Paul Campos commits a really good deconstruction of the NY Times article on Jason Lieb’s resignation for harassment. He teases out all the understated assumptions in the article, and exposes the biases that minimized the consequences of Lieb’s actions…and the culpability of the institutions that have been hiring him.
But this is also a case where I’ll tell you to read the comments. They’re entertaining. The audience seems to be lawyers and the so-called softer side of academia, and they’re all talking about how the sciences get so much more money, and how so many scientists are dismissive of philosophy and the liberal arts and think the humanities are worthless, and how STEM is hostile to women.
As someone imbedded in that STEM community, I would just like to say that they’re completely right. It’s a serious problem.
My experience is that humanities faculty find STEM worthless, not the other way around. I’ve encountered humanities PhDs who who say, without shame, “Oh I always hated math.” I’ve never that I recall meeting a physicist who says the equivalent: “Oh, I hated reading good literature.” I’ve argued with humanities faculty who contend that our general ed (41 hrs) requires too much math (6 hrs) and too much science (7 hrs). The remaining 28 hours are from the humanities. Our honors program is heavily biased toward humanities, and when we propose honors content courses, say honors calculus, they are shot down by the humanities dominated honors faculty.
Anyway, if you ask me the real culprit is college cost. That has lead us to the current nightmare scenario where more kids, often it seems at the insistence of helicopter parents, are migrating to STEM. Ten years ago our freshman class might have 300/1200 in STEM. Now it is more like 500/1200. That would seem to be good news for us, but it’s not. Going into STEM because it is more lucrative is not a recipe for success. But who can blame them or their parents? The thought of a engineering degree plus 100K$ in debt is a lot easier to swallow than the thought of a English degree and $100K in debt.
As for women in STEM, while there are problems in all disciplines and all levels, and we can always do better, I will restate what I stated on a thread several months ago. The real problem is farther upstream, K-12. By the time they get to university, we are faced with, not creators of, the male-biased STEM demographics.
Cost is a major problem. It also fuels another trend: driving students into business courses. If there is one thing humanities and sciences can agree on, it’s that business is not an academic subject, and that it belongs in a vo-tech school somewhere.
I certainly have seen the bias in course requirements: it’s the same at my university. It is entirely possible to get a degree here and never take a serious math or science course (as is common, we’ve got the rocks for jocks course), but science students are expected to take a fair bit of humanities and social sciences.
But what is the source of the problem? I’d love to be able to say that I’m at a university that requires all graduates to have taken math through trigonometry/pre-calculus, that general chemistry and first year non-calculus physics are required, and at least one biology course must be taken, even if you’re an art or English major. But it’s not going to happen.
All sides of the campus will make reasonable criticisms that we can’t overload our students with required courses, but I guarantee you that the loudest protests will come from the science buildings, where everyone will freak out at the huge additional course load it will impose on us. And if the administration then does what is necessary and opens up many new faculty lines to teach introductory math, physics, chemistry, and biology (hah, not that that would ever happen),then the humanities/social sciences cadre will be outraged at the additional influx of resources into the already relatively rich side of campus.
It’s fine to point out the unfairness in the course requirements for your standard BA degree, and how they’re light on sciences. But to correct it means we science people would need to make a huge investment in time and effort to open the doors to students who are a) poorly prepared, and b) unwilling and uninterested. It would also require a massive buy-in from all universities. If UMM, for example, were alone in demanding, say, 20 credit hours in the sciences for all degrees, we’d further imbalance enrollments in the sciences, and see loads of non-science students scampering away to all the other schools around us that don’t force them to take math.
Hey! I’ve commented in that thread, representing the M in STEM. Which I don’t think belongs to the so-called softer side of anything (though we are rather data-free). … And your analysis @2 is right on. It’s a real double-bind.
Bill Bruckner
Huh? Does not follow. “I hate maths” =/= “STEM is worthless”. Besides, yes, you’ll find a great number of people who say “I always hated languages in school”. None of this is a general verdict on the usefulness or lack thereof of certain fields.
Though I do admit that as a humanities major you’re better equipped for seeming well educated at parties not 90% populated by STEM people.
But that’s quite besides the general point here.
