My dad has a saying: “The fact that people ask whether you believe in something is a good indication it doesn’t exist.” A Google search for “Does God exist” pulled up 103,000 Web sites, but a search for “Does Clinton exist” “did not match any documents.” You’d think someone would be wondering.

I think that also goes for whether things matter. If people keep debating whether something is important, then maybe its days are numbered.

Thus, I noted one of this spring’s courses: “Does Literature Matter?” Granted, I’m not taking this course, and I can’t speak about its content, but the title amuses me.

I do know that my I-Hum lectures and sections addressed this topic. My professors debated whether literature mattered, whether it’s worth studying the humanities, etc., and they always came up with the same answer: yes.

Of course they’re going to say that the humanities matter, after staking their intellectual and professional value in them, just as most psychotherapists and their patients will say that treatment helped. Who would voluntarily devalue their own profession or admit that something they’ve put extensive time and money into doesn’t matter?

But the question is not “Does it matter?” but “Does it matter very much compared to other things?”

“Does X matter?” is almost a pointless question, because in a chaotic world, everything matters. You’ve probably heard the saying about a butterfly causing a hurricane. Maybe someone’s book on the symbolism in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” will inspire a teenager to buy her first lit-crit book upon which she will become interested in scholarly pursuits and do well enough in school to come to Stanford, where she will start out as a humanities major but realize that the humanities aren’t really going anywhere and thus switch to management science and engineering, make several million dollars and donate it all to the Rewilding Fund to preserve wild spaces. So yes, I’ll agree with the world’s humanities scholars — studying the humanities matters.

But how much do the humanities matter compared to other things?

In science and engineering, a common way to find out whether something matters is to remove it, at least in a simulation, and see how things are different.

Imagine the world without literary criticism. I’ll grant that it would lack some of the good aspects of lit crit, but I don’t know whether it would be so different. But then imagine the world without computer science or biology.

And for courses, imagine a Stanford education without the gender studies requirement or without I-Hum. If you performed a long-term study on students with and without the humanities GERs, I’m not sure you’d find much difference. If there were a noticeable difference, I’d expect it to be that the students who weren’t forced to take humanities would read more after college.

I’m sure that plenty of people have had great experiences in their I-Hum and humanities courses. There must be scores of students who think they got something out of their required courses.

Yet the question is not “Did they get something out of these courses?” but “Did they get more from them than they would have gotten from other courses?”

I hinted at this to my I-Hum teaching fellow. “I-Hum is bad for my education,” I said. She didn’t see how this could be true. But it seems to me that even if we’re getting something out of our humanities GERs, we’re getting less out of them than we’d get from other uses of our time, energy and course credits.

General requirements “hurting” students? How can that be, you might protest. But I think it’s happening even now. Someone I know from my stochastic processes class said one reason American students are so far behind their foreign counterparts in science and technical subjects might be that we’re held back by all these breadth requirements.

And there are other ways general requirements can hurt students. They create the situation I hoped I’d left behind in high school — students taking courses they’d rather not be in. Besides being hard on teachers, taking courses just to fulfill requirements leads to the unpleasant feeling that you’re being forced to learn something you don’t think is important and trying to squeak by while diverting as little time and effort as possible from things that actually are interesting and important to you.

So what’s my solution?

Easy. The same way that honors work in a major is optional, GERs should be optional. Just as students can decide whether fulfilling honors requirements and earning the distinction will benefit their education, students should be allowed to decide whether they want to earn distinction in each of the GER areas.

As for people who keep arguing that the humanities really matter and people need to study them, I dedicate this quote from “Hamlet”: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

Andrea Runyan is a junior in mathematical and computational science. If you agree or disagree with anything in this column or any of her other columns, please, please e-mail her at arunyan@stanford.edu.