Unknown unknowns

I started thinking about this idea a couple of days ago at dinner, when I overheard a senior in computer science complain that his department didn’t adequately prepare him for a career in computer science. He argued that half of the people in the department wouldn’t know the first thing about how to make a website and that computer science majors spend their time rehashing problems that were solved 30–40 years ago. I understand the frustration he felt, but I’m afraid his critique of the department missed the mark. At the base of it, he is right — I have taken a fair number of computer science classes but, if it weren’t for my internship last summer at a tech company, I would have absolutely no idea what to do if someone told me to “make a website.” Indeed, I know much more about sorting, which is basically a solved problem, than I do about creating an Android app, something that makes a new millionaire (and a dozen would-be millionaires) every week.

But that’s not what we go to college for. Following that logic, we shouldn’t read Kant because he was relying on now-outdated mathematics and physics. Following that logic, physicists shouldn’t spend time fully learning classical mechanics or thermodynamics since these fields of study are not areas of active research today. And, most importantly, following that logic, forget about computer science — we should simply disband half the departments at this school since, let’s face it, they teach many, many things that are not directly helpful in securing a job.

In short, this disgruntled computer science major thought the University should be teaching him known unknowns. He knows that he doesn’t know x, y and z, and he wants to learn them. This is a perfectly valid desire and should absolutely be a part of any education. But, more fundamentally and much more difficult to legitimize, a University like ours should be teaching us unknown unknowns: things that we did not even know existed, let alone know anything about.

Often, when you look at a freshman’s fall schedule, you’ll see courses like math, French, English and chemistry. An academic adviser will often encourage such a student to look at courses in subjects they have barely even heard of, like anthropology, African American Studies or neuroscience. This is, of course, not to say that those students who go on in math, French, etc. are not settling for something easier, because God knows upper-level courses in those departments are unknown unknowns to me. The idea is that if you come to school knowing exactly what you want to learn, you are, in some ways, missing the mark.

Technical schools and summer internships are where people go to learn the technical things they know they need to know. While I agree that it is absolutely a part of the mission of a university to prepare you for a career, learning how to make an app or what makes a successful product campaign is, in some ways, the easy part. A university’s job in this arena is not to tell you things you know you’ll need to know — if you know you’ll need them, you’ll most likely find them along the way. But what about the things you don’t know you don’t know, the ideas and concepts that shape our world and that we might not have heard of at age 18?

In short, universities live in the world of unknown unknowns, which may be why it’s so hard to pinpoint what they are for and what their essential purpose is. Maybe after a few years of study we’ll learn what we want to learn and begin going off in that direction, but the trouble with unknown unknowns is that they are impossible to tie down. So we’ll always, I believe, need places like this to help us figure out just what it is we don’t know we don’t know.

Luke Massa is a philosophy major from Ridley Park, Pa. He can be reached at lmassa@princeton.edu.