On the Sciences-Liberal Arts dichotomy at the U of C

Posted Tuesday on my live journal, with editing and additions

Last week was devoted almost exclusively to writing a paper for my Sciences of the Mind class. It was probably the only 10 day period all year where I didn't have a problem set or a lab report hanging over my head (unfortunately, I had a midterm in chemistry on Wednesday that cancelled this trend). In this time, my level of academic functioning was devoted almost exclusively to historical analysis, creative thinking, and writing coherently. I worked just as hard as I have in the sciences, in fact even harder, but I was extremely satisfied with the result, and only wish I could have worked on it more.

After that, I ended my hiatus from science and went back to studying chemistry. About an hour ago I had my chemistry discussion section. In the discussion, there were students antagonizing and yelling at the TA for explaining a concept poor to the point they were almost abusive. People walked out of the discussion section after he explained one of the many concepts just about 10 minutes after the discussion, and was reminded of the ongoing feud between the students in my class and my chemistry professor over the material covered on the midterm, which has also been somewhat abusive. In another example of mutual abuse between Chemistry teachers and students, the lab director and professor, despite dozens of requests from students, refuse to post solutions to past midterms online, but insist that they still post them (in fact they only post the first two) in the Chemistry builidng. Not only does this assume that students do most of their studying in the Chemistry building, it leads to overzealous students bringing cameras and taking pictures of the wall where the exams are posted. Not even in the excesses of grade-grubbing in high school have I seen both students and teachers go to such ridiculous lengths

I have begun to realize: is this really the way my classes have been functioning? With these people who have almost no academic insight or curiosity but abuse, cheat and force their way to success? Have I really been functioning in this manner all year?

I began to think of last quarter, when I was in chem, bio and Greek Thought and Lit. Theoretically, no one could have been born in the past 2000 years, and my education in the winter would not have changed. While I loved Greek Thought and Lit to no end, it was consistently overpowered by the other two monstrosities of classes, and it affected my intellectual and creative thought. I noticed that, beginning towards the end of the fall and continuing until the middle of this quarter, when I began writing more again, my reviews for the Maroon and my creative writing (playwriting, free writing, lj entries, etc.) began to become less expressive, less interesting, and less rigorous. I felt constantly that my creative thinking had been sapped, and lamented about how I was not at my academic peak like I was my senior year. After this experience, it's quite obvious that my misguided decision to immerse myself in science was at the core of all this, and my abilities in the humanities and social sciences, which had been the core of my modes of academic thought throughout my life, were being profoundly ignored.

The worst part about this is, the fact that I had been clinging on to my creative tendencies has actually hurt my performance in the sciences. The reason I got a C+ in bio last quarter, and the reason that I'll probably take psyc pass/fail this quarter, is that on midterms, which call for short responses, I've responded in prose-like fashion. I didn't realize this was a problem until I went to my psyc TA last week to go over my abysmal grade, and he pointed out that I should instead, be writing bland, to the point definitions in bullet-point format. Among the other causes, he pointed out that all the TA's who were grading were not native-English speakers, and that my lack of neatness, neatness that is inversely related to my passion of writing, was confusing. While Pascal is amazing and has been a huge help, it only confirmed that my tendencies as a writer will hold me back in the sciences. While I do have some level of scientific creativity, it has not been aspoused by intro classes with no fewer than 60 students and as many as 300, and probably won't be until I take the second part of the AP 5 sequence next spring.

This means a lot to me. I am still profoundly interested in the questions science asks and the method it seeks to answer those questions, but it seems that the majority of people who pursue the path those questions require don't think the same way. That's why I love with the History of Science program here, and while I feel like sometimes the program can be excessively hostile to sciences (though in most cases, it's at least somewhat deserved), it maintains my interest in sciences while continuing to facilitate my writing and historical analysis sensibilities. It means that, unlike what I was previously considering, there's no way in hell I'm taking O-Chem, as the things I find unacceptable about Gen Chem will only be amplified in O-Chem. For the upper-level science class required for HIPS, I will instead take the neuroscience sequence which, while still presenting the same problems as my other science classes, will be more directed to my interests and intellectually stimulating. I still may take 130s Physics, since I feel like I haven't been fair to physics and it will be much more intriguing and bearable after Chemistry, and won't be too infested with pre-meds like 120s is.

