bois into the spring 2014 curriculum. But these token exceptions do little more than prove the rule. The works that have been deemed “great” by Yale and the upper echelons of academia are the product of a very particular subset of the population.
Perhaps even more significant is the demographic breakdown of those charged with teaching, grading, and inspiring. There are twenty professors that lead DS sections this year, and all twenty are white.
For the program administrators, the lack of diversity in the curriculum and the faculty is not a pressing concern. Kathryn Slansky, Director of Undergraduate Studies for DS this year, explained to The Politic that the faculty gathers annually to assess the curriculum, but they “don’t sit down and talk about diversifying [it]. Our commitment is to teaching books that have been highly influential over the course of what we call Western civilization.”
Classics Professor Joshua Billings, who teaches a Directed Studies section in literature, echoed that sentiment. “A great books course in the Western tradition [must] include mainly dead white men,” he said. The homogeneity is “lamentable,” Billings noted, but it remains “the culture that Yale was founded in and still finds itself in.”
For minority students, however, the nature of the curriculum may be a major reason for failing to pursue, or outright rejecting, entry into the DS club.
“Because of how the program is rooted in the Western canon, it grabs those individuals who feel some kind of cultural connection to it,” said Sterling Johnson ’15, a former DSer who is African-American. “And those populations are usually wealthy and white.”
An investigation by The Politic found that there is just one African-American DSer this year, Chicago native Jon Terry ’17. In Terry’s mind, the lack of black enrollment in the program is a result of perception.
“As far as the black community that I’m familiar with, there’s simply very little value in reading Plato or Aristotle,” said Terry. “Education is valuable and education can take you places, [but] it is difficult to see the value of reading dead Greek philosophers.” In a sense, the fears of George Pierson have been realized: the humanities-driven liberal arts education has become, in many minds, gratuitous.
As far as being the only black DSer, Terry explained, “It’s not something that makes me feel self-conscious or awkward or alone or estranged.” Having attended the prestigious Groton School, a boarding school in Massachusetts, he has not found it difficult to immerse himself in the program. Terry is among the majority of DS students who attended private secondary schools. The Politic survey found that 56 percent of DSers were privately schooled, compared with only 42 percent of the overall Class of 2017. This nearly fourteen-point gap points to the role of privilege in determining which Yalies are accepted into Directed Studies.
“The program is geared towards individuals who have a very, very high collegiate level of writing going into Yale,” Johnson said. He noted that elite private secondary schools train their students in that mode of writing and expose those students to subjects that many public schools simply don’t have the resources to offer, such as philosophy and political theory.
Jeffrey Brenzel ’75, Master of Timothy Dwight College, former Dean of Undergraduate Admissions, and a current DS professor, said he struggled as a DS student himself. At the time, “Yale was just opening its doors to nontraditional audiences,” Brenzel explained, and as a first generation college student, he “wasn’t well prepared to tackle DS.”
Charlotte Finegold ’17, a white DSer who attended a public high school in New Jersey, recalled that the most rigorous classes offered at her school were Advanced Placement Literature and Advanced Placement Government. On the other hand, some of her peers in DS enjoyed small enrollment classes with as few as two students devoted to exploring the work of a single philosopher. “The resources that some kids have coming in are much greater,” Finegold added. Among those surveyed by The Politic, 32 percent of DSers reported that they studied the classics, Greek, or Latin in high school.
“We don’t have any formal policy to support students who don’t have an exposure to the great books,” Slansky said. The program does, however, attempt to start its students on a level playing field. “We spend time telling them: what you think you know about this book, you should put aside, because we’re now going to look at it in a different way.” Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine that prior preparation has no bearing on how students perform in the program — or on what type of students apply and are chosen.
There are two rounds of admission to Directed Studies. The first is a pre-selection process in which Yale Admission Officers guarantee individuals a spot in DS along with their acceptance to Yale. The majority of DS students are admitted in the second round, by application, after they’ve already committed to the university.
“Admissions officers nominate admitted students for Directed Studies who have demonstrated particular strength when it comes to their academic record and breadth of intellectual interest,” said Jeremiah Quinlan, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions.
