Returning students at KAISTwould all have experienced thesame feeling when they accessedthe school website to scavenge for humanities courses:shocked at the lack of empty spots to register for.The reason for this sudden disappearance of possibleclasses to take was due to a reduction of Korean-taughthumanities classes by the School of Humanities andSocial Sciences. Perhaps this issue would not havegained huge schoolwide attention if humanities courseswere not mandatory. However, KAIST requires studentsto take at least a minimum of 21 credits in “Humanitiesand Social Science”. The question of whether sportsclasses at KAIST, another graduation requirement,should be mandatory had been discussed in a previousissue of the Herald. This time, the writers of thesociety division would like to kick-start the semesterby addressing the so-called “Gyeoyangdaeran”, whichtranslate into “humanities crisis.”

Mandatory credits in humanities courses are policiesemployed by most colleges throughout the world. Infact, it is also used as a tool to differentiate colleges.For instance, the University of Chicago is widelyrecognized as a reputable institution due to its “Core”program, which stresses foundational learning overmultiple academic disciplines. This emphasis can beattributed to many reasons but one of the major reasonsis that humanities courses spur creativity. Especially atschools that focus their academic interests heavily intoengineering and science, it can be easy to miss out onthe human aspects of scientific discovery. As academicsubjects become more and more sophisticated, theboundaries between them vanish and skills learned in onediscipline become useful in other disciplines. As HenriPoincare has stressed, the humanities help elucidate actsof creativity such as the scientific discovery.

Another reason why the humanities cannot be excludedfrom one’s education is the increasing importance ofinterdisciplinary research. The MIT Media Lab is anexample of interdisciplinary research with huge benefitsfor society. Additionally, the renewed boom in artificialintelligence (AI) showed that the focus of current dayresearch is to benefit society at large. AI is alreadyinfluencing human activities such as education, health,and entertainment. Literary texts are being analyzedwith graph theory and the understanding of the historyof music is being deepened through pattern recognitionsoftware. With the turn of the 21st century, there hasbeen an increased hybridization of academic subjectsand to send out engineers and scientists without at least abasic knowledge of different fields in the social scienceswould be disastrous.

Last but not least, for the students of KAIST, it mustbe stressed that science is a subject that is not done inhuman isolation. Cooperation between members, theimpact of research on society and the presentation ofscientific discoveries are all aspects which benefitthrough humanities and social sciences courses. To giveOppenheimer his fair credit, it was his persistent andadamant effort which led to the creation of the Acheson-Lilienthal Report and paved the way for an internationalsystem to maintain atomic energy. As a large percentageof KAIST students will participate in research at somepoint in their career, a knowledge in the humanities canonly benefit their futures. Also, the mandatory policiesgive a chance for students to learn something completelynew.