An MIT Dean's Defense of the Humanities

AthanasiusKircher (1333179) writes "Deborah Fitzgerald, a historian of science and dean of MIT's School of the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, speaks out in a Boston Globe column about the importance of the humanities, even as STEM fields increasingly dominate public discussion surrounding higher education. '[T]he world's problems are never tidily confined to the laboratory or spreadsheet. From climate change to poverty to disease, the challenges of our age are unwaveringly human in nature and scale, and engineering and science issues are always embedded in broader human realities, from deeply felt cultural traditions to building codes to political tensions. So our students also need an in-depth understanding of human complexities — the political, cultural, and economic realities that shape our existence — as well as fluency in the powerful forms of thinking and creativity cultivated by the humanities, arts, and social sciences.' Fitzgerald goes on to quote a variety of STEM MIT graduates who have described the essential role the humanities played in their education, and she concludes with a striking juxtaposition of important skills perhaps reminscent of Robert Heinlein's famous description of an ideal human being: 'Whatever our calling, whether we are scientists, engineers, poets, public servants, or parents, we all live in a complex, and ever-changing world, and all of us deserve what's in this toolbox: critical thinking skills; knowledge of the past and other cultures; an ability to work with and interpret numbers and statistics; access to the insights of great writers and artists; a willingness to experiment, to open up to change; and the ability to navigate ambiguity.' What other essential knowledge or skills should we add to this imaginary 'toolbox'?"

Comments

Nice Defense.

[stewsters]

An MIT?

Re:Nice Defense.

[Anonymous Coward]

An MIT?

See here.

Re:Nice Defense.

[Anonymous Coward]

Case in point!

Re:Nice Defense.

[stewsters]

I thought we were going to call them mit rather than EM-EYE-TEA now.

Do you pronounce SCOTUS as ESS-CEE-OH-TEE-YUH-ESS or scotus?

Re:Nice Defense.

[Anonymous Coward]

MIT starts with a vowel sound ("em"), so it takes "an."

Re:Nice Defense.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you pronounce SCOTUS as ESS-CEE-OH-TEE-YUH-ESS or scotus?

Sk-oh-tuss

I started with a Humanities Degree

[funwithBSD]

Then earned my IT degree later in life. Hard to eat on a Humanities degree salary.

Still, I can communicate and write better than 90% of my peers, and that gives me a major advantage over them.

Being able to communicate between people is as important as being able to enable communication between two machines.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[sandytaru]

Same route I took. English undergrad, web programming/MIS master's degree. Now I do what I really wanted to do all along with the English degree, which is write documentation (along with various other duties as an analyst, many of which require writing in some fashion as well.)

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[ShanghaiBill]

Then earned my IT degree later in life.

As an engineering major, I took plenty of courses in humanities, and I feel that I got a very well rounded education. At least at my school, the humanities were not
neglected at all. Everyone had to take a "core" of mandatory classes in literature, and also take a required number of elective courses in history, economics, sociology, etc.

Still, I can communicate and write better than 90% of my peers

The problem with humanities majors is not that they can't communicate, but that they have nothing interesting to say.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[CanHasDIY]

Not to mention the thousands of years of human achievement, artistic and otherwise, that's actually pretty awesome once you learn to appreciate it.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[ColdWetDog]

You like writing documentation?

Can we clone you?

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[Anonymous Coward]

A combination of ego and condescension. You may have taken humanities courses, but you did not gain humanity.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[TeknoHog]

The problem with humanities majors is not that they can't communicate, but that they have nothing interesting to say.

Agreed (to the extent that all generalizations are dumb). I don't think you need to learn all the extra artsy fartsy in order to master your language, though of course it helps to have some context.

I've only officially studied science/tech fields, but I've always been interested in language, and like any complex system, I like to pay attention to its details and play with it. I grew up in Finland, went to an international school mostly because of the language aspect, but ended up getting a science degree in Britain. Later I have taught math and science in both languages, and I find my attention to language invaluable. For starters, it's just embarrassing if you teacher makes obvious spelling or grammar mistakes, even if it's not a language teacher. On a deeper level, teaching is all about communication, and it always helps if you can make your message clearer and simpler (without simplifying the subject matter, of course).

I've never understood why math/science/programming geeks are stereotypically bad at spelling (or language in general). It should be about the same kind of attention to detail in both cases. You know how disastrous it can be to miss a quotation mark in a programming language, yet you don't care about "its" vs. "it's"? Of course, the latter is not disastrous in the same way, but for a lot of people such mistakes will break the flow of reading, as well as giving an impression of generally sloppy thinking.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[Stormy Dragon]

Indeed. Note conversely that while most STEM majors take a lot of humanities classes, humanities majors rarely must take more than a couple of STEM classes.

Why is it that while being illiterate is generally considered shameful in our society, people have absolutely no qualms flaunting their innumeracy?

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[Krishnoid]

Maybe not clone, but if you act quickly enough, you might be able to get him to a place where he can meet someone to reproduce with.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[sribe]

I've never understood why math/science/programming geeks are stereotypically bad at spelling (or language in general). It should be about the same kind of attention to detail in both cases.

