Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right

Belonging to a liberal arts university which boasts both an unusually high proportion of pre-med students and a student body small enough to ensure that people of every discipline rub elbows with each other daily, I feel like IWUers are prone to have a heightened awareness of the intellectual war between art and science. More than once I've found myself in the writing center, calmly reading a novel for class to the furious squeaking of Chemistry Susan filling an entire white board with improbably long memorized equations. This wouldn't really be a noteworthy thing to remember were Wesleyan not also the type of school to encourage you to want to feel smart. And one way to feel smart is to have a smart-person major. And it's hard to justify your major as a smart-person major when students of other majors regularly flop down on the couch after hours of studying an anatomy textbook, take a look at you completing your own hours of homework, and say, "Man, I miss being able to just sit down and read like that. I should have been an English major."

If we take for granted for a moment the fact that the war itself is fundamentally stupid, we at least have to acknowledge that it gets under people's skin. No one likes to be told that their attempt at higher education nevertheless placed them on the serf level in the intellectual caste system. And frankly, it's harder for the artsy set to defend ourselves, mostly because even if both parties agree that equally brilliant, hard working people exist in all shapes, sizes, and colors, science walks away with the Trophy of Practicality. The general realm of science (or just not-art) gives birth to doctors, engineers, businesspeople, accountants. People who do things. Art begets, well, artists, and while we may arguably lay claim to social workers, lawyers, and speech writers, there's really no question that functionality is more easily associated with cancer research than with Leaves of Grass.

There naturally isn't an answer to whether either art or science is harder, more useful, requiring more or less intelligence or creativity. Both camps should ashamedly feel a bit like a four-year-olds' reenactment of West Side Story for trying to find one, and a resounding "who cares?" should really come up more often. All our swelled brains and egos could be put to much better use. My one complaint is that, were it not for this futile debate, the virtues of the practicality of science would not be thrown in my face nearly so often. One byproduct of an English degree is a wide and unclear choice of professions, which I'm not having the easiest time sorting through. The last thing I need is a pervading sense of guilt emanating from future surgeons, telling me that no matter what I choose, the second I checked BA instead of BS I doomed myself to a life of Lesser Immediate Usefulness. If we all attempted to be surgeons, after all, the unemployment line would be a lot longer and there'd be nothing to read while we waited.