Jennifer+C’s+Final+AmEx+Speech+2016


 * An Ode to the Humanities **

Before I start my speech, can I get a sense of how many people in this class plan on majoring in something science or math based? Terrific! It’s nice to know that if I ever have a heart attack at a class reunion 20 years from now, there will be plenty of professional life-savers around to resuscitate me. How many of the rest of you guys plan on studying something more arts or humanities based, like linguistics or philosophy? It’s nice to know that if the class reunion runs out of cater waiters, we will have plenty of experienced fast food cashiers in our midst.

This joke (or variations of it) has been repeated time after time again by people ranging from public officials to science teachers to me a few seconds ago. For the last half century, our world has become increasingly interested in shifting education towards more specific, vocational teachings; in fact, a few months ago I had to write an entire 25 minute essay about this topic on the SAT (and if there’s anything I have learned from my 3 years of high school, it’s that CollegeBoard is the most influential institution to ever grace human civilization, with the Catholic church coming in as a distant second).

This overarching dismissal of a liberal arts education has been coupled with a push for more emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) subjects in public teachings. Every week new articles roll out about another university, corporation or foundation funding another initiative advocating for the proliferation of STEM programs. Do you guys want to take a guess at how much money humanities research gets compared to science or math research? As of 2011, half of one percent. The expensive luxury that is a philosophy major has been thoroughly cautioned against by our culture, and down in Florida and North Carolina, Governor Rick Scott or Governor Patrick McCrory want to make college students pursuing humanities degrees pay more than their engineer and physicist counterparts, so as to dissuade them from pursuing this path.

A lot of conservatives and other skeptics are convinced that the way to save America from “going to Hell” is to drive the arts far away from being a central component of this country’s educational system and to foster more engineers, so as to fill this “innovation void.” Yet what these people fail to understand is that especially in terms of innovation and entrepreneurship, it is equally or even more critical to have an overflowing toolbox of skills provided by the arts.

Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal, was a philosophy major. Dr. Harold Varmus, Nobel Laureate of medicine and director of the National Cancer Institute, was an English major. The founder of CNN, classics. CEO of Bank of America, history. I know what you’re thinking. “Jenny, all you just did was rattle off a bunch of names and majors so you could fill up a few more seconds, and all of these people are exceptions. Yeah, they’re successful but that doesn’t pertain to normal people like us.” And that is where you are wrong, my friends. One of the most important parts about starting or expanding upon a business or research (which, let’s be real, is probably what most of us are going to go into) is analyzing the needs of society and how your product or research will interact with this need. The arts and social sciences foster and sustain our capacities for the originality needed to come up with a flexible solution to this need, rather than a “solve for x” approach.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am in no way, shape, or form saying that STEM fields are useless; I’m sure a solid math basis will come in super handy for you Bioscience, physics kids sophomore year of college when the rest of us art history majors are typing into Google “what angle beer pong accurate,” but it’s important that as our generation and the next generation and the generation after that face our world’s quintessential challenges regarding things like energy, health care, environment, and hunger, we understand that these affairs are further warped by issues of culture, politics, race, and religion. Yes, it’s great to have a deep understanding of the physical universe and to be able to balance a chemistry equation, but it is far more paramount to understand the nuances and human complexities many of these “science” issues are.

To answer the prompt, I want to live in an America in which I won’t be seen as frivolous or “undermining feminism” for not pursuing a STEM related major. I want to live in an America in which people will perceive the prevention of the extinction of a culture or language as just as important as finding the cure to Zika. I want to live in an America in which a scholar isn’t just someone who can solve a fancy math equation but rather someone with a fluency in critical thinking and a capacity for cross fertilization.

As I wrap up my speech today, I’m going to address what you guys all must be thinking: Jenny, we KNOW that you only wrote this anti-STEM speech to piss off the Bioscience kids. And yes, I admit I might relish in tormenting my girl Bella a little bit, and yes I would rather get ringworm on my entire body than take another year of math, but overall the message I want to leave you guys with is this. We’re all wrapping up our junior year, and steadily approaching an overabundance of momentous decisions, one of which happens to be what we decide to spend the next four, critical years of our lives studying. Sure, a major isn’t a life sentence (although your crippling student debt will probably prove otherwise) but when you and I and all the rest of our class take off our summer sunglasses a few short months from now, I really hope you guys will keep my message in mind and choose a path filled with both mutually informative subjects, not just the one with status and payroll.