Message From the Head

What's the point of studying the humanities? Or studying Sociology and History? The Department of Humanities at Primeasia University as for many other universities, I am sure, has to frequently face this question and has to convincingly answer to the upcoming academic, corporate, political and entertainment big shots, and the society as a whole. To many, humanities are luxuries that employment-minded students can ill afford. We live in a world increasingly dominated by science and business. In science, mathematics and engineering classes, we are given facts, answers and knowledge, which give us a kind of certainty. But the humanities, leads us to go beyond that certainty, to a world of imagination with unknown challenges to face, which is especially important when it comes to claims about humanity, about what we are, where we came from, and even what we can be and should be. The humanities remind us that we have an enormous capacity for deluding ourselves. They also tell us that every single human is unique, different from every other human, and each of us keeps changing in unpredictable ways as well as the society’s do, in which we live. The humanities are more about questions than answers about our life and its meaning, and making a meaning out of it. It is all about fostering a healthy attitude of questioning about the nature of reality, about the purpose of life, and about what it means to be a good person. Particularly at the Department of Humanities of Primeasia University, studies of Sociology, History and English enable the students to identify their ‘self’ with this universe, to communicate and interact with the constituents of the universe; and know the ups and downs of the human race over the ages in doing so, to learn from the mistakes and not to re-invent the wheel. It prepares the students with a solid liberal arts foundation for a broad range of professional fields, including business, communication, education, law, medicine, and politics among others; and the opportunity to study and work across the world. To us, that is the point of studying the humanities: they keep us from being trapped by our own desire for certainty – a status-quo of knowledge.