I Wish Vinod Khosla Could Write A Decent Essay

It would really strengthen his argument against liberal arts education

In 1974, Vinod Khosla and my father were studying Electrical Engineering together at IIT-Delhi, the Indian university that is so insanely hard to get into that it’s ranked ahead of Harvard.

42 years later, Khosla has emerged, probably from the beach he’s diligently worked to snatch away from the public so that only he can enjoy it, to announce that an education in the humanities should be made optional.

“Humanities later,” he declares. He does not specify when.

The primary argument against Vinod Khosla’s proposal, which is to indefinitely postpone instilling a basic humanities foundation in our young people, is Vinod Khosla himself.

Because at 61, the only book he seems to have ever cracked open is by Malcolm Gladwell, which thankfully like the rest of the literate world, he appears to have found banal and reductionist.

Unfortunately for us, he conflates Gladwell’s flaws with all liberal arts majors: clumsy, incoherent and misguided.

Khosla then uses the proven scientific method known as “his opinion” to make this sweeping generalization of those liberal arts floozies at the New Yorker and The Atlantic:

When I do occasionally read articles from these publications, I make a sport of judging the quality of thinking of the writers as I read, based on false arguments, unsupported conclusions, confusion of story telling with factual assertions, mistaking quotes from interviews as facts, misinterpreting statistics, etc. Similar lack of cogent thinking leads to bad decisions, uninformed rhetoric, and lack of critical thinking around topics like nuclear power and GMOs.

Unencumbered by his uninformed rhetoric, unsupported conclusions and his confusion of storytelling with factual assertions, Khosla moves swiftly onward.

Bad argument, worse timing.

“If you live in France, shouldn’t you learn French? If you live in the computer world, shouldn’t you learn Computer Science?” asks Khosla, stopping short of the logical extension that would overturn the very premise of his rambling 22-minute essay:

If you live among humans, shouldn’t you learn about the human condition?

That is not a rhetorical question by the way; the answer is a resounding yes.

Have you heard the insane things people have been saying about other people lately? Our ignorance and paranoia as a nation is on full display this election cycle.

These are not bad people. They are good people, who are bewildered and frightened of people who don’t look and act like them.

They don’t have the cognitive tools and vocabulary for grasping the complexity of the world around them. They lack the discourse that would allow them to navigate and negotiate experiences outside of their own — and as a result, all they can do is lash out with a childlike intensity against “others.”

The Muslims. The refugees. The blacks. The transpeople. The immigrants.

This in turn, informs the national policy of the most powerful nation in the world — and we all suffer for it.

At a time when Sikhs Americans are getting kicked off planes, when 1 out of every 12 black men is behind bars, and anti-Muslim mosque attacks are on the rise, I would argue that prioritizing the humanities is the most relevant fucking thing in the world.

But it’s at this hateful juncture of the American story that Khosla suggests that cultural literacy can wait. He is wrong.

The value of a teacher guiding a bunch of 15–year olds through books like 1984, Slaughterhouse-Five and Heart of Darkness, to reach outside their personal experience and explore what it’s like to be someone else, somewhere else? It cannot be overstated.

The humanities have to be instilled in our young people from Day 1. It has to be a part of our education from childhood.

If you flunked your Calc and Econ courses like I did, you can become a copywriter, like I did.

But even if you are good at math, we all need to get comfortable from a young age with the idea that the world is full of gray areas, nuance, and that more often than not, there IS no right answer.

More humanities. Better humans.

I’m no authority on Khosla’s childhood, but if it was anything like my dad’s, there was no choice but to excel in a STEM field.

Back in the old country, his family would not have found it adorable if a young Khosla wanted to be a painter or an English teacher. They would have smacked him upside the head and told him to go make some damn money.

Khosla successfully did that. He immigrated to the U.S., did more math stuff, and made it rain.

So I will give Khosla a pass for putting a Wikipedia definition of “liberal arts” at the center of his argument.

Like my dad, he probably wasn’t exposed to the arts and humanities, which is why the most he can do is offer up this theoretical understanding of it:

The old version of the Liberal Arts curriculum was reasonable in a world of the far less complex 18th century Euro-centric world and an elitist education focused on thinking and leisure.

But I will not give him a pass for shitting on a discipline that he thinks hasn’t budged since John Locke.

Wake up and smell the gay coffee, Khosla.

The humanities is a rich and multivariate landscape of lenses that include intersectionality, post-colonialism, gender identity, structuralism and semiotics. (You can see more on my old Honors Humanities syllabus.)

There are American scholars walking among us, using these disciplines to imagine a better, more inclusive society for all of us.

While countries like India continue to worship STEM students partly out of economic necessity and partly because challenging authority scares the shit out of them, we have the incredible privilege to study both arts and sciences…and then bring that multidisciplinary education into a great career.

This should be celebrated and expanded across the country, not taken away from us.

But as I said before, Vinod Khosla himself is the strongest argument against Vinod Khosla’s argument.

Writing from his $1 billion pedestal, the only thing Khosla can definitively prove, is that he has no idea what I was doing in college:

Memorizing the Gettysburg address is admirable but ultimately worthless; understanding history is interesting, even useful, but not as relevant as topics from the Economist.

Study the humanities later? Vinod Khosla is living proof that “later” will never come.

“I do not believe that today’s typical liberal arts degree turns you into a more complete thinker; rather, I believe they limit the dimensionality of your thinking.” — Vinod Khosla

Like this? Hate this? Come yell at me on Twitter — I’m @nandoodles.