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Well-rounded is one of the many adjectives applied to graduates of Columbia University. Columbia University, with its rich core curriculum tradition, definitely places great emphasis on making its students well-rounded. On the one hand, well-roundedness is a human ideal; on the other hand, it is difficult to fully comprehend its implications on humanity.

A bacterium is well-rounded. It can maintain its internal state, respond to its external state, reproduce itself, and perform all the necessary chemical reactions and energy conversions to do so. Such an organism has all the machinery required to exist in its world.

A Volvox colony is also well-rounded in a similar sense. Thousands of flagellate cells organize themselves into a hollow spherical formation and swim together, grow together, survive together. But on the organismal level, a single Volvox can no longer be considered well-rounded. Some Volvox are somatic; they grow but do not reproduce. Some Volvox are motile, helping the entire colony find food and avoid danger. Some Volvox produce new colonies through repeated division; others reproduce sexually.

Would a human community be as well-rounded, then? Indeed, with each of us fulfilling our individual roles, we can collectively be complete. Therefore, it is with suspicion that I approach our desire to become “well-rounded citizens” ourselves. Surely, this is not the same well-roundedness that we seek. What does it mean for us to be well-rounded and is it beneficial? The ideal that we seek is purely individual. Each of us by ourselves can be said to be well-rounded: we do everything that the bacterium does. But we rarely think of ourselves in this light. We like to think that we are superior due to our reasoning abilities… that we are somehow higher on the importance scale. Indeed, one of the most important properties of humanity is its ability to subvert its natural instincts and behave the way that it thinks is best. Many of us call this intelligence.

Like Volvox, we form colonies. We are able to collaborate with each other on complex projects, fight together to defend a common ideal, and make sacrifices that benefit the community rather than the individual. A key enabler of this pattern is differentiation and specialization. Each of us has a different set of skills, but together we are able to do anything. So to form a society, we have given up a number of individual ideals, one of which being well-roundedness.

Does that mean that for society to exist we cannot and must not be well-rounded? Society certainly does not prevent any individual from exposure to multiple disciplines, but it does severely hinder such development. On the organismic level, there is a pressure to refine a narrow skill set within a rather short time frame in order to secure one’s livelihood. On the societal level, it is less efficient to nurture universal knowledge in each member rather than allow each member to specialize. It can be said to be expedient to give up individual completeness for societal completeness. Thus, well-roundedness is a selfish perspective.

Learning to appreciate art, music, and literature is more than just part of our desire to be well-rounded, however. These are a language that helps hold our community together. As individual Volvox cells attach to each other via strands of cytoplasm, we attach to each other through language. For society to exist, there must be a culture to bind us all together. We do not study the humanities so that we could be well-rounded citizens. We study the humanities so that we could build a better society together.

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