Liberal arts? Liberate me from science

Idreamt last night I was on a train to heaven, and by some chance I had brought my books along. Everyone had, actually: we were all college students, so this wasn't particularly surprising. What was surprising was that we were all pretty happy with our books. The girl to my right was ripping through a quantum mechanics text, and to my left, a couple of history majors were comparing notes on biographies of John Adams and John Quincy Adams. Behind me, I could hear A Love Supreme coming from the headphones of an Af-Am studies major as he highlighted lines from LeRoi Jones' Blues People, while the economics major read Adam Smith and listened to the Talking Heads. As I looked up at them all from my dog-eared copy of The Tempest , I realized that though we were all "studying," I didn't hear a single complaint. Then the conductor shouted, "Next stop, Providence!" and I woke up in a cold sweat, next to an unread copy of Steven Hawking's A Brief History of Time and my Science Fiction and Science Fact homework, due in a couple of hours.

I've really got to stop dreaming about Brown. Yeah, I know even the word Brown is a punchline to us, alma mater of Otto the bus driver from The Simpsons as it is, but it was my first choice largely for one simple and completely respectable reason: no distributional requirements whatsoever. Like a lot of the more artistic and English-major types that Yale and Brown attract, I fear math and science like George W. Bush, DC '68, fears three-syllable words. My seventh-grade biology teacher still haunts me to this day, and I don't believe she's even dead. I'm proudly planning to make it through life without taking a single class in calculus. And, most importantly, I see no use in my own life for any of the knowledge Group IV has to give me: I had all the basic abilities needed to look up at constellations, do my taxes, and make a webpage long before I came here. Someone else will be finding a cure for cancer; I'd just like figure out how to write a good novel.

And there are lots of Group IV majors that feel the same way about Group I, with their minds made for calculations, not Chaucer. Our future scientists and mathematicians may enjoy a good book just like I enjoy being able to point out the Big Dipper, but considering how little The Aeneid has influenced my life or expanded my mind, I doubt it will do much for them, either. Then again, many of them also have nightmares like mine, only their fears are of English teachers and iambic pentameter. For the same reason it's easier to teach a younger child a second language than a college student, it's hard to teach liberal arts people a formula, or the scientific-minded a sonnet. By the time we've made it this far, if not all of us know what subjects we love, we definitely know which ones we hate. And there's little to be done to change that.

Yale is a fond believer in the liberal arts education, which is why distributional requirements have stood even as prerequisites of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew (yes, Hebrew) have fallen. I acknowledge the value of these: the classes I've taken in history, constitutional law, and even city planning have been among my favorites, and I might not have dug into groups II and III as deeply if I wasn't required to. My experiences in group IV, on the other hand, have been utterly useless: I can count the things I still remember learning from EE 101, Physics for Poets, and now, Science Fiction and Science Fact, on two hands. The former two classes were taught by teachers so beyond my understanding, I found it much simpler to just read the book, rather than attend class and be confused forever. If I had taken non-gut courses, I'm sure my head would have physically explo-ded, just to spite the scientific impossibility of head explosions. And I know I'm not alone in this: a science-minded friend of mine took English 125 for fun (don't ask me why), and was so terrified in the class, she thought her teacher was withholding the grades on her paper. She somehow failed to notice the grades were written behind the comments.

Rather than waste one-twelwth of my credits (and, I suppose, my tuition) on an outdated distributional requirement, Yale could give us all the most liberal arts education possible: that is, let us study whatever we actually came to study, rather than what we can't stand. But they won't, so I'll make another deal: you science majors who want a column in the Herald next week, just give me your topic and position, and I'll write it for you, for free.

(Just, please, help me out with this Science Fiction and Science Fact homework. Problem No. 4 is killing me.)

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