I’d like to talk about the poor emphasis higher education has placed on math and science. Before you write this off as another economics column a la mode Thomas Friedman, hear this: I’m leaving the economy out of this one, and instead I’m going to try and convince you merely that your classic liberal arts education has failed you intellectually. Sound good? No comparing paychecks, no “useful” versus “non-useful” or “hard” versus “easy.” We’re keeping this above the belt and speaking solely of intellectual merit. Alright let’s get started.

Since Cornell was founded, math, science and engineering have progressed exponentially. In 1865, the idea of an “electron” was only a couple decades old, and no experiment had even proven its existence. Today you’d be hard pressed to find an area of your life our favorite elementary particle hasn’t affected (what’s the “e” in e-mail for?).

But has the liberal arts education kept pace? We live in an age where science has completely revolutionized our existence. We travel at rapid speeds in personal vehicles made possible by the work of Carnot, Otto and Diesel (the engineer, not the clothing designer). We use computers whose algorithms were developed by mathematicians and computer scientists like Alan Turing and whose speed and precision was made possible by countless chemists, physicists, electrical engineers and material scientists.

The human genome, DNA and the mechanics of heredity have been unlocked by molecular biologists, who can now observe the structure of basic proteins and RNA. They are beginning to use this powerful information to tackle some of our biggest medical challenges.

For the first time in history, cosmology and the study of the very beginnings of the universe have been put on a solid scientific foundation (well … sort of solid).

Science has even informed our discussion of topics once solely speculative: Is time a human construct or something physical? Is an object defined by its state of existence or the act of observing it? Is the future completely determined by the past?

And yet countless people studying outside the sciences at Cornell decide to evade these amazing topics by ducking into watered down survey courses designed to appease the humanities major, like “Chemistry for Poets.” Wasn’t the whole point of studying outside your field to learn to think like someone in that other field? What would I gain from “Shakespeare for Engineers”? It certainly would not include a new perspective on life.

Many make the mistake of thinking that science and math are a collection of facts and tools. We memorize equations and molecular structures and algorithms for arriving at an answer. Who cares if we despise what we do? It’s all about getting rich so we can make big donations to Cornell some day. We are cash dispensing automatons.

But from what I’ve gathered, what we do is more about problem solving, experimentation and theory building. The methods we use are as diverse as the subject areas, from rigorous proofs to case studies. The creativity doesn’t come through how shocking our essays might sound. It comes from how much we manage to accomplish with so few resources. It comes from figuring out alternate routes to the same conclusion, and using that new found insight to predict something new.

This is not a column about “useful” versus “not useful.” Stop deluding yourself by thinking it’s trendy to avoid calculus because you like learning for learning’s sake. You’re not depriving yourself of job opportunities; you’re really just preventing yourself from being given the means to see things differently.

The most egregious example of this, I think, is computer science. People who’ve never taken a class in programming think it’s all about padding your resume for when the Google crew comes knocking. And you can’t blame them, when this is exactly how America advertises scientific knowledge: as a commodity. Computer science teaches you to use logic and to think of non-obvious ways to solve a seemingly straight forward problem. It emphasizes that any complicated task can be broken down into tiny, simple constituents. That sounds more like an outlook on life than a job skill to me.

Of course, it’s pretty easy for you to reflect this argument and watch me stumble off my soapbox. After all, I’m an engineer. Aside from two writing seminars and six liberal arts courses, covering at least three different categories with at least two at the 200 level or higher, engineers don’t need to take any humanities or social science courses. And of course, you guys take way more than eight science and math courses, in at least three different categories at the 200 level or higher, right?

I think the worst part of all this is that the folks graduating from Cornell’s liberal arts college are getting a B.A. that signifies a well-rounded education. With just four courses in math and science, with no guarantee of rigor, how could that possibly be a genuine claim? Perhaps the degree would be better suited with a designation like “Literary Technician” or “History Engineer.”

Mike Huckabee recently came to campus and contrasted the sciences from the arts by claiming that while the sciences are important, they boil down to “data download,” which must be supplemented, for sanity’s sake, by the arts. What a terrible way to reduce such nuanced subjects into a simple binary. You’d think such an idiotically simple message wouldn’t resonate with more enlightened crowds, but sadly it does. It’s kind of ironic, when you consider that technical majors are the ones who work in binary.