Duck Harris, I’m the science professor who you think would get defensive at the suggestion that English is valuable because it teaches critical thinking and writing in your column “Writing skills needed in every major” published Feb. 4.

You are so wrong. You see, even though I’m a science professor, I wouldn’t be here at all without my humanities education — and specifically my training in English! Let me explain.

I was a math major in college but I also took 30 hours of English. That’s where I learned to write clear, unstilted prose and where I discovered what I believed in and what I had to say.

KNOX

That’s also where I encountered my role models for living. I am a different and better person because of my humanities education.

You see this “personal growth” as “very silly” and reserved only for “church,” but previous generations valued it as a vital part of their college experience.

In 1969, a whopping 85 percent of college freshmen nationwide said in a UCLA survey that “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” was “very important” or “essential.” By 2009 that percentage was down to 48 percent, with over 78 percent now saying that “being well-off financially” is what matters in life.

If I believed that too, I wouldn’t have chosen the long impecunious path of the Ph.D. student. I wouldn’t be teaching today. But I learned in my English classes, as well as in church, that there are higher goals in life than serving Mammon.

My humanities education paid unexpected dividends in graduate school in atmospheric science. As a math major, I had been taught how to manipulate equations and prove theorems, but not how to apply this knowledge to the atmosphere. I fell back on the critical thinking skills I developed in my college English classes.

My Ph.D. research began with “close reading” of scientific articles in my specialty, identifying holes in our understanding and then using equations and data to explore and fill in those holes.

My Ph.D. thesis is probably the only one in the history of science to quote John Keats, William Butler Yeats and Marilynne Robinson. Without my humanities education, it wouldn’t have happened at all.

Ideally, all courses and departments would promote this kind of education. The reality is different. The feedback I receive from my own students is that writing assignments are rare in their classes.

I think I can guess why. Since 1969, the number of students at the University has virtually doubled, but the number of full-time faculty has actually decreased by 3 percent!

As the student-to-faculty ratios swell and the time crunch tightens on professors in most disciplines, the tedious work of critiquing and grading papers simply becomes undoable. That is, except in the humanities, which seem inseparable from the tradition of essays and tons of grading.

Similarly, in an ideal university all courses and departments might focus on deeper issues — say, ethics. But in practice, with limited class time and new disciplinary knowledge being discovered every day and needing to be taught, it’s difficult to carve out space in the syllabus for anything “extra.” Whereas in the humanities, the deeper issues are not “extra;” they are, or should be, at the core.

This is why I believe that we should create more “habitat for the humanities” at the University, not less. The justifications are grander, Duck, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

— Dr. John Knox is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography