Plucking the Flower from the STEM

*I apologize for the punny title. I can't help myself*

Recently, the Japanese government has made the controversial decision to encourage its country's universities to dismantle social sciences and humanities departments, and convert its resources to focusing solely on STEM fields. Funding will now be dependent on the universities complying with this measure. This decision comes from a declining number of Japanese young people enrolling in colleges, as well as Japan's focus on industry. It comes from an economic strategy put in place by the President of Japan, Shinzo Abe, which demands national universities serve as producers of "human resources" for the industrial fields as opposed to shaping more academically inclined thinkers. This article goes into much greater detail about the President's announcement and responses: http://monitor.icef.com/2015/09/japanese-government-asks-universities-to-close-social-sciences-and-humanities-faculties/.

As a tentative Biology and English double major, the strict dividing line drawn in contemporary education between the STEM departments and the humanities and soft sciences fascinates me. It is almost as if they are thought to be in competition over the "right" way of thinking. Now, in our techno-focused society where pharmaceutical and computer companies seem to dominate the market, there seems to be an increasing pressure to focus on STEM at the expense of other disciplines. Studying the hard sciences is seen as practical and more likely to get you a job out of college. Besides the financial aspect, I also feel like current conventional wisdom looks to science for a more objective form of the knowledge. A literature class can not give you neat lines of data. How can its truth be as true as the one printed in the lab manual?

But this dividing line seems to me to be constructed socially more than anything else. I see lots of similarities between science and the liberal arts. When I learned my first coding language, I was struck by how the word "language" was incredibly apt. There was a whole grammatical structure to understand, both intuitive and non-intuitive at points. The interpretive reading skills I use to analyze Hamlet are not so different from the ones I use to analyze data. Both require creativity as well as contextual knowledge. Both give me something with superficial meaning and ask me to find a possible deeper story behind it. And the skills I have learned in my English classes have strengthened my skills in the lab, as well as me as a person. How am I supposed to write a compelling grant application in the future if I haven't read anything besides journal articles in all of college? It seems to me that Japan will find it has weakened its work force with the dramatic change, and that they will see even lower enrollment numbers than before. The college experience is not stimulating when confined to one discipline. It requires a diverse array of inputs to produce an output of students worth the effort.