In a Washington Post opinion piece, Harvard Medical School Professor David Silbersweig ’82 makes the case for the value of a liberal arts education.
His undergraduate Dartmouth degree in philosophy “has informed and provided a methodology for everything that I have done since,” he writes.
Silbersweig notes Dartmouth Associate Professor of History Cecilia Gaposchkin’s commentary on the value of the liberal arts and recalls then-President John Kemeny telling Dartmouth students at a long-ago convocation that the increasingly complex world needs “citizens to inform policy with (and therefore develop literacy in) science.”
“A higher education that unites liberal arts and STEM fields is what provides these crucial abilities and enables new career trajectories,” Silbersweig writes.
In addition, he writes, interdisciplinary programs such as the academic clusters Dartmouth is creating, “are critical if our society is to address the most complex and desperate problems facing our world, develop the next generation of leaders who can bring novel solutions, and advance our capacities as a learned, diverse and peaceful civilization.”
Read the full opinion piece, published 12/24/15 by The Washington Post.
