Faculty Forum Papers
March 1976 -
By
Louise Westling
Department of English
January 12, 1976
If humanists and scientists at OSU have nothing important to teach each other,
if our inquires are unrelated, then the College of Liberal Arts has no business on this campus. OSU students
are wasting valuable hours taking required courses in history, political science, English, and
psychology, when they could be enriching or polishing their training in a chosen scientific or
technical field.
Strangely enough, however, institutions like Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Harvey Mudd College, and California Institute of Technology seem to believe that strong liberal arts
programs are vital to their students' scientific and technical educations. The finest liberal
arts colleges continue to require students in humanities to have a serious initiation into the
sciences.
Professor Hawkes (January issue) seems to have forgotten that academic disciplines
are merely arbitrary makes set by human intelligence around parts of the vast and seamless web of the
universe we perceive. Mathematics is undeniably related to music and painting, as Renaissance
culture makes so obvious and as Einstein frequently reminded us. Literature, psychology and
history dealing as they do with the experience of a species of living creature, investigate
the same forces that geology, archaeology, biology, and even chemistry examine. Human values
are important in business, forestry, and engineering, just as the arts depend on science and
technology to provide an understanding of the structure of the cosmos and man's relation to it.
It is terribly shortsighted to ignore that essential unity of our enterprise as intellectuals,
scholars, and teachers. To do so is to make a mockery of the idea of a university. To do so
is to condemn each discipline to see along its own narrow shaft of light into the whole world
we need to understand.
Academic disciplines have become vested interests for their members, who then
religiously guard them with increasing suspicion and hostility against any outsiders who claim to have a
corner on truth. Members of each priesthood tend all too often to behave like the proverbial blind men
trying to describe the elephant. Is it the chemists or the physicists who proclaim that the
creature is cylindrical and tough on the bottom, because all they can feel is a foot? Do we
humanists pronounce the true beast to be affectionate because we feel the trunk curving around
to investigate us?
Every teacher and every student is nourished and grows by seeking to understand,
synthesize and meaningfully organized as much knowledge as he or she can absorb. The constant quest for
knowledge, as a mutual enterprise, is what academic life is supposed to be about. How foolish
to suggest that scientists and humanists would waste time and tax resources by trying to
cooperate and bring their disciplines closer to the original harmony they shared in the age of
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
