For 25 years, USC’s thematic option has been traumatizing a few hand-picked undergraduates with impossible reading lists, unrealistic writing assignments and indigestible doses of western thought. It’s the honorable thing to do.

JIM PIECHOCKI ’81, MA ’85 IS A LIVING, BREATHING BILLBOARD FOR THE LIBERAL ARTS. He’s that rare thing, a modern-day man of letters, an intellectual jack-of-all-trades. A consultant with Rubin, Postaer & Associates, the national ad agency for Honda and Acura, he earns his daily bread writing sales copy about cars. To cubbyhole him by his profession, however, is a bit like saying Ben Franklin was a printer. The man is much more than his job title.
Long proficient in Latin and ancient Greek, Piechocki is currently teaching himself Náhuatl, the language of the Aztecs. He needs it to penetrate a large body of Náhua literature surviving from the 16th century – literature he’s mining for accounts of tlachtli, a forgotten blood sport somewhere between soccer and tennis, only played to the death.
Why? Piechocki has a curious hobby: he likes to make short films on mythological themes. “Sacrifice” – told from the perspective of a captured warrior forced to play the Aztec ballgame – will be the third in his series of “ancient adventures.” This is no amateur home video. With a $100,000 budget courtesy of a Japanese investor, he has hired a full-time USC intern to help research the game. He plans to employ USC film students to work on the production, including a careful CGI re-creation of the lost city of Tenochtitlán. For his earlier film “Minotaur,” (based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and a contemporary short story by Carlos Fuentes), he got the creators of the Terminator 2 robot to design the monster’s fully articulated body mask.
But don’t look for “Sacrifice,” “Minotaur” or “Pygmalion” (a modern day, gender-bending twist on Ovid’s yarn starring a Calvin Klein underwear model) in your video store. Libraries and schools are the only distribution points for these filmic labors of love. Piechocki isn’t interested in remuneration.
His main goal – beyond doing something he enjoys – is to get school kids thinking about some of Western culture’s big themes, like the thin line between heroism and brutality. And maybe, just maybe, get them to fall in love with the classics, as Piechocki himself did more than 20 years ago.

“That first D is a wake-up call signaling “what we expect of these freshmen – which is junior- and senior-level composition. We know they’re going to become better writers. We want them to become better writers sooner.”

THIS IS THE STORY OF A USC PROGRAM THAT turns out Jim Piechockis. In 25 years, it has produced around 1,600 such inventive, iconoclastic, culture-loving lifetime learners.
Called Thematic Option, at first blush it looks like nothing more than four interdisciplinary “core” courses and a couple of composition classes taken during the freshman and sophomore years to fulfill USC’s undergraduate General Education requirements. But T.O. is much more. It’s a humbling trial by fire, a scalding immersion in the crucible of Western thought, wherein erstwhile high school valedictorians learn what it’s like to get D-minuses and worry about being the dumbest kid in class.
It’s also “a community of scholars, a home, a place where I felt like I belonged, where I could be a valuable contributing member,” says T.O. alumna Laurel Baker Tew ’82, MA ’84, now USC’s associate dean and director of admission.
Though housed in the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Thematic Option is open to students from all schools and majors. The courses are taught around “themes” with remarkably clunky labels: “Quality of Life,” “The Process of Change in Science,” “Symbols and Conceptual Systems” and“Change and the Future.” Vague, yes, but that’s the point, says director Robin Romans MA ’85, PhD ’91, an adjunct faculty member in political science. Among the program’s greatest virtues (to crib from Shakespeare) is that custom cannot stale its infinite variety. Within a basic framework, professors – who are without exception among USC’s star academics – have great freedom to craft a course around their own scholarly tastes and interests.
“Each class had a completely different feel or mood depending on the professors,” says senior film production major and T.O. survivor Ethan Shaftel. “James Kincaid’s class had a sociological feel; it was all about deviance. Tony Kemp’s class focused on the history of human civilization.”
Both Kincaid, who holds the Aerol Arnold Professorship, and Kemp are tenured faculty in the English department. With just 12 to 40 students per class, intellectual camaraderie between senior faculty and bright-eyed freshmen is practically inevitable.
Jim Piechocki ’81, MA ’85, holding a Grecian vase depicting the tale of the Minotaur. The prop served as an opening image for his filmic reinterpretation of the myth.
EVERYTHING ABOUT THEMATIC OPTION defies the cookie-cutter approach to education. Indeed, no two students in the program can conceivably come away with the same experience, because no two classes are the same.
Take, for example, history professor Paul Lerner’s most recent section of core 103 (“The Process of Change in Science”). Lerner and his students retraced the evolution of scientific thought vis-à-vis insanity, going beyond Freud to probe the writings of French physician Philippe Pinel (who in 1792 introduced the bold reform of unchaining patients in the Paris asylum) and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (whose essay, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” exposes 19th-century treatment of depression in women). They reviewed the psychiatric community’s take on “shell shock” after World War I, and the Nazi rationale for systematic extermination of the mentally ill, on through the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s, the ’80s revolution in antidepressants as reflected in Peter Kramer’s Listening to Prozac, and the contemporary rethinking of schizophrenia.
Other sections of the same course took radically different tacks. Biologist William McClure, for example, viewed the history of science through the lens of brain biology. Anthropologist Alexander Moore focused on the cosmos, while geologist Charles Sammis juggled a host of big questions in physics.
Preparing these courses puts a heavy burden on professors, yet department chairs typically must rotate T.O. assignments to satisfy all the faculty requests.
“I love teaching Thematic Option,” says classics department chair Carolyn Dewald, who has cheerfully done so since 1980. “It’s a great pleasure to take these extraordinary students, who work really hard, and have them trace themes that started in the Greco-Roman period and continue right down to the 21st century.” Where else can you go from The Odyssey and St. Augustine’s Confessions through Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier’s prize-winning novel about a Confederate soldier’s long trek home, or Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, a novel about a World War II veteran returning to his Indian Reservation – and ask students to find similarities? “That wouldn’t happen in any course I teach in the classics department,” she says.
The students aren’t the only ones who come away enlightened. “You get these terrific undergraduates who are bringing their whole experience to the text,” says Dewald. “It will always open the text in astonishing ways for me. I’ve been reading this material for a long time, but I’ve never had a T.O. class that didn’t give me some new perception.”

Photographs by Joe Pugliese

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