Directed Studies at Yale University
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Directed Studies at Yale University is a selective humanities study program for freshmen, popularly known as "DS" or even "Directed Suicide" or "Death Sentence" for a workload that includes reading up to 1,500 pages per week.
It follows the Great Books of the Western tradition, and resembles Columbia University's Core Curriculum, the University of Chicago's Core Curriculum and the program of study at St. John's College.
Directed Studies consists of three year-long courses: Literature, Philosophy, and History and Politics. Reading includes works by various philosophers and thinkers, including selected books of the Bible. The program requires a large commitment of time, and allows students to take only one or two other classes each semester.
The program includes 125 students a year, or about one-tenth of each freshman class. About 50 are admitted because they expressed interest in their applications to Yale College. The remaining 75 must apply for the program during the summer before freshman year.
Directed Studies classes are small. Lectures have been given by prominent scholars such as Sterling Professors R. Howard Bloch and Harold Bloom. DS participants have returned to Yale as scholars, including Margaret Litvin, cognitive scientist Tamar Gendler, English professor S. Shameem Black and political scientist Roy Tsao, who all led D.S. sections in 2006-07.
Critics of Directed Studies say so much material cannot be covered in sufficient intellectual depth in one year. Others say the reading list includes too many dead white males. In past years, the syllabus has included short stories by Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor and novels by Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf, but in 2006, Sappho and Hannah Arendt were the only female authors included in the syllabus.