But according to Brenzel, the former Dean, pre-admission is also used as a selling point for Yale. He said, “The admissions office tries to identify a certain number of students for whom DS might be such an attraction that it would make a difference as to whether they would come to Yale.” Yet this begs the question: are these especially strong students — deemed irresistible by the admissions office — less diverse than the general pool of admitted students? Or does the DS disparity result from the second round application process, where students who have been exposed to the rigorous study of the humanities can choose to continue it?
Current and former students were eager to offer a range of prescriptions for expanding membership to a wider array of Yale freshmen.
“I think Directed Studies would be significantly better if you were not allowed to apply to it,” Jack O’Malley ’17, a white DSer, remarked. In his mind, self-selection is the program’s biggest limitation in terms of diversity. O’Malley proposed that Yale select those students who are strong in academic record and breadth of interest and push them to take the DS plunge.
A change that may be closer at hand could be modifying the DS curriculum. The idea of adding minority voices to the reading lists simply due to their race or gender was widely rejected by the DSers interviewed, as well as by program administrators. “Do I wish we had more minority voices — women, people color — on the syllabus?” asked Slansky. “Yeah, I wish we had them in the tradition. But they’re not there. We can’t go back in time and create them.”
Certainly, centuries of stifling of female and minority voices cannot be overcome so easily. However, some DSers, including Finegold and Cho, question the exclusion of certain non-traditional voices within the Western tradition that have come to be highly regarded in academia. If students read Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, why shouldn’t they read Narrative in the Life of Frederick Douglas? If they read the white male ancient Greek playwright Euripides, why shouldn’t they read the lesbian ancient Greek poet Sappho? If they read T. S. Eliot, why shouldn’t they read Zora Neale Hurston?
The most obvious constraint is time — the DS reading list cannot go on forever. According to Slansky, this year’s addition of DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk meant that Nietzsche had to be dropped from the syllabus. Is this a valuable trade off? Inevitably, the answer to that question will vary from DSer to DSer and from professor to professor.
At the heart of the debate over the diversity of the Directed Studies student body and curriculum lies a simple question: does this matter? For some students, the minority enrollment in the program or blend of historical perspectives is largely irrelevant.
“If the color of a person’s skin doesn’t fundamentally change the dialogues that students have in classrooms, it seems that there’s not much to fear in there being some degree of racial overrepresentation — or underrepresentation,” said Michael Tappel ’17, who is white. In his opinion, what DS lacks in racial diversity it makes up for in intellectual diversity. “I don’t think the classroom experience suffers much, if at all,” he concluded.
Other students strongly dissent from this view. According to many of the minority DSers interviewed for this article, the color of a person’s skin undoubtedly impacts her classroom experience. Sterling Johnson said that during his freshman year, DS events and lectures became “real-world reflections of such a Western-centric worldview.” And for students whose heritage lies outside of that worldview, Johnson continued, “you feel like you’re not completely part of the mold.”
Hayun Cho, the Korean DSer, echoed the notion of the Western mold as a gold standard. “I think I have always grown up in America seeing this Western ideal as what is good, what is right, what is beautiful,” said Cho. “That is on so many levels, from the most superficial level, in terms of beauty to the most deep level, in terms of how to live your life.”
That question — “How we should live as human beings?” — is at the core of Directed Studies. What does it mean if the collection of voices surrounding the tables of DS seminars, attempting to use history as a lens to answer that question, is more homogenous than Yale as a whole? As Finegold said, “We’re learning about what it means to contribute to society and we will then be the ones to contribute to society. It really bothers me that only privileged white kids, for the most part, are getting that experience.”
Changing the perception — and the reality — of the Directed Studies program is no simple task. Decades of tradition have contributed to the development of the unique DS identity. Nearly every DSer calls the program a valuable experience. For Johnson, it was a way to explore a range of ideologies; for Terry it is an “awesome” starting point for his academic career; for Cho it is a solid basis for a future career in writing; for Tappel it is a “whole new way of thinking;” and for Brenzel, it was an “intellectual star” to follow.
But many of the those enrolled in the program believe that their experience could benefit from some modification. “It sounds like I hate the program — and I don’t,” Feingold concluded. “It could just be so much better.”