Dean misrepresents mission of humanities

By Eric Doctor     3/18/10 7:00pm

Three weeks ago, the Thresher reported that the School of Humanities would be cutting two courses "not directly relevant to majors," HUMA 250: Writing for Print Media and HUMA 251: Typography and Design ("Non-major Humanities courses cut," Feb. 26). As an alumnus of HUMA 251 and an aspiring graphic designer, I find this news very distressing.However, what is more distressing is the fact that Interim Humanities Dean Allen Matusow asserted in a letter to the editor last week that these two courses are "peripheral to the core mission of the humanities" ("Courses cut due to limited budget," March 12). This statement demonstrates a grotesque misunderstanding by Matusow about the mission of his own school.

Matusow's line of thinking comes from the conception of the humanities as a collection of loosely related single subjects, such as history, literature and visual arts, and it is true that the two courses being cut are only peripherally related to these subjects. The humanities as a holistic discipline, however, are not a collection of subjects, but rather a lens through which we learn to view the world and our species.

The medieval Western university strove to impart this basis of knowledge upon its students through the foundational subjects of the trivium: grammar, logic and rhetoric. These three subjects are tools that can be applied to the subjects of the liberal arts, which are the departments that fall under the School of Humanities.

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Effectively, the goal of the humanities should be to impart skills that can be applied to any kind of knowledge. We currently accomplish this by endowing students with specialization of knowledge in one subject - a major - but we also expect students to be able to draw from a large base of knowledge in other subjects. In order to study the human condition, we need to develop an understanding of humans through a variety of subjects, not just one.

We must also look beyond the traditional liberal arts subjects; just as the humanities are more than simply a collection of loosely related areas of study, a liberal arts education involves more than simply the traditional disciplines of academia. The two courses being cut offered subject matter that extended beyond the groves of academe.

It is unfortunate that the contracts of the instructors who teach these two courses happen to run out at the end of this year, just as the School of Humanities is facing budget cuts. They are victims of circumstance, and while I recognize that Matusow saw an opportunity to shed some fiscal fat off his school, he is - to use President Barack Obama's language - going at the budget with a hatchet rather than a scalpel. He should consider the ramifications of removing students' learning opportunities, and he should certainly consider the implications of his stated justifications for doing so.

A liberal arts education, which Rice and its School of Humanities profess to offer, should expose the student to a wide variety of subjects. A student should gain a significant depth of knowledge in one area, but ultimately there is a reason that most majors in the School of Humanities require only 36 of a student's 120 credit hours - those remaining 84 hours are to be spent gaining a significant breadth of knowledge.

Consider Steve Jobs. He audited a calligraphy course at Reed College, where he learned about serif and sans-serif fonts, kerning, the history of letterforms - what makes typography great. Ten years later, when he was developing the Macintosh computer, that course came back to him, and he made the decision to include proportionally spaced fonts on the Mac. Had Jobs never had the opportunity to audit that course, desktop publishing as we know it today may not even exist.

Perhaps the most important courses we take are not those in our majors, but those that we stumble upon.

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