Today's paper
Today at lunch I grabbed the student paper to read, and came away confused and kind of pissed off.
There was a story on the front page of the inside section which declared a “battle” between liberal arts and life sciences, as the president of the university recently announced that life sciences was the school’s current priority, in order to keep up with this rapidly-expanding field and reap the funding benefits.
I can’t pretend that I’m not happy the university is focusing on life sciences; that is my field, after all, and that means more opportunities for me. I’m also well aware of and wholeheartedly embrace the value of a liberal arts education. I’ve always had a wide range of interests that span a whole lot of science and liberal arts fields. That’s why I went to a liberal arts college for undergrad. I chose to focus on biology for my career because it was something I enjoyed and something I could make money at. I almost equally enjoy writing, but there’s definitely an issue with money there. I grew up in a family that was by no means poor, but which was definitely in the lower middle class. My parents make good money at their jobs, but they manage it terribly and have struggled with debt since before I was born. These are people who cannot resist buying crap they don’t need the instant they get a little extra money, and then run into problems when they end up not being able to afford stuff they do need. As a result I have always been very frugal and even tight-fisted when it comes to money, as have both my brothers. So I won’t deny that biological sciences appealed more to me as a career, financial-wise, than being a journalist (which was my career goal for a long time).
And I wasn’t pissed off by the actual “battle,” which was three OpEd columnists arguing their various positions (IU should focus on life sciences, IU shouldn’t focus on life sciences, and a neutral opinion that it didn’t really matter what IU focused on as long as there was money coming in). I also wasn’t pissed off that every one of the columnists was an undergrad liberal arts major, though that did make me raise my eyebrows and wonder at the kind of bias we were getting. No, what pissed me off was the whole concept of a “battle” between liberal arts and science. Again. I have ranted about this before and I’ll continue ranting about it. I hate, hate, HATE this whole concept of being either all liberal arts or all science. I absolutely hate it when liberal arts people dismiss science as “boring” or “too hard” without even giving it a chance, or science people dismiss good writing skills with a flippant, “I’m not an English major.” It makes me, coming from a place where I have interests in both areas, just seethe with rage at everyone’s unquestioning acceptance of this ridiculous dichotomy. I don’t understand why people just can’t be both. I sigh when newspaper articles have to dumb down their science sections to the point where they don’t make sense, because people think scientific understanding is some impenetrable mystical realm that they refuse to even attempt to understand. I cringe when my colleagues have terrible grammar and spelling and refuse to try and improve themselves because they’re scientists and “don’t need to know that stuff.”
I just want to smack both groups upside the head and tell them to stop making stupid excuses for not putting in the effort to learn new things. Now there are areas that I’m bad at. As I’ve mentioned before, I have the world’s biggest mental block against math, and I’ve had it since I was in elementary school. That didn’t stop me from taking five years’ worth of math in high school (I took second-year algebra one summer solely so I could take AP calculus my senior year). It didn’t stop me from taking more math than I needed for my major in college. And I don’t shy away from the math I have to do daily in lab. I keep trying to chip away at it, even though I don’t think I’ll ever truly grasp it. I’ve taken beginning calculus the equivalent of three times, and I still couldn’t tell you what the hell calculus even is, much less how to do it. But that doesn’t mean I don’t at least try to understand. I don’t like not knowing what other people are talking about. In fact, I detest feeling ignorant, and it’s hard for me to see how anyone could. But that’s what people do every day, and it’s just constantly reinforced among younger generations: You can be humanities or you can be science. You can’t be anything in between.
And when you get told that often enough, you start to feel like there's something wrong with you, because you do like both.
There was a story on the front page of the inside section which declared a “battle” between liberal arts and life sciences, as the president of the university recently announced that life sciences was the school’s current priority, in order to keep up with this rapidly-expanding field and reap the funding benefits.
I can’t pretend that I’m not happy the university is focusing on life sciences; that is my field, after all, and that means more opportunities for me. I’m also well aware of and wholeheartedly embrace the value of a liberal arts education. I’ve always had a wide range of interests that span a whole lot of science and liberal arts fields. That’s why I went to a liberal arts college for undergrad. I chose to focus on biology for my career because it was something I enjoyed and something I could make money at. I almost equally enjoy writing, but there’s definitely an issue with money there. I grew up in a family that was by no means poor, but which was definitely in the lower middle class. My parents make good money at their jobs, but they manage it terribly and have struggled with debt since before I was born. These are people who cannot resist buying crap they don’t need the instant they get a little extra money, and then run into problems when they end up not being able to afford stuff they do need. As a result I have always been very frugal and even tight-fisted when it comes to money, as have both my brothers. So I won’t deny that biological sciences appealed more to me as a career, financial-wise, than being a journalist (which was my career goal for a long time).
And I wasn’t pissed off by the actual “battle,” which was three OpEd columnists arguing their various positions (IU should focus on life sciences, IU shouldn’t focus on life sciences, and a neutral opinion that it didn’t really matter what IU focused on as long as there was money coming in). I also wasn’t pissed off that every one of the columnists was an undergrad liberal arts major, though that did make me raise my eyebrows and wonder at the kind of bias we were getting. No, what pissed me off was the whole concept of a “battle” between liberal arts and science. Again. I have ranted about this before and I’ll continue ranting about it. I hate, hate, HATE this whole concept of being either all liberal arts or all science. I absolutely hate it when liberal arts people dismiss science as “boring” or “too hard” without even giving it a chance, or science people dismiss good writing skills with a flippant, “I’m not an English major.” It makes me, coming from a place where I have interests in both areas, just seethe with rage at everyone’s unquestioning acceptance of this ridiculous dichotomy. I don’t understand why people just can’t be both. I sigh when newspaper articles have to dumb down their science sections to the point where they don’t make sense, because people think scientific understanding is some impenetrable mystical realm that they refuse to even attempt to understand. I cringe when my colleagues have terrible grammar and spelling and refuse to try and improve themselves because they’re scientists and “don’t need to know that stuff.”
I just want to smack both groups upside the head and tell them to stop making stupid excuses for not putting in the effort to learn new things. Now there are areas that I’m bad at. As I’ve mentioned before, I have the world’s biggest mental block against math, and I’ve had it since I was in elementary school. That didn’t stop me from taking five years’ worth of math in high school (I took second-year algebra one summer solely so I could take AP calculus my senior year). It didn’t stop me from taking more math than I needed for my major in college. And I don’t shy away from the math I have to do daily in lab. I keep trying to chip away at it, even though I don’t think I’ll ever truly grasp it. I’ve taken beginning calculus the equivalent of three times, and I still couldn’t tell you what the hell calculus even is, much less how to do it. But that doesn’t mean I don’t at least try to understand. I don’t like not knowing what other people are talking about. In fact, I detest feeling ignorant, and it’s hard for me to see how anyone could. But that’s what people do every day, and it’s just constantly reinforced among younger generations: You can be humanities or you can be science. You can’t be anything in between.
And when you get told that often enough, you start to feel like there's something wrong with you, because you do like both.