Chris Houpt's column, "The Merits of a Diverse Education" (Sept. 28, 1995) so misses the point that it almost seems humorous. Not only does Houpt put words into my mouth, but when he does have his facts right, the conclusions he draws from them are based on flimsy reasoning.
Houpt quotes me as saying that the difficulty in determining society's long-term needs makes all majors equally useful. Quite apart from the problem that a key aim of my article was pointing out the difficulty in establishing the meaning of the term "useful," I said no such thing as Houpt suggests. What I did say was that nobody (not even myself) can say what is "useful" in the long run and what is not.
In the next paragraph, Houpt accuses me of dismissing scientific and technical knowledge. This is preposterous. There was a reason for my choosing Dirac, Newton and Euclid from my examples, and contrasting two of the above three with Plato. Besides, being the mathematics and physics double major hopeful that I am, it would be quite irrational of me to dismiss scientific and technical knowledge, would it not?
In the same paragraph Houpt says that both Newton and Euclid were broadly educated, thinking he has somehow weakened my argument. Perhaps he should have done some biographical research, because Newton was far from the well-rounded gentleman Houpt imagines him to be, and far less is known about Euclid than would give us the authority to talk about the breadth of his education -- unless Houpt has a source to which the rest of the academic world is not privy.
Houpt accuses me of generalizing from the great to the ordinary, another accusation not based on anything I actually wrote. My point was to throw into relief just how Procrustean overly extensive distributive requirements can be. Besides, is Houpt not ready to grant his fellow students the intelligence to know what is good for them? After all, what I advocated was not that they all become philosophy majors, but that they should have more freedom in choosing their courses. How does this hinder those of a "practical" bent?
Houpt then says something which particularly rankles -- he writes that I entirely discount "the possibility that some people might actually enjoy mathematics, ..." Nowhere in the article of mine before my eyes do I see myself saying or implying anything of the sort: Why should I, when I take pleasure in the subject myself?
As if this comedy of errors were not amusing enough, Houpt in one swoop dogmatically dismisses my argument by saying "the purpose of a college education is to provide a college education ..." as if this were a reasonable argument. This kind of reasoning ignores entirely the point of my original article -- to examine an alternate logical foundation for educational philosophy.
Later on in Houpt's article one reads that Nobel-prize winners must be able to perform their functions as citizens and humans, and that their educations are deficient if they cannot do so. Is it Houpt's implication here that distributive courses somehow necessarily make us better friends and countrymen? The English university system is a study in narrowness -- no distributives, no electives outside the major. Yet I doubt that it produces marginally worse citizens than its American counterpart.
Houpt says that I provide no evidence that Nobel-prize winners ignore art or literature. I did not because I never implied that these individuals as a whole neglected such things. What I did do was choose an example of one Nobel winner who was never subjected to distributive requirements -- Paul Dirac. If Houpt knew anything about Oxbridge style education, he would know that this certainly was the case.
My original point, which I restate again, was that we as students should have more freedom in determining how broad, narrow, practical or impractical our college educations should be. This idea is one which Houpt bareley touches upon, and for good reason: It isn't easy to tell your peers that you alone know what is best for them, the true antithesis of my intentions.
