A running joke on campus is that as we walk up the hills to class we look at our friends and say, “I’m seriously paying 20,000 dollars just for great calf muscles?” Like all good jokes, it’s funny because sometimes it seems as though it’s completely true. The debate about whether or not a college degree (or worse- a college degree in English) is worth it is constantly raging around every college student. For everyone who has taken the leap and is already walking up the hills to class every morning, it’s easier to laugh about the uncertainty facing graduates than to seriously consider it.

In Interdisciplinarity, Moran makes an argument not only for a more inclusive and less compartmentalized education but also for education itself. Moran quotes Aristotle saying that liberal educations are “something good in itself” and that the value of these educations are held not in necessarily in “usefulness” but in the idea that a person armed with a well-rounded education is inherently of value.

Additionally, if the only way people can get a quality higher education is by shoveling thousands of dollars out the door, shouldn’t the students get the best education possible? Doesn’t it make sense that along with overwhelming debt, college graduates leave school knowing not only their major but also the disciplines outside of it? Moran quotes an Italian “thinker” Giambattista Vico who claims that focusing only on some disciplines has “led to the neglect of a broad education in favour of specialist knowledge”, leaving some students who perhaps took only Psych classes realizing that maybe taking entry level calculus wasn’t such a bad idea after all. People don’t go to college because they want to master a single math equation or keep rereading the same novel every semester; people go to college so that when they graduate and head into the workforce they have a degree in their back pocket. Of course they will have a specific major, but with a liberal education they’ve also been exposed to dozens of other disciplines along the way.

The introduction of Interdisciplinarity advocates not just for the derided English majors, but for the embattled liberal education as a whole. So the next time anyone complains about walking up these beloved Geneseo hills, just remind them they are investing in their futures and not just great legs.

Moran, Joe. Interdisciplinarity. New York and London: Routledge, 2010. Print