The Humanities and Sciences Depend on Each Other

My Index column from last week is my small addition to all that's been written about why we should not install medical and neuroscience research labs in all of our Humanities buildings just yet. To me, the debate of whether there is a major that is better, or more necessary for our society to study right now, often misses the point that we need many different ways of thinking to get any task done in any one discipline--be it a paper analyzing the motives of characters in O Pioneers! or a social psychology study on prejudicial attitudes towards a certain ethnic or cultural group. In all fields, we need data and insights from many different sources in order to say anything meaningful about the world. But for a less apologetic take on the need for English majors, and one that I like better than mine, read Adam Gopnik's "Why Teach English?" from the New Yorker this August. We need English students and teachers because people like to read, and to talk about what they read. Why would we need any more defense for the major than that?