Nonetheless, I shouldn't let my experiences this year ruin sciences for me. As people have suggested to me, quite fairly, I am too quick to create a dichotomy between sciences and writing. The trick for me in the upcoming three years will be finding a way to channel my abilities in both fields in a way that keeps both interests active while maximizing my concentration and thinking in both aspects of my life. I must also learn to ignore the problems of the people around me in my pursuit of science, something very hard to do in beginning science classes where your ability seems to be solely based on your relationship to other people's abilities. Part of the reason I was so quick to denounce the sciences is that I feel curving tests with a class of over 50 students practically accepts that the faculty doesn't care about the individual, while paper grades are more oriented towards an individual's strengths and weaknesses, even if it's a large class where TA's spend no more than half an hour per essay. Sciences like to see themselves as filtering out the not-as-bright with large intro classes, which in and of itself is elitist, and they don't seem to realize that along the way the tend to filter out individuality as well. I feel like I've learned so much in my sciences classes, despite the large lecture classes and essentially incompetant TA's, yet the intro science classes don't seem to teach rigor in terms of creativity, only rigor in terms of studying for intro science classes.

Mathematics is a noticeable exception, as mathematical creativity is fostered even in the standard 150's calculus classes. I personally think the design of the math department is phenomenal, and while I am no more fit to take Analysis in Rn than I am to fly, I appreciate the kind of thinking that goes into mathematics here that, in many ways, borders as much on Philosophy as it does science. My only problems with mathematicians here is there arrogance behind their field. Perhaps this comes from living in Hitchcock, but I've noticed that most mathematicians feel like Math is what goes on behind everything, that everything in life can be explained in mathematical terms, that math is the highest up on the scientific and academic food chain, and that people not in mathematics are not as intellectually gifted.

While I can certainly understand how a mathematician would be susceptible to such a claim, there are huge, egregious problems with such a claim. For starters, mathematical platonism is no more philosophically legitimate than Cartesian dualism. To suggest that mathematical reality exists outside of human reality ignores the fact that it is only humans who have perceived that so called reality, and that, in other cultures, perceptions of mathematical reality is quite different and much more flexible. Another noticeable problem is that mathematicians overemphasize the role of mathematics in academia. While it is true that the physical sciences, and increasingly the biological sciences, could not exist as we know them without mathematics, that doesn't mean that fields in the sciences that don't require thorough mathematical knowledge aren't equally viable. Furthermore, while it is certianly acceptable to say that mathematics has a role in the social sciences and humanities, in most cases that role ignores the larger issues that are more relevant. While it may be possible, for instance to break down Hamlet's motivations first in terms of psychology then in biology then in chemistry than in physics then in mathematics, doing so would miss the issues relevant to intensive literary criticism. And while mathematicians make amazing progress in rational thought, they often forget the mounting evidence that, for the most part, human minds are not designed to be entirely rational. Mathematics is not the only field to have this misperception (Economics being the other obvious offender), but they use the claim of supreme rationality as fuel to promote their superiority.

The attitude academics must take, which goes for the humanities as well as the sciences, is that no major academic field is illegitmate. A field may not be fully developed, and there may be problems with their methodology, but the questions each field asks and the type of thought they encourage is just as viable as any other field. Physicists and Mathematicians often ignore that the social sciences have not been around as long as the so called "hard sciences" have, and that, given the time to grow, they can come up with just as many revolutionary ideas as Newtonian mechanics, Einstein's relativity, or Dedekind reals. All fields must recognize, and attempt to surpass, the role of bias in the establishment of their fields. While that task is too great for any field to accomplish, and in fact will most likely never be achieved, it is something every field, from Physics to Film Studies, must struggle with for the entirety of their existence.