I spent much of yesterday afternoon in a meeting to decide the college sophomore humanities core curriculum where I teach. The votes were close at every turn, but here is what we decided. You be the judge.

Last year, we taught Michelangelo, Calvin, Elizabeth I, Hobbes, Jefferson, and Beethoven in the first semester, followed by Sand, Darwin, Freud, Picasso, Ellington, and Pope John XXIII in the second. This has been altered for the next two years (curriculum changes are only made every two years) to Michelangelo, Luther, Galileo, Elizabeth I, Jefferson, Beethoven and Darwin, Carnegie, Freud, Picasso, Ellington, Camus. So, out with Calvin, Hobbes, Sand, and Pope John, and in with Luther, Galileo, Carnegie, and Camus.

Several of the votes were quite close. Calvin put up a good fight and I voted to retain him, but after a round of speeches his support bled away and we are all Lutherans now. Hobbes was killed (yours truly among the defeated Hobbesians), while both George Sand (who my students thankfully hated) and poor Pope John were blasted out by acclamation. There was also a spirited debate about Elizabeth I versus Shakespeare, with one set of professors saying any "great books" core must include Will and the other set saying without Elizabeth we would have no women in the core and hence no opportunity to teach gender. Despite the pleas of many that ideas are more important than gender, Elizabeth held on.

The great second semester debate was which three among Tolstoy, Carnegie, Freud, and Ellington to keep. Ellington was retained with no opposition (here, here) and Freud by a healthy margin. In the end, it came down to the Russian novelist and the Scots-Pittsburgh steel magnate. An appeal by a business professor that we ought to be studying people "who build things" along with writers, artists, and musicians carried enough votes, and Carngie snuck in. I secretly wondered why Camus was included, and would have like Tolstoy instead, but several profs afterwards insisted to me that the students loved him. We shall see, but two weeks on French existentialism as the last unit of the core at a Catholic school seemed odd.