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Makes you wonder: were there any women on the hiring committee? I recently read an article from a female entrepreneur about a hiring decision in her company: The male candidate was very competent and they wanted to hire him, and there was just a last interview which was especially about social aspects. Afterwards the female members vetoed him because of the way he behaved himself around them and how he interacted with them.
Few people will openly say “women don’t belong in the workplace” at a job interview, but if you treat the male members with respect and expect the female members to serve coffee, you show your true colours.
Clearly STEM academia has a major problem with the way it treats women, but if non-STEMmers are running a diss party in the comments, I would suggest that they are ignoring their own fields’ problems with women.
#4,
It does, with a modest extrapolation. It is a symptom of the larger problem. In a long career in academia (at a liberal arts university) I have witnessed more antagonism from humanities directed at STEM than the other way around. And if a STEM faculty hates the humanities, it is less acceptable than humanities faculty despising STEM–which is sometimes worn as a badge of honor. I have heard humanities faculty state in curriculum debates (at my liberal arts college) that “our students do not need so much math and/or science.” I have never heard a science prof (again, at my liberal arts college) say: “our students do not need so much writing.” In my experience, you are dead wrong.
Bill B @6: OTOH I have heard far more biologists of varying levels of distinction opine on sociology or philosophy or anthropology with no clue about the subjects than the other way round. I have heard sociologists etc speak with authority and competence about the effects of technology, which is legitimate, but rarely (especially wrongly) about the details of the science. I have also witnessed, what is much more hopeful, dialog between the two that leads to greater understanding.
Bill Buckner
Have you considered that there’s usually a considerable difference in power and funding between STEM and humanities? If you’re always the first to be threatened by cuts, the first to be declared not necessary, constantly being called “not a science” and “what people too stupid to study real science do”, you get quite a bit defensive.
Giliell,
I don’t know about power, but I am keenly aware of the funding differences. I have always had a grant that paid for 1/2 (now 1/4) release time. When I came up for tenure I actually had someone (from History) suggest that since I was only teaching half as much, perhaps I should have to wait twice as long to be eligible.
Another place where I see antagonism from the humanities toward STEM: our provost is a scientist. It is not hard to hear the complaint from humanities faculty: what does a scientist know about our fields, or how to evaluate our professional products, etc? Our previous provost was a classicist. I heard way less complaining that a classicist does not know how handle scientists.
In most of what you mention I have no experience. I have not heard anyone threaten to cut English or sociology or history, etc. Now I have heard people debate about what is and is not science. It is true, I think, that many scientists do not consider the social sciences to be science–although many do appreciate that social scientists are often better at statistical analysis than we are. (A litmus test on this is: in which college is Psychology housed? For us it is in the science college.)
Has someone from the STEM faculty actually said to you that humanities are “what people too stupid to study real science do”? That has actually been said to you, not as a piss-poor attempt at a joke but in all seriousness? I think an appropriate response would be a kick in the shin.
Giliell
Indeed! I hate, hate, hate maths with a passion and yet I obtained a STEM degree (system analysis). I basically purged from my brain most of the math knowledge I had obtained once I was finished with the courses; nowadays I use a calculator even for such simple operations as, say, 146 + 37 (it’s not that I’m actually that bad at math, but just incredibly lazy with it; I can still solve somewhat complex equations and, with a little rereading of my math books, I could probably go back to using some advanced concepts, but so far I haven’t needed it and I’m quite glad for it).
Bill @9
I’ve been told versions of that. And yes, once from a faculty member, who did not say it outright, but implied strongly enough for even me to get what he meant…basically that it was a good thing I was “just” an education major. Ohhh, but he was ‘just joking’; maybe that doesn’t count.
Now that said, I attended Erskine — which has been mocked and berated here at least twice (and very rightly so, too!!!). I can’t speak for now, with the current regime and massive fundy takeover, but when I was there, we were required to take science classes in order to graduate, even with a humanities major. Except for Astronomy, I took mine in summer school at another college. Biology and physics.
One thing my dad taught me, growing up, was that business classes are a complete waste of time until you already know something. His perspective was that of an undergrad business prof.
Business, as far as I can see so far (it’s been only a year or so) is about humanities and bean counting. Might as well just study humanities and learn the bean counting by counting actual beans in your genetics class.
