There’s a certain magic that develops in the Humanities Seminars Program, an energy created by the convergence of knowledgeable professors, engaged students and topics of great interest.
For 40 years, that magic has driven the University of Arizona’s premier lifelong learning program and built a community around the exchange of ideas and the enduring lessons of the humanities.
The Humanities Seminars Program began out of a conversation in the third floor hallway of the Modern Languages building, between Richard P. Kinkade, then Dean of the College of Humanities, and David Soren, now Regents Professor of Anthropology and Classics, but at the time only in his first year at the university.
The conversation centered on an idea from Dorothy Rubel, who had been active in the University of Chicago’s Public Lecture Program and lobbied for years for a similar opportunity in Tucson. Could such a program, Kinkade and Soren discussed, exist at the University of Arizona?
“That was the start of the Humanities Seminars Program, in that very spot in the hallway,” said Soren, who would be at the helm for its first 27 years. “How do you really get the whole thing stood up? There were two criteria. One was you have to be an excellent professor, some kind of a star. But that wasn’t enough because a lot of stars were just boring. And so you had to have a reputation as a great lecturer.”
Since 1984, more than 35,000 community members have enrolled in more than 575 classes in the Humanities Seminars Program. And that initial formula never changed.
“You get the best people and you get the best audience together. You won’t go wrong,” Soren said. “The Humanities Seminars program provides wonderful professors teaching wonderful students all kinds of important information to keep your mind eternally young. The students in this humanities seminars are here because they want to learn and that makes the professors more interested because they realize they can go deeper into the well. You can feel a connection between an audience and yourself when you’re lecturing that you don’t always get. It’s really a beautiful thing to achieve, especially in a classroom, when it rises above the mundane.”
As for Rubel, she became one of the hundreds of active and engaged HSP students, as well as a member of the advisory board and a tireless fundraiser for the program. HSP’s first permanent space, opened in 2007, was named the Dorothy Rubel Room, in her honor. She passed away in 2012 at the age of 108.
Like Rubel, numerous students kept returning semester after semester, accumulating dozens of classes over the years.
“I stopped counting at 160,” said Phil Korn, regarded as the program’s all-time enrollment leader. “My wife and I had gone to plays and concerts and operas and so on, but I really did not have a good liberal arts background and that’s why I had an interest in so many of the classes. I was like a kid in a candy shop and the professors have been so innovative and the classes just added up.”
In his 25 years as an HSP student, Korn also served 12 years on the board, when volunteers took an increasingly active role in guiding the program as it was forced by university budget cuts to become self-sufficient. HSP successfully raised $500,000 to fund its permanent classroom at the UA Poetry Center and was able to expand the scope of its courses and add summer options. Malcolm Compitello, who followed Soren as director, said the various challenges came with new opportunities.
“We had to rely more on things that the program had not done very much before. We had never done or asked about advertising. We had no marketing strategy. We had never done any fundraising,” said Compitello, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. “That put me in the position, literally, of having to think through ways in which we were going to make the program thrive and grow.”
In 2018, the Friends of HSP Endowment fund surpassed the $1 million milestone, supporting the long-term interests and continuity of what had become UA’s premier adult education series.
“There’s more and more competition and more programs out there, but there’s nothing like this program. This is unique in the quality of the courses, the quality of the instructors and the breadth of what we are able to provide,” Compitello said. “It works for this audience. They want to be engaged and they want to be part of a community. They have that life experience and they have this ongoing curiosity. I can’t tell you how many people says on their evaluations ‘I never had the chance to take that in college, but I’m certainly glad I got the chance to do it now.’ People have put an interest or passion on hold for an entire life and here they get to come back to it.”
Current HSP student Lizzie Schloss is following in the footsteps of her parents, who took 42 classes from 1985 through 2004. Originally from Germany, Leny Schloss was a nurse and Gerd Schloss was a physician, and they came to see HSP as a second college education that had an enormous influence on their lives.
“They used to talk about it all the time. They just loved HSP,” she said. In fact, HSP earned prominent mention in the family’s annual holiday newsletters.
“Our main intellectual stimulation during the last few years has come from our humanities seminars at the University of Arizona. Since each seminar consists of 30 hours, this means for us 30 hours of pure joy,” Gerd Schloss wrote in 1989. “The greatest enrichment of our lives and the greatest enjoyment during my 23 years of retirement have been the humanities seminars given by outstanding professors at the University of Arizona.”
So when she retired from the university as a career counselor, Lizzie Schloss started her own journey with HSP, up to 16 courses now, exploring history, literature and the arts.
“It’s huge for the university offer this to people in the community, something that is so intellectually stimulating and just a lot of fun to do,” she said. “It’s like being able to indulge every wish that you’ve had to study something, to learn something and not to have to take any tests.”
Karen Junghans, HSP board chair from 2018-2022, took her first HSP class in 2001 and reignited her passion for the humanities. She started gradually, with one class a semester or even year, but found that when she visited museums while traveling, the knowledge from HSP classes had given her new insights. And so her pace increased to three or more a semester, totaling about 80 now.
“It became addictive. There are so many good offerings in one semester. And you go, ‘Oh, well, I can’t ignore that one. I have to take this one.’ You just can’t choose. So you have to take them all,” she said. “In an atmosphere like this, you get so much more out of the class. The knowledge that I have gained is, has made me just so much more enriched as a person. I enjoy literature more. I enjoy traveling more. I enjoy life more.”
Janet Hollander found out about HSP when she moved to Tucson about 15 years ago during a lunch meeting with fellow Smith College alumni and since, she’s taken about 50 courses. A prior board chair, Hollander took a course on James Joyce during the pandemic and appreciated how new technology not only kept students engaged, but broadened HSP’s reach. She was able to invite friends from San Francisco, New York and Chicago to take the same course.
“One of the spectacular things that’s happened is the online effort. Now that it’s possible to do Zoom, it doesn’t matter where people are. It was really quite wonderful,” she said.
Fabian Alfie, Professor in the Department of French and Italian, has taught popular HSP courses on Dante and Boccaccio for more than a dozen years, winning two Ted and Shirley Taubeneck Superior Teaching Awards.
“It’s really exciting teaching the seminarians, because there’s this life experience, they have a deeper knowledge,” he said. “I think of it as a kind of a magic or an energy, because I don’t know where any of this is going. It’s nice to get their questions because they really challenge you.”
The College of Humanities, with experts who cover essentially the entire world, is the perfect place at the university to house such an outreach program, Alfie said. HSP excels most when the courses create opportunities for students to see connections to their own lives.
“The humanities are for everybody. Obviously you can specialize in the humanities, but you can also appreciate the humanities without the specialization. The humanities in general really has lessons for people, for whatever point they are in their life,” he said. “It’s really kind of going back to the well.”
Adele Barker, Professor Emerita in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies, has taught seven HSP courses, receiving three teaching awards, and also enrolled in several as a student herself.
“This really sets this institution apart,” she said. “All the while that I was teaching in this program, before I retired, I wanted to take the other courses. This has been my opportunity to actually see what my colleagues are up to, not just in other departments in humanities, but throughout the university. And I have found myself taking courses in everything from music to astrophysics.”
After 35 years teaching Russian literature and film, Barker felt overjoyed to go back to learning for the love of learning.
“In a way, it’s propelling me back, many, many, many, many decades, to that excitement, coming home from school, ‘Hey, look what I learned.’ It’s a gift, both as a student and as a professor,” she said. “It’s been a gift to the community and to me personally. It’s been a gift for 40 years and hopefully for 40 more.”