From a reader:

Dear Mr. Goldberg,
I feel the need to stand up for the Humanities, as the attitude expressed by the writer of the letter you cite in your post “On Rigor & Academia” is pretty typical of science faculty members at the university at which I study. Just to be clear, I am a PhD student in English at a well respected university in California, and have been responsible for designing, teaching, and evaluating over ten of my own courses. In other words, I am not simply a TA, but have been charged with designing rigorous writing and literature courses. I am currently teaching freshman composition, mostly to science majors, and I think many of them would tell you that my course is every bit as challenging as their chemistry classes. The notion that “Quantum Field Theory” is somehow more difficult than writing should insult you as a writer, Mr. Goldberg. That branch of physics is simply something that a person is expected to know in order to advance within their field. While this person you cite was probably doing a less than stellar job in his or basic composition class (note the appalling lack of commas in his or her letter), I was reading and understanding Faulkner and Joyce, and probably editing his mentor’s astoundingly poorly worded grant proposal. My point is that any discipline is hard for someone who doesn’t enjoy it. I am sure I could be a competent scientist if I worked at it, but I don’t want to. I apparently just want to smoke my cigarettes and drink coffee while scientists do important things. Never mind the fact that teachers of writing help students express themselves in more professional, artful, and nuanced ways. Who has ever gotten a job because their application made them seem more competent and interesting? Just as I appreciate the kind of analytical skills my students learn in their science classes, scientists should appreciate the fact that humanities instructors are most often the ones to remind students that lab reports and research proposals probably shouldn’t read like Facebook posts, tweets (the bane of my existence), or text messages (lol GatsB is krzy). Thanks for your time.

A few thoughts. I like this part: “My point is that any discipline is hard for someone who doesn’t enjoy it.” And I agree that the hard-sciences types can be arrogant (I get a lot of e-mail from scientists who make non-science-related arguments and appeal to their own authority as scientists as proof they’re right about, say, tax cuts or Avatar). And I do think it’d be unfair if I came across as suggesting that stupid people can get a PhD in English or that it’s easy to be a professor of history.

As for me taking offense at someone suggesting that writing isn’t as hard as quantum physics . . . eh, I don’t know. Again, I agree that anything you enjoy is likely to be easier than something you don’t enjoy. And while I may not be a great writer, I’m confident I’m better at it than the average nuclear physicist. But, there’s a freedom to writing that makes comparisons to physics problematic. I can do whatever I want when writing — Look, Cows! — without much harm. If you do the same sort of thing in physics, you might blow up a city or create a new race of opossum-human hybrids.

I guess I still have a lot of respect for the hard sciences (perhaps because I’m so bad at doing science, but like learning about it). Part of it has to do with my bias for factual correctness. Obviously, science makes room for theories, different interpretations, etc. But there’s a concreteness, a non-fudgability to science that the humanities don’t have (but manatees do — man, they just make stuff up all the time). De Tocqueville talked about how there are such things as “clear but false ideas.” The humanities makes room for such things in a way that science does not. You can spend your whole life getting Moby Dick totally wrong, and still teach Moby Dick. In short, science doesn’t have much tolerance for wrong answers. The humanities, generally, have a lot of tolerance for “different points of view.” That doesn’t mean the humanities are objectively easy, but they still strike me as comparatively easier.

Or, I can sum up my view of why the humanities are less rigorous with even more pith: There’s no math.