I can’t really speak to the faculty – I’m just a student, and only took what STEM classes I had to as prerequisites for my major. But I’ve witnessed some pretty ableist rhetoric from the STEM side in my time. I have a particularly hard time dealing with numbers – it takes a while to “parse” even if it’s something easy like basic arithmetic. I can do decent enough when it comes to solving them, but I need like twice the time to work on things than other people do and I have a hard time matching equations to concepts ala statistics or geometry.
There’s a lot of like “good math skills are the only meaningful kind of intelligence, anyone can read a book or write an essay” rhetoric that gets thrown around over here, especially by Engineering majors in my experience.
this reminds me of a conservation I had with a friend of mine concerning a young relation of his. I suggested that it would be wise if they took some science in college even if they were not a science major. He was against it, I asked why? He said, that you did not need to study science you could just hire scientists if you needed some.
I was stopped cold I did have anything to say that would “change” that idea!
uncle frogy
(dam) I did not have anything I could say that would change that idea !
uncle frogy
Simple, if you hire scientists, you need to know enough that what they say sounds plausible and realistic.
Nobody can manage stuff effectively without knowing the basics of what they are managing.
Vivec,
No doubt that some STEM majors can be arrogant. It is reciprocated, by the way–I believe a common insult directed toward STEM students from non-STEM students is that STEM students have no common sense. (It is perhaps better now that “nerd” is cool, at least for the time being.)
Now if a STEM faculty member is insulting you, you should definitely report it to the department chair. That does happen now and then, and my experience as a STEM chair and working with STEM chairs is that they will take it very seriously if you complain with any variation of “Professor X is dismissive, condescending, or tries to make me feel dumb.”
bill buckner
Great! Please explain then how this particular professor who is prone to rape was not charged with a crime, and was not immediately fired, and was hired by university number three despite formal complaints.
Tethys
FFS what a stupid comment. How would I know why this professor was not charged with a crime? I’d guess it was at least in part due to the repulsive old boy’s network, and the temptation, yielded to, to sweep embarrassment until the rug at all cost. There may also have been lawyers involved at some level, especially when it came to not warning subsequent employers if no charges were filed. It is very risky (though maybe the right thing to do) to issue such a warning. Colleges are dealing with a similar issue with students. When a student is accused of a sexual crime but ultimately no charges are filed (say the victim decides not to press charges) and the student transfers, you cannot, at least as it now stands, warn the new school that they might have a predator on their hands. This is clearly a problem screaming for a solution.
But back to your stupid comment. I have been discussing attitudes between STEM and the humanities at a general level. I was not discussing covering up crimes. Try to pay attention.
The subject of the OP is how universities utterly fail to address rape and sexual harassment by faculty, and allow the criminal to quietly resign and go on to fresh victims. But sure, yeah, you go on derailing it into a discussion about STEM versus other areas of study.
Interesting. Whenever I hear people say they hate math, that they never understood it and that it’s useless, it almost universally sounds like grudging respect towards the field.
Like they are/ but not really admitting that the field is too complex for them, so they are going to try and excuse their ignorance by claiming it’s useless.
Humanities, on the other hand, are barely worth being called a field. They fall under “common sense” and what are those people actually studying? They are just getting high most of their years at the uni. (in my country at least, that is the general opinion)
Just the impression I always got among my peers.
Anyway, Bill Buckner,
You have your experience, I have mine, other commenters have theirs… but if everyone’s (in this thread) experience differs from yours, maybe it’s time to consider that yours is an exception?
Oops, my #20 was addressed to Bill Buckner.
Further to the subject of paying attention, you failed to answer my question. You contend that faculty takes complaints of harassment seriously. I pointed out that a rape and formal complaints at university number 2 were not taken seriously, and your response to my complaint was
I hope your students get much better responses from you when they point out errors in your logic.
Tethys,
Bullshit,
This was the last 80% of the OP:
My comments are on-topic. Not to mention PZ offered a lengthy response to by first post. You (alone) made a stupid comment to me, and now you are trying to cry that I derailed. I repeat, bullshit.
Tethys,
Holy fuck, you are also a quote-miner. You write as if my comment that your comment was stupid was about the complaints of rape, when it was (very clearly) about the stupidity you asking me, in a snarky way, why the professor, in a particular case about which I have no knowledge, was not immediately fired. And I did answer it– essentially I answered “how the hell should I know?” and gave speculation in #19.
