When I Was a Freshman in College...

When I was a freshman in college in the late 1960s, the liberal arts school I attended had a course called "Freshman Studies".  The course was required for all freshman,and it covered two terms.  (The school had a trimester system, with the school year consisting of three ten-week terms.)  Another interesting thing (for those who have never heard of a Saturday class in college), is that the classes for everyone met on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings.  I guess the idea is that they really wanted us to stay on campus and study all weekend rather than going home to do our laundry at Mom and Dad's.

Anyway, the syllabus consisted of ten books, five for each semester.  The books were read, discussed, and a paper written for each book.  The intent was to introduce us to the kinds of topics and ideas that we should expect to encounter during our four years at a liberal arts college (rather than just a course on "Great Books").

Now that I am pushing 70, I tried to recollect the list of books that we read in my freshman year (the list varied from year to year and era to era).  Here is the list I came up with, in no particular order (I think it's actually accurate):

Albert Einstein, The Evolution of Physics

William Faulkner, Light in August

Feodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Ben Shahn, The Shape of Content

J. H. van den Berg, The Changing Nature of Man

Plato, The Republic

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto and                     Friedrich Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific

Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis

Bertholt Brecht, The Life of Galileo

I found most of these books in my bookcase, the very ones I bought in college.  (We won't even talk about the prices in 1966.)  The only ones I seem to have lost are Marx and Engels.  One thing to note is that this list would be entirely fitting for a similar class today, even though it's almost fifty years later.  A second thing is for me to confess that I didn't read all these books in their entirety when I was a student.

With that in mind, I think I will try to reread (or read, as the case may be) most of these books.  I have read Light in August two or three times since my college days (it remains one of my favorite books of all time) and Crime and Punishment is a bit long (and yes, I actually read the whole book in college), so I might pass over those.  But maybe I can read the rest of them during 2015.  It'll be fun to try.