To the Editor:

Re: “A Disappearing Haven for Humanists” and “Looking Beyond Our Own Bums,” Opinion, March 4

I’ll be clear. It is more exciting for me to talk to someone who mentions Keats without stammering than someone who starts a conversation effusive about stock splits, but do I really think that because someone would rather study AEM than art history they are somehow destined for a life of emotional bankruptcy in an expensive apartment?

There is a disappointingly common world view among Cornellians and others that somehow one cannot be two things at once. This diminutive yet resonant chorus of voices (exemplified by the column “Looking Beyond Our Own Bums,” which crows that “renewed salience” is given to “life’s eternal questions” in our current economic climate) insists that one cannot be (at least not before now) interested both in leveraged buyouts and hexameters, to grossly oversimplify.

This is utter buffoonery. Anyone (no matter what “major” he or she is — and since when did majors become scarlet letters signifying some set of personality traits?) who really is beginning to examine their life, only now that 22-year-olds suddenly find six-figure incomes more scarce, was already lost. The seeming impossibility to these people is the (true) fact that many former “suit-and-tie-clad co-eds” are magnificently erudite and furthermore, perhaps shockingly for some, perfectly ethical and competent business people (among other things).

My contention is that it is fundamentally unfair, intellectually dishonest and ignorant to think that it is a narrow population of our country or University that needs a wake-up call. The implication that lawyers or doctors or MBAs cannot also be humanists is staggeringly unfair. It reminds me of the old trope that science and the humanities are opposed forces — complete nonsense. It’s not about practical versus theoretical. Both are necessary.

Every academic major, every bank office, every college building is filled with people who are degrees and measures of good and bad, knowledge and ignorance, regardless of how “practical” their life’s course is. The fundamental decencies, parceled out unequally at birth as Nick Carraway tells us, are not parceled out according to profession.

Colin McKeon ’10