It’s Time for the Humanities To Learn Some Science

Everybody knows about Mark Zuckerberg's journey from Harvard dorm room to Silicon Valley titan.

Zuckerberg’s story — including Facebook’s numerous legal issues — is often used to highlight the significance of ethics to technology, and to STEM more broadly. But at Harvard and beyond, we’re overlooking the reciprocal need for exposure to STEM among students in non-STEM fields, with serious implications for policy, ethics, and governance.

Harvard’s graduation requirements make the imbalance clear. STEM students must complete Expository Writing and three General Education courses as well as two divisional distribution requirements in the social sciences and humanities. Meanwhile, humanities and social science students only take a GenEd and a divisional distribution course in STEM, in addition to a Quantitative Reasoning with Data course.

That’s a problem. Informed participation in societal debates — such as those surrounding technology regulation, climate change, public health, or bioethics — requires a foundational understanding of the relevant scientific principles. Harvard’s requirements ought to equip students to critically engage with these debates, evaluate scientific claims, and understand the potential and limitations of scientific knowledge. While universal requirements aim to integrate enough STEM into all students’ studies to fulfill these goals, they fall short.

What’s more, many students find ways to bypass developing the skills these requirements are meant to cultivate. Astronomy 2: Celestial Navigation is “a classic choice to fulfill QRD” according to one recent review on the Q Guide. Likewise, Engineering Sciences 139: Innovation in Science and Engineering, which focuses primarily on teaching entrepreneurship through activities like company pitches to venture capitalists, allows students to meet distributional requirement while avoiding the core competencies or foundational knowledge of STEM.

In principle, there’s nothing wrong with students taking courses on the softer side of STEM if interested. But classes that focus on navigation or business development seem unlikely to achieve the intended goals of these requirements.

Beyond the uneven requirements split, STEM concentrations at Harvard often also integrate ethics and social sciences into their curricula — seemingly in response to the many sordid examples of technologists overlooking the ethical dimensions of their work. For instance, Computer Science concentrators have a Computation and the World requirement, as well as the Embedded EthiCS program, which integrates ethics directly into technical courses. But many non-STEM students have little-to-no engagement with STEM in concentration requirements, depriving them of a deeper understanding of how technology intersects with law, policy, and societal welfare.

And while medical school admissions and engineering accreditation generally require exposure to the humanities, the converse is rarely a condition for professional pathways in the humanities and social sciences. Pre-law students, for example, tend to focus on a specific topic to stand out during the law school admissions process, often enabled by interdisciplinary concentrations like History and Literature or Social Studies, which require students to define narrow, specialized topics of study.

The consequences of this blindspot became glaringly apparent during a congressional hearing featuring Zuckerberg in 2018. What was meant to be a critical examination of Facebook's ethical practices turned into an illustration of how ill-prepared many lawmakers were to engage with pressing technological problems.

When senators struggle to grasp the basics of how Facebook operates, it isn’t just an embarrassing display — it’s a warning sign. We often worry about technologists like Zuckerberg navigating ethics and law without proper guidance. But the fact that many policymakers lack the technical understanding needed to hold these technologists accountable is an issue equally pressing.

As we face a future dominated by issues posed by AI, climate change, cybersecurity, bioengineering, and more, the ability of non-technologists to understand and critically assess new and emerging technologies is crucial. It’s time for a more balanced educational approach — one that equips all students, regardless of their field, with the skills needed to navigate the many intersections between science and society in the modern world.

Charlotte R. Rediker ’26, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Social Studies concentrator in Lowell House.