"Schadenfreude" means pleasure derived from another person's misfortune, from the German "schaden" (harm) and "freude" (joy). Here's another kind.One of my advisees came by my office to drop the rather difficult course I'm teaching in the core sequence for computer science. "It's OK," I told him, "But don't shy away from the intellectually challenging - it's up to you to choose what and when. How are your other courses going?"

"I'm taking the freshman writing seminar," he told me. "We are reading the most useless stuff!" (He actually used a fecund word, worthier of its excremention point.) What, I asked? "Freud," he spat out with disgust - probably Civilization and its Discontents. "Well, I get what you mean," I responded, "but you have to remember: This is a university. We do 'stuff' like that.'"

One of my other advisees applied to transfer last year, and I asked him why. Out came the "grown-up" rationales, but he also said:

"Let me tell you another big reason. I went to visit a friend at the University of Chicago. I got to his dorm room, and he and his friends were reading a Chekhov play aloud. I need more stuff like that."

A year ago, I started going to the "French Table," a regular lunchtime conversation hour for francophones. It was me and a graduate student - that's all. It was fun to speak French; I went to a conference in Marseille during February and returned with photos and stories. It wasn't until the end of the year that I realized that the Romance Languages department was paying the student to run the table. That's OK: If a grad student can make some extra money, great. But I thought I had found une copine, a new buddy - only it turned out I had a University-funded nourrice. My own babysitter!

These anecdotes make me worry our University isn't the intellectual place it could be. (I know this is easy for me to say; I'm a professor. I have tenure and the luxury to think like that). Our focus may be straying too far from the humanities, the written record of what makes us human. Just as the Jewish tradition, for example, recounts the history of the Jewish people, read by Jews as a guide to who they are and where they came from, our literary and historical tradition is a stumbling, triumphant, warts-and-all explanation of who we are, how we got here and what we're doing.

Last year, for example, I finally read Moby Dick. When I met the murderous Captain Ahab, I thought he was crazy and evil. But by the novel's end, I felt compassion for him - destroyed by the famous white whale, a force of nature that may not even have known Ahab was there. How often in life we feel plowed under like that as our dreams and aspirations bite the dust and are reduced to futility due to immutable forces beyond our control! Literature has thousands of stories like that. They are chronicles of our human experience.

In contrast, the professionalization of the undergraduate curriculum - called "grim preprofessionalism" when I was an undergraduate, too long ago - is concerning. (Even the talk of "globalizing the curriculum" leaves me cold - in Singapore or China, are they studying globalization or calculus?) A partner of this professionalization is the excessive credentialization of multiple majors, perhaps an unfortunate consequence of grade inflation, which forces undergraduates to distinguish themselves in new ways.

The American system of undergraduate education, in contrast to the European one, is a model of late specialization. That means: You have the rest of your life to be a grown-up. The University could then be an oasis for intellectual experimentation, in learning to think for yourself, rather than a locus for amassing credentials. This year, the Faculty Senate will recommend that the University Curriculum Committee discuss eliminating triple majors. Now, there probably aren't many of them - my hope is that the discussion might strengthen the majors, many of which have cut requirements to attract more students, too many of whom are double-majoring. It's a downward spiral. A major is a concentration - which ought to allow a focus, as well as ample room for other intellectual exploration. Multiple majors remind me of a sign at a garage in Cambridge that advertises, "We specialize in foreign and domestic cars."

One computer science major, a graduate whom I like very much, did an internship on Wall Street and then worked there. He told me, "Lots of people I knew at Brandeis were taking economics and business courses just so they could get jobs like mine. But you know what my boss keeps talking to me about? Novels! He keeps talking about them because they're a key to a deeper kind of thinking. Tell the students who are still there."

The writer is a professor of computer science and chair of the Faculty Senate.