Justin McDaniel, the professor who created a class to deal with existential despair

One of the most in-demand courses at the University of Pennsylvania — part of the exclusive, world-renowned Ivy League — promises no innovation and no competitive advantage. Nor does it offer students any way to maximize their resources or their time. Instead, it consists of reading sad novels — for hours — and discussing them in the dark.

The class is titled Existential Despair. Its creator, Professor Justin McDaniel, defines it bluntly: “Existential despair is the kind that we all share, simply by virtue of being alive.” He’s not referring to a specific kind of pain, be it a divorce, a breakup, or a humiliation. “That’s despair caused by something concrete. Existential despair is different: it comes with death, old age, illness, loneliness. You can’t pinpoint a cause. You can’t avoid it. You can’t control it.”

The course was born out of frustration. For years, in his classes, McDaniel cited cultural references that he considered to be fundamental, only to be met with silence in return. “I would talk about a famous novel, a Nobel Prize winner, a piece of music, a painting that every teenager should know, and they would just stare at me blankly. One day, I got so angry that I yelled at them and left.”

Two students followed him to his office. They wanted to read. He proposed a test: “I’ll only believe you if you read a book in front of me.” One Saturday, he placed them in a small library, took away their cell phones and gave each of them a nearly 500-page novel. Eight hours later, they had finished it. “We had the best conversation I’ve ever had about a book. They were brilliant. They saw things I hadn’t seen.”

Today, the course that came out of this experience receives hundreds of applications. Every week, the 45 accepted students find out — in the same afternoon — which book they’ll be reading. “I don’t want them to research the book or bring notes,” McDaniel points out. They read for four or five hours. Then, he turns off the lights. “We talk in complete darkness.”

His defense of the curriculum and the humanities runs counter to an increasingly STEM-oriented academic environment (a pedagogical approach that integrates science, technology, engineering and mathematics, in order to promote practical and applied learning). “I have no problem with practical education,” he clarifies. “But I don’t call it education; I call it training. Education doesn’t have answers. It doesn’t give you an instruction manual for life.”

McDaniel argues that efficiency — when elevated to the highest level — leaves out a substantial part of the human experience: “If we truly wanted to be efficient, we would be. But nobody eats perfectly, sleeps perfectly, or chooses a partner optimally. Our existence is not defined by rationality, but by irrationality.”

For him, literature doesn’t promise redemption, but it does offer recognition: others have experienced heartbreak, illness, shame, or loss. Others have previously thought about what we’re only now beginning to formulate.

“If we send young people out into the world to be neurosurgeons or bankers,” he notes, “we should also prepare them to be emotionally sophisticated. I want my students to have beautiful lives, but I know they won’t be free from suffering […] And maybe they won’t [always] have resources. But there are millions of novels, films, works of art and pieces of music that explore these [human] experiences with complexity. We can teach the ways in which others have tried to construct meaning throughout history: how they failed, how they succeeded, or how they fell short. These examples show you that you aren’t alone,” he concludes.

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