Last month, a Herald article ("Humanities departments tout practicality," Feb. 24) reported that Brown has maintained a relatively constant number of concentrators in the humanities, even in the face of a decreasing national trend. We find this heartening given the temptation to forsake one's passions to appear more hirable during the current job crisis. Even as the University seeks to expand its professional degrees by establishing a School of Engineering, Brown continues to attract students who are interested in liberal learning and gaining broad reasoning skills rather than job-specific knowledge.
Here is yet another reason to be grateful for the open curriculum, which, as the Herald article points out, allows students to double concentrate in the humanities and the hard or social sciences and thereby acquire skills across multiple fields. We also commend the Department of Comparative Literature for factoring in our suggestion from last fall to provide current students with information about what alums are doing with their degrees, and we hope other departments will follow suit. It would be reassuring for students to receive input from alums about how their chosen field of study and even their particular courses within their field can help with the construction of a career.
In some ways, humanities courses can even better prepare students than do the hard sciences for the types of problems they will be asked to solve in the workplace. In a Feb. 21 Inside Higher Ed column, Robert Elsinger calls for faculty to embrace the ambiguous areas of their fields when teaching students. Elsinger writes that, equipped with search engines and online publications, students are capable of tracking down the concrete facts for themselves. It is the experimental issues, on which even faculty may not have a definite answer, that students should wrestle with in order to mimic the kind of open-ended issues they will later encounter as doctors, consultants, lawyers and managers.
Fortunately, Brown already seems to teach in this way, especially in the humanities. Asking students to confront the problems they study with a critical eye, and devising novel analyses of them, is not an uncommon initiative in classrooms on this campus. We encourage faculty to continue and expand this method of favoring the experimental over the established, both in the humanities and the sciences.
We hope all students, particularly sophomores preparing to declare their concentrations, will not be dissuaded from following their academic passions due to issues of perceived practicality. We also hope the faculty will structure courses, concentrations and advising to confer a broadly applicable skill set upon graduates of their departments.
Editorials are written by The Herald's editorial page board. Send comments to editorials@browndailyherald.com.
