One of the tasks on a course like the Foundation Year in Arts and Humanities at Bristol, which is designed to lead on to a range of degree programmes, is to introduce students to the degree subjects that they might study next. The options are varied: in the first four years that the programme ran (from 2013 to 2017), students went on to 16 different degrees in the Faculty of Arts, from anthropology to theology, and five elsewhere in the university, including childhood studies, geography and law. In a seminar with the first cohort, we introduced the different degrees, including by suggesting the kinds of question that you might ask in each one. For instance, in literary study, you might ask: ‘Why is this text still read after five hundred years, but not that one?’ Or you might ask: ‘Is the text we are reading now the same one that was read when it was first published?’

Delia is a student who never rushes a thought. After we had given a similar introduction to other disciplines – including philosophy and history – she began to speak. “I see all of this,” she said. “I hear what you’re saying. But – and maybe this is just me – I don’t understand: where do the questions come from?”

When we first started to think about the foundation year, in early 2012, we imagined that, at the heart of the programme would sit a ‘great books’ course. Around this, we would build skills training and independent study options, but the main academic content would be a sort of intellectual Grand Tour – a journey through the works of literature, history and philosophy that compose what is often referred to as the Western canon. Start with Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid; leap forward to Dante’s Divine comedy, Shakespeare’s tragedies, Descartes’ Meditations; forward again to the Enlightenment writings of Hume, Rousseau, Kant; and so on. One of the advantages of this approach, we thought, would be providing students with an overall narrative into which they could stitch their later studies in a particular discipline. We also hoped such an approach would make the course genuinely interdisciplinary; indeed, that it might illuminate how artificial some of the distinctions are between, say, theology and philosophy or poetry.