Following the moment you tell someone you’re a potential English major, there is often an awkward pause. This is the classic half-second pause, oftentimes paired with a lingering, “Oh…what do you plan on doing with that?” There may be no malicious intentions, but there is almost always a hidden insinuation regarding the supposed rigor of the humanities. Let’s face it – we tend to associate ideals of intelligence with science and mathematics over equally competent disciplines and experts within the humanities. But why are we so inherently prejudiced against the validity of intellectual depth in certain disciplines?
As is the case with nearly everything in the twenty-first century, the media plays an overwhelmingly significant role. Links on our own college website offer oh-so-cleverly titled “What Can You Do with a Degree in Philosophy?” sections, as if marketing the major will result in a higher discipline retention rate. Yet nothing exerts such a strong influence on our prejudices as college students than our continual obsession with job placement. The appeal of a large paycheck to satisfy our accumulating student loans is undeniable, and the demand for that individual niche in a floundering job market is crucial. We crave self-marketability: how can what I am doing now help me later? What will I gain from this experience in terms of my career goals? More bluntly, what will look the best on my resume?
Thanks to a tumultuous economy, we don’t necessarily know the answers to “Career Success 101.” Consequently, we resort to the familiar information that is constantly reinforced by popular media and our own inherently biased ideas of the “real world.” A cardiologist can earn in excess of $250,000 a year; a high school teacher may earn $40,000. We justify our biases with these figures that may or may not wholly represent the profession or discipline in question. These ideals of success are consistently reiterated to students by the annoyingly annual “Top 5 Majors for (insert year here),” many of which include narrowly specialized areas of study that are typical of a larger university.
And here is where the irony thickens: we attend a liberal arts institution, the very definition of which is a “curriculum based on obtaining general knowledge rooted in the humanities and developing strong critical thinking and writing skills.” The ideals within our curriculum are easily interchangeable, yet we still seemingly favor those who opt for one of our pre-law, pre-med or pre-business tracks rather than our equally rigorous majors in the Classics, Philosophy and Art. We are forgetful of our college’s mission and its quest to broaden our capacities for interdisciplinary thinking, connections and actions. The job market is tough out there for all of us, regardless of our majors, choice of undergraduate institution or high school standardized test scores. It is our job as students to take advantage of the skills we develop throughout our time here at a liberal arts college before moving onward to our careers.
I do not mean to exclude or single out those of us on this campus in pursuit of mathematics, science or areas of study not generally classified as part of the humanities. I only wish to remind us all that there is more to intelligence than we generally consider. We should be proud of our liberal arts education and the values it instills in us across all its rigorous disciplines, because my upcoming exam in social psychology will be just as hard as that next test in organic chemistry. •
1. The reason we tend to favor mathematics and the sciences, is because the sciences give you the opportunity to contribute something practical to the world, and those who have a hope in hell of contributing to mathematics will requisitely be geniuses. In other words, you have two primary things that people will recognize you and/or reward and/or hire you for when you go out into the real world. The first of course is effort. If you put in a ton of effort, and learn EVERYTHING that came before you in your field, you will be in a position to give something back, will have something to say about something important and thus people will recognize you for it. The second, however, is raw intelligence and/or creativity. When we ask you to jump, and gravity prevents you from actually saying “how high?” how high are you actually able to jump? Do you recognize that we didn’t specify you couldn’t engineer elastic shoes that cause you to jump higher? Mathematics and the hard sciences do mandate that you jump higher than anyone else, because in the case of mathematics, we are dealing with the SOLELY theoretical, the bounds of a priori reasoning, and in the case of the hard sciences, we aim to reconcile ALL empirical phenomena with a model of reality, which with a mastered knowledge of it, can enable one to have a contributory opinion towards, say, curing cancer, or fixing folliculitis, or building a functional jetpack.
2. I think we ought to go the other way, actually. During my time at Conn, I found that most of the psych classes, when you put effort in, were an easy A. Philosophy classes, they tended to be harsher graders. So, when we question the classics, or question philosophy classes, I think a more legitimate complaint contra the awkward anti-classicists people in such a position are typically getting a free ride, grade wise.
3. While I’m not in a position to speak about pre-law, I can assure you, that pre-business is a bit of a misnomer. The idea you operate with, of course, is that you do pre-business, then you go to business school. This may be A form of reality for some people, however, the reality is that business school isn’t worth a whole lot unless you’ve actually got a good 7+ years of real work experience under your belt. For a number of reasons — 1. knowing what to expect from your labor force, 2. knowing what you can expect from yourself without guidance, a textbook, and a defined set of answers, 3. knowing the real, CARNAL, value of a dollar, 4. a lot of other things — all of which render business school useless without real work experience under your belt.
4. I haven’t taken orgo, but I used to see people studying for it. It is absolutely absurd to assert that organic chemistry and social psychology have a similar level of difficulty. One entails appreciating certain phenomena and how they interact, the other entails knowing the geometry of how tri-valantly (protons, neutrons, electrons) charged particles interact, and the implications of the dynamic interaction on the molecular level.
5. If there is a case to be made for the humanities contra the physical sciences, it would be that their pursuit basically reduces a human existence to filling in the chart outlined out by the giants who came before them; Mendeleev being one such giant. However, if all of humanity uses the chart, it behooves you to use it too. Whether you exploit the chart or seek recognition for contributing to it, is your own prerogative; however, having been a philosophy major, who took quite a few math and physics classes, I would say “Yes, the study of the natural sciences and mathematics will better equip you for success and lead you to draw more intelligent conclusions than do the humanities.”
6. Where I’d agree with you is that a major in philosophy or the classics will make you better equipped to express and comprehend these distinctions. Though, you’d get that with age eventually.
7. The issue isn’t intelligence so much as preparedness. Are you prepared to do what your prospective employers want you to do, or not? There is no magic formula for accomplishing that which must be accomplished by hard work. If you have a degree in chemistry, or have a knowledge of HTML, you have a marketable skill. If you have a psychology degree, there is some truth to the proposition that you may not have anything as marketable as your comp sci and chem compatriots. In fact, this is nothing new, Nietzsche, Goethe, and Schopenhauer (if I’m not mistaken) all went through existential crises on that very subject, and we have their writings to learn this from. So, my advice, is yes, do what you love, but only do what you love if you really love it, because the world only rewards the best psychologist, the best sociologist, the best whatever, and they almost always rest on the shoulders of giants, as per Newton’s famous phrase about Galileo.
-I wish to revise what I said in 1. The first thing they reward you for is work, not effort.
-A grammatical error in 2. “I think a more legitimate complaint contra the awkward anti-classicists[,] [is that] people in such a position are typically getting a free ride, grade wise.”
-Repair to a sentence in 4. “…[chemistry] entails knowing [and ENVISAGING] the geometry of how tri-valantly (protons, neutrons, electrons) charged particles interact…”
-Point of Clarification: in 5. the words “their pursuit” refer to the pursuit of the physical sciences.