To the Editor:
In her Oct. 26 column, "In defense of humanities," Yue Wang ‘12 misses a critical point: Both humanities and the sciences are essential to a liberal arts education. I'm hard-pressed to argue against the merits of studying cultures or arts, but why relegate every other field to something "skill-based" and "vocation-oriented"? The undertone here is that these fields contribute little more to the broad perspective of a young mind than just skills, and that is dangerously short-sighted.
My field — computer science — certainly gives undergraduates a skill set of programming and analysis that has weathered the recession. Computer scientists and engineers place near the top of most annual salary rankings for both entry-level and mid-career jobs. But studying computer science or mathematics also teaches us to see larger patterns in the natural world, and gives us a viewpoint to make sense of relationships between people, events and larger systems.
Computing has given rise to new forms of expression and identity-understanding with tools like Facebook, which has raised at least as many cultural and philosophical issues as technical ones. Research in visualization, where humans are brought "into the loop" to understand data, necessarily requires us to consider how an individual's background and condition affect perception and interpretation. Sometimes the data we look at are rooted deeply in the humanities (e.g. computationally reconstructing archaeological sites, or identifying authors from fragments of poetry).
I challenge Wang's idea that humanities students are "more adaptable" than engineers or scientists: How do we judge that? Embracing Brown's open curriculum means supporting students in whichever fields they pursue, even pragmatic ones. Education is about finding new viewpoints, and humanities and sciences are both necessary puzzle pieces in learning to interpret the world.
Steven Gomez GS
Oct. 26
