SJSU Celebrates 70 Years of the Humanities Honors Program With Redesigned Curriculum
A plaque honors the founding faculty members of the SJSU Humanities Honors program in Washington Square Hall. Photo by Julia Halprin Jackson.
What do Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and 12th century Islamic thinker Ibn Tufayl have in common?
Though the two men were separated by centuries and continents, they pursued parallel philosophical questions, says Erik Johnson, coordinator of San José State’s Humanities Honors program. Johnson and his faculty team have redesigned the program’s curricular sequence to make it easier for students of all majors to earn general education requirements and qualify for a special certificate upon graduation — while still maintaining the academic rigor and interdisciplinary integrity of the program’s 70-year legacy. This has included restructuring the curriculum into new courses like Humanities 10: Honors Global Oral and Rhetorical Cultures to show how thinkers like Rousseau and Tufayl are, essentially, in conversation.
“We redesigned the course sequence to show these moments of cultural overlap,” Johnson explains. “We’re showing how none of these traditions are static; no one exists in complete isolation. We look at Rousseau as a classic thinker about the state of nature: examining the idea of a man outside society. But we also looked at Ibn Tufayl, a member of the medieval Islamic world who imagined a man growing up without human companionship on a desert island and raised by deer. We‘re interested in putting texts next to each other so students can see those connections and compare directly how different cultures have dealt with similar questions.”
L-R: Arthur Shiwa Zárate, Erik Johnson and SJSU President Cynthia Teniente-Matson at an event recognizing the 70th anniversary of the Humanities Honors program. Photo by Michele Bertolone, ’88 Social Science, ’24 MA History.
Johnson shares that the program’s redesign serves practical and pedagogical purposes. In previous years, students were required to take courses in chronological order (from ancient time to present), but now Spartans can enroll when it best suits them and still complete the entire sequence in a year. The faculty group that team-teaches the courses, including Assistant Professor of Global Humanities Arthur Shiwa Zárate, Religious Studies Lecturer Todd Perreira and Associate Professor of Theatre Arts Sukanya Chakrabati, collaborate on interdisciplinary approaches to each course to give students a well-rounded approach to the humanities.
Zárate says that the curriculum redesign benefits students of all majors.
“The program considers the ‘humanities’ across a range of different geographic and temporal contexts to explore how they can help us think about some of the core issues the world faces today, including racism, colonialism and global refugee and migrant crises,” he says. “Learning how to think critically about such issues is a key skill needed by all SJSU graduates so they are prepared to live and work in a globally connected and multicultural world.”
“We made a real effort to decolonize the humanities with this revised program,” Johnson says. “Previously, courses started in the ancient world and worked their way up to the modern world. Now our courses are organized around thematic units: oral versus written tradition; answering major ethical and philosophical questions; thinking about the ways cultures construct environments and artifacts; and the ways cultures express and define themselves in literature.”
He adds that each course covers a broad chronological sweep, and includes perspectives from the East and West, as well as from the Global North and the Global South.
70 years of critical thinking
Founded during the 1954-1955 academic year, the SJSU Humanities Honors program was established by the English and Humanities Professor O.C. “Clint” Williams; English and Humanities Professor Jack E. Fink; English and Humanities Professor Rex Burbank and Art Professor Richard Tansey. In 2010, the university acknowledged the founding professors, as well as their wives (Elizabeth “Betsy” Williams, Maxine Hunt Fink, ’43 Elementary Education, Nancy Burbank, ’72 Art, and Luraine Tansey) with a plaque outside of Washington Square 109, the classroom where they taught.
Faculty, alumni, staff and students gathered to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the SJSU Humanities Honors program. Photo by Michele Bertolone, ’88 Social Science, ’24 MA History.
Notable alumni include former California Assemblymember Jim Beall, ’74 Political Science, who spent four decades in public service following his time at SJSU. More recently, Johnson taught two Spartans who discovered their career passions while enrolled in the program: Justise Wattree, ’23 Humanities, won first prize in the undergraduate category of humanities, arts and letters at the 2022 CSU Student Research Competition with a research presentation investigating how the Black community fought health disparities during the COVID-19 pandemic; and Caitlin Pambid, ’23 Anthropology, who won the same recognition a year later. Now a graduate student in Johns Hopkins’ master’s in health science program, Wattree’s first inklings of what interdisciplinary research could be began in the Humanities Honors program.
“Both Justise and Caitlin discovered their career interests through projects they did in their humanities courses,” Johnson says. “They developed their ideas in senior humanities seminars. Justise found his calling in public health, while Caitlin found her calling in museum work.”
“The [Humanities Honors] program was a major part of my college career,” says Pambid, whose senior seminar research project “Death to the Museum (As We Know It)”, explored interests she discovered in the honors program, won the 2024 CSU Student Research Competition in the undergraduate category of humanities, arts and letters. “I remember the exam study groups, both guided and unguided by tutors, being fun and extremely helpful. The professors are all very insightful and nice about explaining complex themes of the lecture or reading. They’re also diligent about sending out opportunities that interest their seminar group.”
Her project envisioned the end of museums as top-down authorities on cultural memory and predicted their rebirth as inclusive spaces. She now works at the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park.
“I am an exhibits intern at a history museum and I hope to continue my career in museums, either the curatorial or collections department,” she says. “An important aspect of exhibit writing is meeting both reading comprehension standards and the public’s knowledge of the subject.
“Our professors in the Humanities Honors program and their assignments encouraged us to cross reference ideas from different subjects, especially the intersection of religion with art, history with philosophy, philosophy with music, political science with English literature, etc. These types of essays and discussions transformed how I analyze topics critically. My ability to synthesize makes me an asset in my current internship at the historical museum because I am able to offer a big-picture understanding of what’s being interpreted with some nuance.”
Johnson hopes that with the streamlined curriculum, he and his fellow faculty members can usher an even greater number of students of all majors through the Humanities Honors program. One example is Gabriel Leighan Panado, ’28 BFA Digital Media Art, who is currently enrolled in Humanities 11 and 21. He first learned about the program on Admitted Spartans Day.
“Humanities Honors has impacted my career because it expanded my perspective on the world and taught me about different nuances in the world and its various cultures that I wouldn’t have learned about otherwise,” says Panado. “While it isn’t directly tied to my major, I found that this program enabled me to expand the creativity of what my art depicts. I recommend people should join the program because it can give you a new skill set.”
The Humanities Honors program is a 12-unit course sequence that can be completed in one to two years. Students of any major are eligible to enroll, and those who complete the program receive a special recognition upon graduation.
