Perhaps the only thing sadder than Noam Chomsky saying that the social sciences and humanities have been “dumbed down” is the fact that it was a social scientist who said it. No — there is one thing sadder, the fact that it is true. Math and the so called “hard” sciences have very strong foundations. You either know the equations and understand the processes or you don’t. The same cannot always be said for the humanities.

We live in an age where a large percentage of the population goes to college to maintain a specific standard of living. Without a college education, this standard is more difficult to attain. College did not used to be, and still is not, an institution for everyone (please note people seem to get pissed off rather easily around here: I am not making a value-based judgment about poor people, uneducated people, people of color, etc.). But now just about everybody goes.

Much of the curriculum has been changed. Professors seem to have lowered their academic standards. I know that I have turned in papers that I do not believe merited an “A” but received one regardless. Perhaps compared to the other papers turned in they did deserve an “A.”

As far as the liberal arts education goes, Albert Spear, Hitler’s minister of armaments, coined a very interesting term at his war crimes trial and in his memoirs. He was asked how the Nazi regime was possible, how so many people could go along with it. He responded by describing the quality of German education. They had men who could build bombs but did not consider the ramifications of this. People who could build massive crematoriums but who did not know enough to ask why they were doing so. They were technical barbarians. I firmly believe that we have more to fear from a nuclear physicist with no background in philosophy or ethics than from a historian with no conception of quantum physics.

That is not to excuse the historian from learning these things. The world is a complex place and cannot be understood through a single lens.

We must cultivate a holistic viewpoint to truly understand the world in which we live.

Christopher Baughman

Sophomore

Anthropology