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Editorial: Veritas

One week ago, the staff of the Harvard Crimson ran an editorial embracing a new trend in higher education—the growing number of students choosing to pursue degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematical (STEM) fields over the humanities. “Let them eat code” is currently the top-read article on the Crimson’s website, with 80 comments as of press time. The editorial applauds students who choose these more “rigorous” fields, characterizing the knowledge and skills gained through study of these disciplines as more practical in our ultra-competitive economy. Scholars in the humanities, they write, are of little importance because with or without them, people will still have access to literature, music and philosophy.
“Why spend four years listening to lecturers warn you that you can never really know anything?” asks the piece. We can’t help but note that this is neither an unenlightening nor a novel concept; Socrates argued that “the only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
And while we do not believe that four years spent reading Woolf and Hume and Shakespeare is a waste of time, the strength of a liberal arts education is, in part, its breadth. Bowdoin’s new Digital and Computational Studies Initiative proves that the two disciplines are not mutually exclusive; for one final project in the inaugural Gateway to the Digital Humanities class, two students are learning code to build a website that archives the history of art at the College. These classes prove that the disciplines are not only valuable in and of themselves but as complements to one another.

Editorial: It takes a campus

Results from the Orient’s latest approval ratings survey indicate an 84 percent approval rating for Bowdoin Student Government (BSG), the highest first semester ratings in four years. BSG President Sarah Nelson ’14 also ranked highly this term, with 86 percent of respondents favoring her performance thus far.
This fall, BSG introduced two new programs: TurboVote, a service that helps students apply for absentee ballots, and PolarFlix, a free online film-streaming program. Some of the Executive Committee’s most ambitious campaign proposals from last spring have yet to be realized, and are pending administrative approval. Currently, BSG carries a proposal that would extend the deadline for Credit/D/Fail, and waits for the Recording Committee to take action. We applaud BSG for taking steps towards actualizing this key campaign issue and hope it will doggedly pursue the policy change. BSG has also continued the popular Food For Thought lecture series it began last spring, offering a platform for students to nominate their friends for short, informal talks on topics of their choice. The lectures have been well-attended and wide-ranging, from “Life Without Brakes: BMX and Extreme Sports Culture in Brooklyn” to “Story of My Life: An Inside Look at the One Direction Fangirl Phenomenon” this Monday.
The success of these lectures depends on student engagement, both from speakers and audience. This is true of most BSG initiatives—when they fall short, lukewarm student participation is often partly responsible. Its course review website, for example, is a valuable resource for selecting classes. BSG runs the website, but the utility of the database depends on students submitting up-to-date class reviews. Right now, only one member of the class of 2017 has written a review; just 83 reviews have been contributed from members of the sophomore class. We will all be filling out paper course evaluations for the Office of Academic Affairs during our final classes next week, and we encourage everyone to take a few extra minutes to submit their thoughts on the BSG site as well.

Editorial

This piece represents the opinion of The Bowdoin Orient editorial board.

November 22, 2013

With less than three weeks left in the fall semester, the final push is upon us. And though we’ve known about many of these final assignments since the first day of classes, these last papers, exams and projects never fail to induce panic, culminating in December’s all-too-familiar—and almost always over- caffeinated—frenzied final sprint. What we produce in these last three weeks represents, in theory, a demonstration of a semester’s worth of lectures, readings and assignments—a synthesis of all we’ve learned. Yet we tend to dispatch these completed assignments into a void, abandoning them as we pack our bags for our long-awaited break.

Currently, there is no official policy for professors handing back graded finals and papers. And though some do offer students the option of turning in final work along with a self-addressed envelope, or encourage them to collect assignments at the start of the following semester, this is far from the norm. More often than not, the quality of our final work is reflected in the course grade alone; students rarely ask for—and thus miss out on—constructive feedback.

It would be disingenuous to suggest that grades are irrelevant, or that the hard work we do throughout the semester is reflective of pure intellectual zeal. Grades are powerful external motivators. But this reality does not negate the fact that learning for learning’s sake is folded into our work as well. We benefit from working on these assignments, and we owe it to ourselves to bring the process full circle.

This kind of feedback should not be limited to professors; our peers have valuable insights to offer as well. We are rarely exposed to what others work on for these final—and often self-driven—projects, save for the occasional 10-minute presentation or one-sentence explanation in casual conversation. We invest significant time and effort in these culminating assignments. Our liberal arts education is predicated on collaboration and peer-to-peer communication as well as lectures and readings and professor-led discussions. We benefit from end-of-semester class time dedicated to sharing our work in class and to learning from each other’s research and efforts.

We hold ourselves to high standards when we know our audience is larger than the professors who read and grade our work; presenting our work more broadly to our classmates will inevitably improve its quality. Moreover, seeing how our peers have synthesized material affects our own thinking in new ways.

It’s easy to power through these final weeks with winter break tunnel vision, but even for the most holiday-party hearty among us, our final academic assignments demand a significant investment of time and energy. Why not make it fully worth it?

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