Directed Studies at Yale University

Directed Studies at Yale University is a selective humanities study program for freshmen. It follows the Great Books of the Western tradition, and resembles Princeton University's Interdisciplinary Approaches to Western Culture, Columbia University's Core Curriculum, The University of Notre Dame's Program of Liberal Studies, Georgetown University's Liberal Arts Seminar, the University of Chicago's Core Curriculum, the Program in Structured Liberal Education at Stanford, the Kaplan Humanities Scholars Program at Northwestern University, the Guided Studies program at , and the program of study at .
Directed Studies consists of three year-long courses: Literature, Philosophy, and Historical and Political Thought. Previously, Art History and Classics were also available as options. Each class meets once as a lecture and twice in section each week. Lectures are given to the entire Directed Studies program, while sections range from 16-18 students. Section professors range from postdoctoral fellows to tenured faculty.
Students begin reading ancient Greek works, and end the year in the 20th century. In the 2013-14 school year, the literature syllabus included Homer, Greek lyric poets, Catullus, Horace, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Virgil, selections from the Bible, and Dante in the fall. In the spring, students began with troubadour poets, then read Petrarch, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Goethe, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Proust, and Virginia Woolf.
Philosophy classes read Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Sextus Empiricus, Augustine, Anselm, and Thomas Aquinas. In the spring, they continued with Descartes, Leibniz, George Berkeley, David Hume, Kant, John Stuart Mill, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Nelson Goodman.
Historical and Political Thought classes covered Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Livy, Polybius, Tacitus, Augustine, Al-Farabi, Maimonides, and Aquinas in the first semester. Second semester work included Machiavelli, Martin Luther, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, the Federalist Papers, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Marx, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Hannah Arendt.
The program includes 125 students a year, or about one-tenth of each freshman class. About 50 are offered places by the Yale Admissions Office, when they received their admission offers from the College. The remaining 75 apply for the program during the summer before freshman year.
There is periodic criticism of Directed Studies on campus. A few students say so much material cannot be covered in sufficient intellectual depth in one year. Others complain that the workload is too intense, and that students in the program do not have enough opportunity to pursue other interests. However, most Directed Studies alumni—the majority of whom major in a humanities discipline, but many of whom go on to the sciences or social sciences—defend the program passionately. One of the often-cited advantages is that the program offers freshman a tight community, and a regular work schedule. (Students hand in a five-page paper most weeks of the year, but the deadlines are coordinated between the three DS courses.)
Gender is one of many themes studied (especially in Literature and in Historical and Political Thought), but some complain that the syllabi contain too few women authors (and none outside the Western canon, broadly conceived). In past years, the syllabus has included works by Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Jane Austen. In 2013-14, the only women writers included were Virginia Woolf, Hannah Arendt, and Christine Korsgaard.

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