This Letter was written in response to Trenton Smith's submission "An open letter to President Pastides," published April 12.
Earlier this week, a fellow student accused our “Carolina family” of not having shared values in an open letter to USC President Harris Pastides.
I agree with this statement, but for some reason, he went on to describe why that is a bad thing. A university is a collection of students from a variety of backgrounds who will inherently have conflicting values.
For example, the author of the letter is a political science student. Having an understanding of justice and morality is no doubt vital to working in the realm of gray-areas that is politics. But will knowledge of Plato’s allegory of the cave help find to the rate of diffusion of a drug though a capillary? Will the study of ancient languages help to design a fire extinguisher that doesn’t get too cold? Will understanding philosophy help to match the mechanical properties of a polymer to that of living tissue?
Sometimes studying the liberal arts is not relevant to a student’s chosen field of study. If you truly value a liberal arts education, you have every opportunity to pursue those studies individually.
The university is broken up into many different college: arts and sciences, music, nursing, hospitality, engineering and computing, public health. These were referred to as a “multiversity” that aimed to “train [students] how to market a product or manage a sporting venue.”
This should be expected of a university.
In modern America, a college degree is essentially a requirement for professions that pay a livable wage. Students need to take classes that will aid them in their futures, so they attend the appropriate colleges. What would the purpose of a college education be if not to prepare students for their future occupations?
The Carolina Core exists to guarantee that students don’t exit the university completely devoid of cultural understanding or deficient in experiences with subject material outside of their major. It is not intended to be a full liberal arts education, and it shouldn’t be; that’s why liberal arts colleges exist.
A lack of this education will not cause of students to “learn from Islamic extremists” or “hold the ideas and opinions of fascists.” Realistically, those sympathetic to these ideals will encounter such viewpoints in society. A college education develops knowledge, but that doesn’t invalidate one form of knowledge in favor of another.
So, if I can be excused from studying Dante’s "Inferno," I won’t insist that Trenton take thermodynamics.