Your phrase "by implication" is doing a lot of work, Jim. I don't imply that STEM classes don't teach critical thinking. If you had read my piece better, you'd have noted that I wrote that "students [can] learn language, literature, history, persuasive writing, and critical thinking from many disciplines." I'm not sure why you concluded I had excluded yours.

If I were mean-spirited, this would be where I'd belittle your reading skills or tout how much better they'd be if you'd studied Humanities. I won't, because I don't believe that.

I will point out that you believe some tripe, though, my friend, and you have swallowed it whole. I also noted in the piece that our graduates have gone on to be lawyers and doctors and video game creators (two of those, oddly) and museum curators and accountants and teachers and entrepreneurs. Some are working on PhDs but not too many; that's not quite the school that we are. I don't know any who are working at McDonald's or Starbucks, though they may be. Plenty of them are not using their degrees specifically in their careers. And as far as I'm concerned, that's wonderful. I still like to view education as something more than vocational training. I hope that it's also contributing to the personal, social, and moral development of our students, not in narrow and mechanistic ways, but in broad and adaptable ways.

I gather that you do not think of education that way, but I may be wrong. You may have a more generous view than appears here. I certainly hope so. And I hope you'll demonstrate your ability to think by examining your own presuppositions about what colleges and majors do. In good Socratic fashion, keep the ones that are true, but go ahead and dispense with the wrong-headed ones.

Thanks for reading and responding, my friend, and all best to you.