Oh! The predictable “I feel sorry for your students.” Shall we now move on to the “I don’t really believe you have a Ph.D. and I doubt you are actually a professor and/or a scientist?” Those brilliant critiques usually go hand-in-hand.
Bill Bruckner
The point Tethys is making is that if a faculty apparently doesn’t care about sexual misconduct, harassment and indeed rape of their own students, it’s hard to believe that they will give a fuck about “they were mean to a humanities major”
Giliell,
That does not at all follow, in fact the reverse might be true. That is, in this fucked up world, with human nature being what it is, I might, as a chair, be more willing to (and I did) call a professor in for a come-to-Jesus moment if he or she is being mean/rude/condescending/insulting to a student (humanities or otherwise) than to do the right thing when a big-shot professor is a predator and should be fired. To do the first is quite easy.
I hope I would do the right thing, but I can only say that I have said to rude professors “you can’t treat students like that” and, fortunately, I never had to deal with a professor under my supervision accused of sexual misconduct by a student. I hope I would do the right thing, and I’m sure I’d report it to the Title IX office, but if I had lawyers threatening to sue me if I fired him.. maybe I’d be a coward. I don’t know. Just being honest.
Philosophy is useful. Is philosophers I can’t stand. They are all arrogant wankers, and while I am sure there are exceptions, I haven’t met any.
My experience is very similar to Bill Buckner’s; so he is, at least, not the only exception.
Bill Buckner
Considering that the vast majority of sexual assaults go unreported, and that sexual predators are very good at blending into the 90 percent of non-rapists, this is not surprising. It is statistically certain that there is at least one predator on your staff, and that there have been many unreported incidences.
You may wish to go back and reread what I actually wrote. It was not “I feel sorry for your students.” The bit I have quoted is complete projection on your part. I believe that you have an alarming tendency towards belittling people who criticize you. Did that arrogance come with the PHD?
Arrogance is the original sin of academia. This applies to all disciplines. It’s not so much what you have to study as how you have to climb the slippery pole, and by the time you’ve got your PhD you usually tend to be (a) convinced you’re bright and (b) isolated from practitioners of other disciplines. Toss in a hefty dose of reinforcement from your close peers and you get what I’ve run into: scientists who think they know ethics, and ethicists who think they know science. Fortunately, both are generally capable of learning, it just doesn’t happen often enough. [And, yes, I chuckled when I wrote “original sin.”]
Bill Buckner:
What’s the problem supposed to be? This isn’t antagonism. Isn’t it the case that people aren’t capable (or much less capable) of evaluating things which are outside their area of expertise? It’s not claiming that the person’s (scientific) expertise is useless, full stop, but that it’s useless for evaluating something that isn’t science.You’re also implying the scientists were complaining too, but that there was way less of this (valid, legitimate) criticism coming from them? What would they have had to complain about? Was there some classicist provost somewhere who planned to cut funding for sciences to put it into non-lucrative humanities research, to hire enough not-highly-paid humanities faculty, to provide more inexpensive humanities facilities? How would this have made a significant dent to the science programs, such that science faculty would have just as much reason to be concerned?
But besides anecdotes about internecine squabbling, there’s a much more general phenomenon that you don’t seem to be aware of (or you’re not willing to acknowledge and take seriously). Some people, especially it seems those who were instilled with a lot of positivist ideas decades ago when it might have appeared to be more tenable (if you paid no attention to the pushback it got even then), would say that scientific knowledge is the only genuine sort of knowledge there is. The implication of that sort of position seems to be that everything else in academia is bullshit or useless or not even possibly about features of the objective world, like theology or astrology or reading entrails or like some kind of intellectual fraud is being committed. (And you can tell this is true, because who has ever made medicines or technologies or made the whole modern world itself, with something like literature research? … so the absurd thought process is apparently supposed to go.) There is no comparable tradition of humanities scholars making wild claims to the effect that the whole of natural science is just a big pointless lie, since only the humanities offer access to the real and only and actual truth about everything. I can’t even think of a single humanist who’s ever said anything like that, in contrast to the very large list of scientists and philosophers (very well respected and firmly in the establishment) who’ve forwarded such pro-science and anti-humanities positions. Coupled with that is the weird expectation that humanities should somehow have the same standards (use the same methods, explain things with the same concepts, etc.) as the sciences — and when that isn’t the case, simply because of the nature of the subject, that’s supposed to be evidence that they’re not legitimate or not to be taken seriously, because being like science is what would qualify them as legitimate.
