With over 30 sections, each English 114 seminar is focused on different topics. For many Yale students looking for a writing credit, the class is a natural choice. By offering such a wide variety of topics, it seems to give students the opportunity to stick with their interests and make the often painful process of writing a little more bearable.
My goal when selecting an ENGL 114 class was to avoid anything political. At a school where a professor estimates faculty political diversity to be 0 percent, as reported by the Yale Daily News in 2019, I did not want to risk saying something controversial. I chose what I presumed to be a “safe” class that aligned well with my interests and was nicely apolitical, ENGL 114: Time Travel.
One month into the semester, I can decidedly say this is not the case. We have discussed the whitewashing of fantasy by reading a chapter from Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness, progress in queer acceptance by watching The Favourite, and the Eurocentrism of the concept of modernity by analyzing the essay “Modernity: Are Modern Times Different?”. Yes, we are studying time travel, though not as the primary subject matter, but rather as a lens through which we can examine society.
As a STEM student, this has been a completely foreign experience. When I take math classes, I learn how to prove theorems, derive equations, apply formulas, and other distinctly mathematical topics. When I took biology classes, I learned about cells, genetics, ecology and a hundred other distinctly biological topics that I have now forgotten. I left those classes certainly more skillful and more knowledgeable, but did I leave any wiser? I am not sure anymore.
By coming to a liberal arts university, we should be striving to be better people, not just better students. We should be looking to leave a positive impact in some way on some facet of society, but this is a tall order if classes lie entirely in the world of academia and theory. It is difficult to even fully recognize the problems facing society, much less understand their causes or propose potential solutions if there is no connection between the skills we learn in class and the events of the real world.
For a concrete example of how this lack of connection can have dramatic consequences, the Introductory Machine Learning class is a good example. Students spend time covering different techniques and models in machine learning, all important information of course. However, little to no thought is placed into racial bias in models, a problem that has led to racist predictive policing and healthcare referral algorithms which has life-ruining and potentially deadly consequences for minorities.
For me, ENGL 114 has been the first class to bridge that gap. I am learning how to write, I am learning about science fiction, but I am also learning about how writing reflects the greater systemic racism in America. My beliefs have been challenged at every turn. Some have become more liberal and some more conservative, but they are finally being logically tested in relation to concrete real-world consequences.
It seems natural to conclude that all students should take more English classes or more humanities classes in general. But the burden of creating better people should not lie on any one area of study. Given that students naturally gravitate toward different fields, and every field has connections to society, STEM and other quantitative fields must more actively connect their theoretical studies to actual consequences.
Going forward, I will be supplementing my STEM education with more humanities and social sciences classes, but until our STEM education system is revamped, we will continue seeing intelligent people inadvertently do more harm than good.
STEPHANIE HU is a Sophomore in Saybrook college. Contact her at stephanie.hu@yale.edu .