Stanford students choose the humanities

Six Stanford undergraduates talk about what the humanities are and why they think it's important to explore the ideas, culture, and people that shape the human experience.

Video by Todd Holland; Photographs by Harrison Truong.

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Angie Lee: I think that there's a certain notion nowadays that studying the humanities or the arts is kind of a luxury. I would disagree because it's studying each other, it's studying what makes us human, it's studying how to make the world a better place.

Tristan Wagner: There's so much that's told about culture through art and through literature that you can't get in other ways. I think the one thing in common that holds all of the humanities together is a certain way of approaching problems, thinking through questions over a longer period of time in a way that I think prompts human action.

Irie Evans: Humanities allows us to connect with other people, and understand where they come from, and who they are. That's the most human practice of all.

Lorena Diosdado: The essence of existence is multi-faceted, difficult to understand, and difficult to explain. And so, I think the humanities combine all of these challenging questions that people want answered but have comfort in the fact that you may never get there, but finding value in an ongoing process of inquiry.

Panos Vandris: One thing I learned in my humanities courses is to never take anything said or written at face value. No person is 100% correct. One philosophical framework, or one historical construct cannot explain all of the complexity in everyday life.

Lina Wang: If nobody today goes into the humanities, what do we leave for the people 2,000 years from now? There's a lot of stories to be told by people today, art to be made, books to be written. I think that that is a very important societal need. I think other fields really allow us to be alive, but humanities allow us to live.

[00:02:04] [END OF AUDIO]