In atheist circles especially, right here on this blog for instance, there are people who scoff at the mere concept of “other ways of knowing” (other than scientific, empirical knowledge) — the most charitable reading is that they’re only scoffing at some kind of mystical knowledge that religious people (or psychics, etc.) purport to have, which of course is worth scoffing at, but the trouble is that it comes without even imagining how it’s supposed to be interpreted as a claim about all scientific and non-scientific domains. At best, it’s like those fields don’t even occur to them as producing a sort of knowledge that they’d need to take into account somehow, when making grand claims like this… in which case, what does that say about their attitudes concerning those fields? At least when it comes to bogeymen like theology or pseudoscience, some scientists recognize them as something that merits some small degree of attention or analysis, if only to refute or discredit the claims … but what about the humanities?
If you’re just not sensitive (or not paying attention) to how, in all sorts ways, with all sorts of misleading or thoughtless or deliberately insulting rhetoric, humanists tend to get lumped in with liars, quacks, frauds, bullshit artists, people suffering from delusions or hallucinations, etc. — even by people who’d claim to appreciate literature, art, music, history, philosophy, etc. — then maybe you just need to get out more or wake the fuck up, because it happens a fucking lot. But the divide, such as it is, the attitudes various people have about STEM or non-STEM, has to do with a lot more than simply who was whining about what in one of your faculty meetings.
@consciousness razor 31
Funnily enough, the one time I noticed the “humanities denialism” thing was when I was taking a multidisciplinary course on sex and gender. It had a neurologist, evolutionary biologist, sociologist, and evolutionary psychologist (aka quack) teaching the course.
They all kind of gave different views on the subject (said neurologist has been in the news for supporting gay and trans conversion therapy, and did such in the class as well) but one thing that stood out was the introduction lesson by the Evopsych professor, where at least half of the presentation was about how they thought sociology was bullshit pseudoscience (irony!) that only addresses the proximate cause of behavior, not the ultimate cause.
David Lisak is a clinical psychologist who has devoted his professional life to studying the causes and consequences of sexual violence. His papers should be required reading for anyone who is in a position of authority, and other people who are legally required to report abuse as part of their jobs. Several are available as PDFs at his website.
Just to add something (as a woman in STEM) – STEM has its problems, but something I noticed was that as far as *fucking your students* went, it seems tolerated to the point of ‘meh’ in the Art and Literature program of the schools I’ve been at, and (if an accusation had merit) grounds for firing in STEM. Sexism takes different forms in different places. Certain fields may be more accepting of female students, but also more accepting of professor fucking them.
” It is true, I think, that many scientists do not consider the social sciences to be science”
How could anyone argue that they are science? Being a science is not a value judgement. Mathematics is not a science either.
My experiences (admittedly only as a doctoral student, between Classics and Medieval History, in England) of academic backbiting were somewhat different. Humanities and sciences seemed to inhabit their own almost entirely separate worlds, and when the one thought about the other at all it was along the lines of “what do they do there? Buggered if I know!” The Other Side was a sacred mystery on the very bounds of perception.
This meant that we could safely turn our rivalries and backbiting inwards of course. Modern historians looked down on Medieval and Ancient historians for having such little surviving evidence to work with that you could get through it all in an afternoon, and we looked right back down at them for having so much evidence that there was barely anything left to figure out from it. Both Ancient and Modern historians looked down at Medievalists for studying, in their opinion, a dull and worthless period where nothing of note happened, and we returned the favour by tutting at their ignorance of just how central and important to world affairs the Medieval centuries were. People studying Ancient and Medieval literature sneered at those studying Modern literature (oh, so you do what we do but in your native language, not an obscure long-dead one, how quaint!), and got the pushback that they weren’t nearly as sophisticated in their approaches because they didn’t buy nearly as much into trendy modern literary theories as the modernists. Historians of ideas thought that philosophers were ill equipped to talk about ancient and medieval philosophy because they were hopelessly concerned with whether it was true or credible, rather than the cultural context it came from, and the philosophers likewise wondered why we weren’t engaging with the philosophy as ideas in isolation but rather trying to see in it expressions of culture and circumstance. And everyone looked down on Divinities students, of course. And then you get even closer to home and the vitriol gets even worse – how can an historian of Ottonian court culture in the 11th century possibly understand the development of the Universities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries! How can a mere archaeologist give us any meaningful analysis at all on early Roman imperialism! How delightfully naive this Egyptologist is for interpreting Alexander in straightforwardly Pharaonic terms, rather than privileging the Greek accounts of him – why did we deign let them have a crack at our guy again?
