There is so much contradiction and convolution in your response, Jim, that I'm not really inclined to engage with it, except for one reason: you teach students. That fact is discouraging enough for me to try once more to present another view.

It may not be your true belief, but in your two responses to me, you present the goal of a university education as employment and earnings, and nothing more. As I wrote before, I think that education can be more than vocational--and I have no idea why you object to the word "vocational," since that describes your description of college (vocation = job).

First, however, when I say more than vocational, I am not saying non-vocational. I certainly want students to find employment, though I would add meaningful employment over lucrative employment if one has to choose between those options.

So what is more than vocational? Most broadly, it is about values. And not about acquiring the "right" ones, but about learning to evaluate themselves and others, and using all disciplines, but especially philosophy and literature and religion and history and art, etc. to do it.

You speak about one type of value, economic value. If one were to evaluate you on the basis of these responses, one could reasonably conclude that for you money is the be all and end all of a good life. I'll give you more credit than that. I'll assume that you see deep value in your family, probably in your friends and community, maybe in a faith tradition (though it's nowhere in evidence here), maybe in beauty and nature, maybe in good health (I hope), etc. Sometimes these values come into conflict within us; sometimes we meet people who have different values; sometimes the society we live in changes its values; sometimes we're asked to do something that violates our values even within a workplace; sometimes the values we used to hold lose their vibrancy.

You may think that the university is no place for that kind of teaching or learning. To which I would say, why not? The students are just moving from childhood to adulthood, with frontal lobes maturing. Many are moving from their familial homes to independence. What better time would there be for them to develop these interpretive and evaluative skills? Or to reference my discipline again, these Socratic skills, that encourage us to examine ourselves and our beliefs, and to keep those that are true and discard those that are not?

You show a real need for that kind of self-examination; you're clearly unaware of your own shallow and flawed thinking. You don't need to be an engineer to have opinions on abortion or gay-rights or DEI: you can be a cashier or a panhandler on the corner. Two problems here: first, are all opinions on these matters equivalent? And second, do you think that's what the Humanities teach? That example, and your use of "the real world" in the same paragraph, suggest that you traffic in caricatures and clichés more than real thought. And for what it's worth, I don't think every student needs to know where the energy for electric vehicles come from. That's for engineers to know. But yes, probably most citizens need to be informed about issues that affect all other citizens. And all humans ought to think about what it means to live a good and meaningful life.

Perhaps you think you know me, too, that you're sure of what I think about abortion, gay-rights, etc. To be honest about abortion, at least, I think it's a very complicated issue, because I am sympathetic to arguments based on bodily autonomy and freedom and to arguments that it ends a life. For me, it's important not to be right but to be as open and humble as possible, because I may be wrong or partially wrong.

I'll tell you another story. My father is a good man, faithful, generous, devout, kind, long-retired, a successful pharmacist and businessman. For reasons that I don't fully understand, he is warped out of the frame by homosexuality, so much so that he left the Methodist church that he was baptized in. His reason is simple: the Bible is against it. I agree: the Bible condemns homosexuality. For myself, I also see that the Bible does not condemn slavery, because it was the accepted norm, and yet we all "know" that slavery is morally abhorrent. So I look at the Biblical condemnations of homosexuality, like its non-condemnation of slavery, as reflective of their place and time and not normative for ours (though I do not view the entire text in that way). My father is incapable even of hearing this. It infuriates him. So I've watched this good man become reactive and defensive, uninterested in real connection with his grandchildren, unwilling to examine himself for apparent fear of growth and change. What if he had cultivated that habit much earlier, say, in his early 20s? He might reach the same conclusion, but it would be accompanied by so much less fear and anger and rejection of others, I think.

For that reason, your suggestion that people should enjoy art and humanities when they retire seems to capture how much you fail to understand about what education can do when done well.

As a small note, for what it's worth, the Chemistry department at my university has relatively few majors, because it is not a ready track into employment. Students mostly take Chem classes for pre-med here, but we do not have industry around us that makes that major, or other STEM majors, a guaranteed job track. Perhaps you are near health research facilities or pharmaceutical R&D centers--the Research Triangle Park in NC is such a place--that shape your experience, but I have no idea how universal it is. I assume the earnings of STEM majors are greater, yes, but I've already stated above what I think about the relative value of salary over all else.

Why did I bother with all this? Not because I think it will make a bit of difference to you. But that's not the point. When I encounter people who seem very wrong and very confident in their wrongness, I usually refrain from responding; but if that person is a professor who may be spewing this wrongness liberally, I feel a different kind of obligation to respond. But that's all I can do. I imagine that you're the hard or thorn choked ground, but that doesn't change my obligation to sow the seed.