BH, our man in Sydney, forwards this delightful Tim Blair column from Sydney's Telegraph :" I abandoned my arts degree after just one year when I realised it could result in a career serving food. Or, worse, in Labor politics. This was a mistake, according to actress and anti-carbon dioxide activist Cate Blanchett, who last week revealed the almost mystical power of an arts degree. Blanchett said: “I’d like to posit today that it is the arts that have always been the driver for innovation and exploration. I chose these words precisely because they are always credited to science.”
Quite right. What do scientists know about exploration? We all remember arts graduate Neil Armstrong’s thrilling dissertation on lunar inequality and post-modernism during his landmark 1969 moon tutorial. Cate also had this to say: “I work in the arts, and you who have been exposed to these broad but vitally important series of disciplines, the arts are what we stay alive for, what we work all week for, what we dream about, what connects us and indeed, what some would say makes us human.”
Indeed, some would say that, in between hallucinogen doses. Blanchett also took on those who would dismiss arts degrees: “When someone asks ‘What the hell can you do with an arts degree?’ – what can the world do without them?”
The Telegraph‘s online readers quickly reminded Cate of various contributions made by non-arts graduates, including electricity, medicine, housing, dental surgery, anesthesia, plumbing, sanitation, roads, irrigation, solar power, agriculture, transport, mass production, the printed word, telephones, the internet, microphones, industry, television, cinema, photography, the compass, air conditioning, penicillin, business, the Theory of Relativity, cochlear implants, heart pace makers, radar, logistics, refrigeration, retailing, fire, botany, vaccination, microbial fermentation, pasteurisation, the internal combustion engine, chemistry, physics, algebra and aeronautics.
There may have been one or two others. On that final point, however, reader Philip asked a brilliant question: “I wonder if Cate would feel comfortable globe trotting on a jet built by arts graduates?” [Source] [BH]
