It is a peculiar thing to sit down in my honors class every semester, hear my professor ask how many students are majoring in liberal arts, and see my hand up in the air mirrored by only two or three others. It is strange to me that my honors program, which focuses on ancient historical analysis and writing, is made up of mostly biology, chemistry, and pre-med majors. Are students going into pre-med just smarter? I have been told, in various forms, that the value of a liberal arts degree is dwindling year by year, and that I am wasting my time and money. I have been told that it is easy to write papers as my only form of academic authentication.
And so we have the dilemma of every student reaching towards a social studies major across the country. All of my friends who are majoring in political science or history (of which I don’t have nearly as many as pre-med friends) complain about the same problem, the same annoying, sometimes distressing criticism of how they’re choosing to spend their time and money.
It may not be a coincidence that as our world becomes increasingly dependent on technology (in turn contributing to the creative destruction of many jobs once done by humans), our world also becomes more questioning of humans whose knowledge consists of John Locke instead of Isaac Newton, analyzing political legislation instead of dividing elements by mols.
But I am not discouraged by this world, and neither are my peers in the same dilemma. My degree doesn’t start at 8am on Monday and end on Friday night. It doesn’t end during winter break, when I graduate, or when I finally find my job.
It is there at Thanksgiving with family. It is there when I attend a protest. It is there when my grandfather, born in another country, fearfully asks me about the state of our union and I can answer his question.
A liberal arts degree is not the open and close of a textbook, sliding a paper under a door, acing a pop quiz. It is the instilment of irreversible commitment to certain ideals, whatever they may be. There is a vast world in politics, history, sociology, women and African-American studies—a world that cannot be defined by one person or 85 exam questions. Most liberal arts student do find a job, but they also take their degree and run with it—to places they choose and places they only have personally arrived at.
So this Thanksgiving, like every other Thanksgiving, we will not talk about the quadratic formula or the value of a mol. But we may talk about how those fragments of our world effect human life—and that, truly, is what a liberal arts degree is.
