As I read Douthat's essay on Harvard....

I found myself wondering why I retained little shocka nd wonder at the treatement of Humanties studies at Harvard University. The lack therein of genral liberal art edication leaves for a steady one-track intellect for a student, constrained by a economic, business curriculum. I personally find that with such an emphasis, Harvard's conservative majority to seems normal. There is a line I find most interesting; "All this is merely reinforced capitalism's insistence that the sciences are the only important academic pursuits, because only they provide tangible, quantifiable (and potentially profitable) results." At my high school, arts and my gifted class, which acted as a generalized liberal arts course, were put down by taxpayers and some administrative members, even going to such extremes as stating a false price on a gas kiln my art department recieved several years back, in a local newspaper. My art teacher, furious at the libel committed, gave a half hour long speech to my art class. In it he said that all schools want to push in math and science, among other ramblings. This point sunk deep with me. Why do we need peolpe good at math: calculations for sciences and numbercrunching? The biggest way numbercrunching comes into play into the job market is statistics and accounting. Money and Ratios. ratios give us information on people and who needs what, and how many out of ten will have terrible allergies during the spring or lack a proper hair care product. Then with science, you have numerous fileds, from chemicals to technonologic developements, physicists travel to weapons. At this point I, too, am rambling but all in all, arts fall short because they don't do anything to help Joe Businesspants make a buck and invest it well. Questioning one's rolein the universe and posessing a thrist for knowledge and how one can gain it, can only be of any good to a conservattive Harvard professors if it stimulates the economy, hopefully in the form of a self-help motivation book from Simon &Schuster publishing.