Perhaps we were lucky (?) enough at Oxford that there were so many academics in the place that they could inhabit separate worlds, rather than having to exist cheek by jowl with the other side. But I suspect backbiting and infighting is endemic throughout academia, and the preferred targets just happen to differ based on circumstance.
Do we have to go back to this idea of social construct again?
I give you a hint: Take the word “science” and translate it into German. You get the word “Wissenschaft”. And then you get “Naturwissenschaft” (science of nature) and “Geisteswissenschaft” (science of the mind). Just because English neatly separates those groups with a word does not mean those are true divides handed down by the gods.
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Let’S not forget all those STEM people who think that everything in the humanities is just stuff they can make a competent statement on because. Like Dawkins opining on about everything, thinking that being a native speaker with a posh accent makes him qualified in English linguistics and stuff.
@35 vytautasjanaauskas
Please inform me what makes biology a science but anthropology, economics or sociology not sciences.
consciousness razor,
They are not complaining that our provost is cutting their funding (he isn’t). They are complaining that we shouldn’t have a scientist in charge, because he doesn’t know their fields. They are complaining, in effect, that a scientist is not qualified to be provost. By the way, not only is he not cutting their funding, but he is preserving promised faculty lines for the humanities even in face of the aforementioned rather seismic shift of students from non-STEM to STEM. (I think he is right to do so, because I suspect the shift is temporary.) The STEM departments are arguing that STEM should get more of a share of the new lines, since we are now teaching more students, while the humanities response is: no, give us the new lines because it is more important for us to have smaller class sizes.
I liked the classicist provost. But there were indeed things he didn’t understand. He didn’t fully appreciate, for example, how much you have to pay an new assistant professor in electrical engineering compared to English or physics. New EE profs make close to what I make, and I’m a full prof. That’s the way it is.
I have only seen this view in isolated cases, it is not the prevailing view. Here I will admit that it might be more common at an R1. I am at a liberal arts school. In theory, why the fuck would anyone teach at a liberal arts school with that attitude? In practice, some people in STEM are at at liberal arts school because that’s the job they got. On the flip side, why would you be at a liberal arts school and complain that math and science, which at 13/41 hours comprise “too much” of the general ed requirements, given that math and science are, traditionally, liberal arts? Some some humanities faculty in the liberal arts are also guilty of not being very liberal artsy.
The faculty meetings that you mention are not unimportant bs sessions. They determine the curriculum for the university, and I have made in my business to be on the undergraduate curriculum committee until I hit my term limit, and then to get on again when the clock resets, because I am passionate about curriculum and, quite frankly, it is one of only a few university-wide committees that make a difference. You tell me I need to get the fuck out more, but have you been on many university curriculum committee meetings? That is where the veils come down and people show their teeth. Some of it is ideological, and some is territorial with a veneer of ideology. Understand it is more-or-less a zero sum game (meaning the only way to add courses to the general ed is to dilute the major requirements, the over-all hours for graduation are a state-mandated 120–ixnay on 121*). It is there you will hear, every couple years or so: We should reduce the math and/or science requirement so we can add to the requirements of a humanities discipline.
Another variation: we have a requirement that every student takes a course in logical reasoning. The course choices mainly come from philosophy, but there has always been one computer programming course that meets the requirement. Well, faced with declining enrollment in philosophy, the inevitable happened, and there was a concentrated effort to remove computer programming (so that those butts in seats would out-of-necessity become philosophy’s butts in seats). All of a sudden it was “obvious” that computer programming had nothing to do with logical reasoning. (To put it in your terms, philosophy is the only “true” way to acquire logical reasoning.) We won that debate because at the meeting humanities professors more or less gave their opinion that computer programming is not logical reasoning, while we showed up with peer-reviewed research and data (from philosophers and computer scientists) showing how CS is in fact very good at teaching logical reasoning (bugs in algorithms map to logical fallacies) and that students taking a programming course score just as high on logical reasoning tests as students taking a philosophy course.
