Dear Editor,

I was extremely disappointed to read Wednesday’s Editorial. Although I understand the writers’ motivation to argue that many Stanford students studying technologically-oriented majors love their fields, the piece is filled with flawed logic and a dangerously mistaken frame in which to place the argument they seek to make. I am embarrassed that people outside of the Farm could see the editorial and judge Stanford and its students by such a misguided account of Stanford academics and culture.

The writers assert that “there’s a battle raging for the soul of Stanford,” and that the administration has had to “save the humanities.” Perhaps the language was intended facetiously, but the sentiment misses the truth either way: although enrollments in humanities courses are down, twice as many Stanford students are enrolled in humanities majors as are students across America, as Ms. McGirr reported in The Daily on Tuesday. An effort to increase enrollments is surely not intended to “save” areas of study that have existed across cultures for millennia; the humanities as a whole is not, and never will be, as ineffectual as the editorial would have us believe. In economically demanding times, students move toward majors that they view as more applicable to particular job markets soon after graduation. Literature, music, art, philosophy and the many other programs that constitute the rich fabric of a world-class humanities program have survived economic downturns before, and an increasing interest in computers is not symptomatic of the end of some of humanity’s oldest and most respected disciplines.

Another logical error came when the piece drew an analogy between Introduction to the Humanities and CS 106A.While IHUM is a university-wide, non-departmental freshman requirement, CS 106A is a gateway class to various programs and is offered through the Computer Science Department. If a science student forms his or her impression of humanities work based on an imperfect freshman program, that student has made a regrettable error. I encourage such a person to take a real humanities course from one of the hundreds of outstanding professors that do innovative work in their fields here. Furthermore, judging huge segments of disciplines at Stanford based on two Courserank figures is simply poor research.

But the real problem with the piece comes later, when the writers suggest that humanities students choose to weasel out of science requirements, while science and technology students suffer through intense humanities requirements. The Board undermines its own point, though: to judge the humanities at Stanford based on IHUM proves that the person in question has not taken real humanities coursework.

And as someone who is double-majoring in English and philosophy — the two fields the Editorial Board’s quip mocks in the closing sentence — I promise that the humanities does not reduce to reading Shakespeare and Plato all day. The “soul of Stanford” ought to be as much part humanistic as it is technological, and there’s much more to humanities than just “Hamlet” and Plato’s “Republic.” Come take a humanities class and see.

Willys DeVoll ‘13