I just finished reading your editorial today entitled “Humanities important, shouldn’t be first victim of cuts” in the Reveille.
I generally agree with you that the humanities and arts are important. Most of my science colleagues feel the same way.
In fact, the sciences and engineering enjoy a large slice of the University’s budget and any meaningful budget cuts will have to hit us rather hard as well.
There are a number of reasons that the sciences are often more protected than arts and humanities. Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) areas are the basis for all the technological advances around you that you rely on every day.
For most research grants that we bring in, the university takes approximately 33% of those funds as overhead. Most of this overhead (millions of dollars every year) goes into the university’s general fund and helps support other programs across campus. Therefore, cuts to sciences and engineering can limit our ability to bring in research funding, which in turn hurts LSU’s overall budget through reduced overhead. This ripple effect can, in turn, hurt the arts and humanities.
That does not mean that LSU should only cut arts and humanities. But cuts need to be done carefully and target areas and programs that are not doing their job in effectively educating our students, performing research (which includes performances in the arts area), and meaningful service work.
But what prompted me to write this response was your flat-out statement that “Science classes don’t teach anyone how to communicate.”
No!
There are an increasing number of science and engineering classes that are very concerned with communication. CxC stands for Communication Across the Curriculum and more and more science and engineering faculty are teaching classes that are communication intensive. Yes, we are still a minority, but there are enough for me to call you on this statement.
I combine CxC and Service-Learning in all my undergraduate chemistry classes. In fact, chemistry faculty send 200-500 LSU undergraduate students a semester out to teach one or more 50-minute lectures on science and chemistry concepts in kindergarden to 12th grade regional classes. This isn’t just “blah, blah, blah.” The students use our ChemDemo’s (chemistry demonstrations) to do hands-on exciting experiments and demonstrations for the class to bring the concepts they are teaching to life. LSU students who do this spend a lot of time preparing, practicing, and COMMUNICATING to educate and entertain.
CxC and Service-Learning classes exist across most programs on campus including sciences and engineering.
George G. Stanley
Alumnus chemistry professor
 
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