Now turn it around: I have never heard an argument to reduce the humanities requirements so that more math and/or science could be added. We have an anthropology course that can be taken for 3 of the 7 science hours. Not once have I heard a STEM professor argue that we shouldn’t allow that.
————
*There can be exceptions for programs like music or engineering, but only for compliance with national accreditation bodies.
Although, pondering this, it does seem that the American model of undergraduate education provides more occasion for direct sciences-versus-humanities friction than the UK model. Over here we don’t have anything like your required basic science / humanities courses. If you’re doing an English degree then you’ll only be doing English. If you’re doing a Physics degree you’ll only be doing Physics, if you’re doing a Classics degree you’ll only be doing Classics. We don’t have “majors”, which are chosen after several years, we just pick a subject and do that from the beginning (though there are joint honours courses, such as History with Economics, which give half each of similar subjects). In fact, most students will have specialised two years before entering university with their choice of A-level subjects (while it is possible to mix sciences, languages, humanties etc., most will pick three or four subjects from the same field). The last time I touched the sciences, maths, or modern foreign languages was at 16 for instance. As such there is no resentment on the part of students that they’re being made to do courses they consider irrelevant to their chosen direction, and no resentment from the teaching staff that they are forced to arrange such courses and teach unmotivated students who resent them.
That kind of resentment occurs mostly in secondary schools over here, among 14-16 year olds. At which age the majority of people tend to resent anything and everything in the world anyway.
From my position, I don’t see it as stem v. humanities. It’s more parochial – it’s program classes v. anything else at all. Programs are hunkering down and wondering what the hell is the use of learning anything other than specific job training, because that’s what people are clamoring for. Hey, completion to degree rates go down when you add requirements. GPA goes down when you make students think. So, Let’s change the writing class to a “writing in the discipline” class and then eliminate it altogether because we’ve “infused writing across the curriculum”. Let’s teach separate math classes for each major because god knows business students don’t need hard calculus and engineering students need a specific type of statistics and sociology majors only need another type. Let’s develop “certificates” that only have program classes and then tell people they’re just as likely to get a job with the certificate as a bachelor’s degree. Colleges and universities are slowly being turned into solely workforce development programs.
While I think that is too bleak, I think there is a great deal of truth to it. And the push is largely coming from the government, which is presumably listening to grumblings from parents. The buzzword these days is “value added.” There is a push, not to show a gain in knowledge and critical thinking from attending university, but to show that the increase in earnings potential more than compensates for the (disgraceful) cost. The US government has already gone after the for-profit schools (the ITTechs) on this regard (which, ironically, are sold as workforce development programs) and there are signs it is turning its sights onto traditional universities.
The universities are hoisted with their own petards. They have spent enormously on facilities to attract students, and that resulted in higher costs, which then leads to unwanted attention along the lines of “is this education worth it?” which in turns leads to questioning the value of a liberal arts education vice a professional education.
In my utopia: we have an affordably priced mixture of high quality institutions for both professional education and liberal arts education. And a path for vocational careers. And toss in Obama’s idea of free community college.
Our larger grants in more controversial or emerging areas of scientific research now include social scientists to study public perception, ethics, interdisciplinary dynamics, and social impacts. The role of the social sciences in promoting and supporting R&D is becoming much more recognised.
The barriers between STEM, Social Sciences, and the Arts need to be lowered, for the benefit of all.
In my experience, STEM has as much of a problem with sexism, whitewashing, and looking after its own as any field. And much more of a problem with engaging with the social sciences to examine the structural deficits within the fields. Arts may have unique problems because of the often greater subdivisions and specialisms of the disciplines. STEM should be well-equipped to address problems, given the overarching nature of the funding bodies, the large professional organisations, and the well-resourced and prestigious departments that account for much of the leadership in the area.
@ cartomancer, #40
It depends on the institution. I had to take an Arts supplementary course as part of my degree, which is why my degree is appended “with Law”.