Nora Yoon ’27 is a chemistry major. They enjoy writing poetry for the campus literary magazine, The Gallery and reading whatever books have a good vibe to them. They also like sitting by large bodies of water, drinking lots of coffee and overthinking movies, songs and things in general. Contact them at giyoon@wm.edu.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
When people ask about the importance of the humanities, or why they’re worth keeping around, one of the biggest detriments to the response is that a classroom setting is not really conducive to giving people a sense of why the subject they’re learning matters. You will not intuitively understand why performance arts, literature, religion, history or philosophy matters by being forced to study it for a COLL requirement with your GPA at stake. Nor is there a guarantee that your professor will be a grounded, lucid educator with the ability to impart the universality of their field, rather than just take the subject’s significance for granted and get right to making you memorize arguments, interpretations and other painfully specific information. But it’s easy to keep asking yourself in the midst of this, why does anyone need to know this?
Part of what frustrates me about this whole experience is that other people, majoring and totally dedicated to a field of study, also cannot articulate the importance of their chosen field. Even when I was visiting colleges as a high school senior, I felt somewhat put off by how very uninspiring the English majors I met were — that studying and writing literature was enough for them, regardless of whether it contributed to the world around them. Maybe this is envy speaking, but I don’t think that’s something I could do in good faith for four years, setting me up for my career for the rest of my life. For a long time, I felt this way, and it seemed to me that people only majored in the humanities because they weren’t determined enough to study something in STEM.
The truth is that there are just as many uninspiring STEM majors as there are uninspiring humanities majors. As my favorite poet, Louise Bogan, would say, “Intellectuals range through the finest gradations of kind and quality: from those who are merely educated neurotics, usually with strong hidden reactionary tendencies, through mediocrities of all kinds, to men of real brains and sensibility, more or less stiffened into various respectabilities or substitutes for respectability. The number of Ignorant Specialists is large.” While Bogan likely had intellectuals in the humanities in mind, I’ve heard horror stories from friends in STEM both at the College of William and Mary and more STEM-focused colleges about people whose education and neuroticism contribute to little more than bullying undergraduates and feeding a sense of self-importance rather than wishing to change the world or help others with their expertise. All this to say, the myopic view of academia plagues all subjects and fields.
However, there is a certain frustration I still feel with English, despite it being a subject I’m committed to studying and that I love. At least with neurotic, self-centered scientists, their work often still builds and contributes to an existing body of knowledge that is benefitted by their work; I don’t know if the same is true for English. I think the best part of literature and academics is that they bring people into the world and allow them to confront and make sense of their worlds. I might share Susan Sontag’s discomfort with English papers as “long (hundreds of pages) monographs on such subjects as: The Use of ‘Tu’ and ‘Vous’ in Voltaire.”
However, this is more a problem of scope: inspiring professors can illuminate their subjects and make things considered feel completely new. In a creative writing class I took that I loved, I heard a quote from the filmmaker Werner Herzog that I think about all the time in relation to this issue: “Facts do not convey truth. That’s a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination.” You can learn whatever facts about this or that piece of text, author or interpretation, but in the end, a troubled 16-year-old feeling very depressed will often be able to sense the illumination of the text better than a college student because they are looking for something fundamentally different; in the same way, fascination and a deep need for understanding about life are as necessary components to really seeing the possibilities of the humanities as the course-supplied hours of reading. Whatever norms you might be trying to glean for a class from the facts of literary study, a sort of instability in your life and willingness to be disturbed are necessary to let literature bring you truly into life.
