A Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry defends the Humanities brilliantly (and amusingly): "Young people haven't, for the most part, yet attained the wisdom to have that kind of freedom without making poor decisions. In fact, without wisdom, it's hard for most people. That idea is thrashed out better than anywhere else, I think, in Dostoyevsky's parable of the Grand Inquisitor, which is told in Chapter Five of his great novel, The Brothers Karamazov. In the parable, Christ comes back to earth in Seville at the time of the Spanish Inquisition. He performs several miracles but is arrested by Inquisition leaders and sentenced to be burned at the stake. The Grand Inquisitor visits Him in his cell to tell Him that the Church no longer needs Him. The main portion of the text is the Inquisitor explaining why. The Inquisitor says that Jesus rejected the three temptations of Satan in the desert in favor of freedom, but he believes that Jesus has misjudged human nature. The Inquisitor says that the vast majority of humanity cannot handle freedom. In giving humans the freedom to choose, Christ has doomed humanity to a life of suffering. That single chapter in a much longer book is one of the great works of modern literature. You would find a lot in it to think about. I'm sure your Russian faculty would love to talk with you about it - if only you had a Russian department, which now, of course, you don't."Read the whole piece here: http://genomebiology.com/2010/11/10/138
I wonder, however, how many biomedical/natural scientists are committed to the university as a *shared* corporation (in the medieval sense) devoted to learning, teaching, etc. In fact, in Europe and the UK even most undergraduate education is rather specialized. It would be amazing if these produced anything but fairly narrow technical specialists. According to Wikipedia, Petsko is a product of Princeton and a Rhodes funded stint at Oxford.
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