Monday, December 2, 2024

Opinion | College humanities studies are their own reward

Opinion | College humanities studies are their own reward


Regarding the May 22 front-page article “Colleges face major change as humanities fall, tech rises”:

Three cheers for University of Maryland English chair Amanda Bailey for bucking the very narrow, cheapskate trend to align college curriculum with job skills.

When I majored in English, I blithely assured my parents, who had not gone to college, that certainly a degree in English would qualify me for a job. When, during my master’s orals, the University of California at Berkeley committee asked me why I was majoring in medieval literature if I didn’t plan to teach, I answered, “Because it interests me.” The committee’s question provoked me to leave with the master’s degree and not pursue a doctorate with people who seemed so shortsighted about what such a degree might offer.

The day after getting my master’s, I got on a plane for New York and was hired as a minimum-wage editorial assistant — because I could type 90 words a minute. My salary didn’t even cover the rent for my studio apartment, but being able to walk from Harlem to the Brooklyn Bridge on the weekend was worth a lot.

Eventually, practicality oozed in and I went to night school for the minimum number of education units to qualify for a teacher’s license.

All these years later, I’m glad practicality came late. I still applaud English as a good major.

Susan Ohanian, Charlotte, N.Y.

As a rising sophomore at the University of Maryland, I am pursuing dual degrees in computer science and government and politics. This semester, I took a political philosophy class in which we read some of John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty.” Mill argued that we ought to shape our own conception of a good life by constantly engaging in “experiments in living.”

I love studying computer science and from evaluating algorithmic complexity to manipulating linked lists, I’ve already learned a lot. But none of these topics has changed the way I live in the way that experiments in living have.

This idea has influenced how I make decisions, pushing me to embrace new experiences over familiar ones. Experiments in living drove me to take a spontaneous trip to D.C. to read on the National Mall instead of in my dorm room. They helped me make new friends and join new student groups. One evening, as I found myself admiring the moon with strangers in the middle of the night, this phrase echoed in my mind.

I can’t get enough of the satisfaction I feel when my code passes all of its tests. But philosophy — as with literature, art and history — has the rare capacity to feed our souls and help us find beauty in the world. We must not devalue the humanities and risk wasting it.

Dhruvak Mirani, Cooksville, Md.



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