Because some have this idiotic arrogance about the subject, and refuse to acknowledge the importance.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[knightghost]

Humanities stole a year of my college life. Utterly useless. Why? Not only do they not accomplish most of what the job-for-life-professor drones on about, but professors use them to weed out people thinking about the major instead of teaching anything useful.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[DoofusOfDeath]

Being able to communicate between people is as important as being able to enable communication between two machines.

Not if you measure importance by salary, apparently.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[greg1104]

People are too busy giving their 110% attention to other causes.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[kick6]

Hard to eat on a Humanities degree salary.

Hit the nail on the head. Humanities CLASSES might be a good addendum to a degree program that has the potential to earn an actual salary, but entire humanities degree programs are just the university taking advantage of kid's and their parents.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[readin]

A combination of ego and condescension. You may have taken humanities courses, but you did not gain humanity.

So it seems humanities courses aren't very useful.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[kick6]

I've never understood why math/science/programming geeks are stereotypically bad at spelling (or language in general). It should be about the same kind of attention to detail in both cases. You know how disastrous it can be to miss a quotation mark in a programming language, yet you don't care about "its" vs. "it's"? Of course, the latter is not disastrous in the same way, but for a lot of people such mistakes will break the flow of reading, as well as giving an impression of generally sloppy thinking.

Compilers toss errors

Spellcheck sometimes does

The chalkboard never does

and there's text messaging where no one seems to give a shit what you type. It's a fun little cryptomystery to solve!

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[readin]

Then earned my IT degree later in life. Hard to eat on a Humanities degree salary.

Still, I can communicate and write better than 90% of my peers, and that gives me a major advantage over them.

Being able to communicate between people is as important as being able to enable communication between two machines.

You make an important distinction. Humanities classes can be good, but a humanities major isn't much use. In the balance of things, we just don't need that many people to study art history, and while knowing some art history is useful it's not as useful as knowing some chemistry, physics or math.

For STEM we've developed a lot of techniques that allow us to g deeper, check our work against reality, provide objective results and in doing so build on previous work. We can put a lot of people to work exploiting these gains to make real progress. With humanities (and it does vary by subject of course) there is too much wheel-spinning and news spinning with people arguing over the meaning of things without being able to prove whose theory looks most right and should serve as the basis for further work..

As for the writing, perhaps you write better than your colleagues because you always could, not because of the classes you took. You decided to get a humanities degree because you were good at writing rather than you're good at writing because you majored in humanities. Perhaps it is some of both. I do wish I had learned more writing. Arguing on the internet has improved my writing more than anything I did in college.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[readin]

I've never understood why math/science/programming geeks are stereotypically bad at spelling (or language in general). It should be about the same kind of attention to detail in both cases.

Personally I'm excellent at spelling but it often doesn't come through in my writing because I'm in a hurry, I hate writing, and I'm such a critic of writing that I can't stand to go back and read my own stuff. Reading my own writing usually makes me cringe. This means I don't double check my writing. I'll notice someone use used "it's" instead of "its", but since I never read my own stuff I never correct my own stuff.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[Anonymous Coward]

I beg to differ about most STEM majors taking a lot of humanities classes. They may think they do, but don't--it's all relative. My guess is that humanities majors say the same thing: "most humanities majors take a lot of STEM classes... STEM majors rarely must take more than a couple of humanities classes."

I don't know where you graduated from, but where I went to school, there's no way anyone could get away with just taking more than a couple of any type of course. You're sort of implying that a humanities major could just get away with what... taking one math and one science course? That would never fly at my school. Maybe no more than one math course, and maybe some introductory science courses, but definitely they'd have to take multiples of them. You can argue about it being limited to introductory courses sometimes, but they'd say the same thing about STEM majors.

My impression over time is that STEM students think they are eloquent and communicate well, but as a group, that's their deficiency--at least, they fit that stereotype as much as the humanities majors do the stereotype that some ascribe to them of being innumerate.

Why the hell can't people just major in what they like without all sorts of stereotypes being applied to them one way or another? It's ignorant.

(I say this as someone who was a STEM student in college.)

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[funwithBSD]

"The problem with humanities majors is not that they can't communicate, but that they have nothing interesting to say."

My colleagues disagree, my technology presentations are well attended inside IBM. In part because I throw in little history tidbits or even where some words come from, both technical and non-technical.

A good example is when I talk about archaic standards preventing progress, like the size of a Roman wheel cart setting the size of train tracks and roads. (Not strictly true, but it is a good story) Or how market momentum creates atrocities like the QWERTY keyboard. (or the IBM PC....)
Both illustrate the need to work from a clean board to ensure we are not architect-ing solutions because "that is the way we do it here at IBM". And we do a lot of that, because template reuse is so efficient, but hinders innovation.

And the humanities is a broad subject, covering but not limited to: art, philosophy, history, and literature. If they have nothing you find interesting to listen to in those subjects, you may be the close minded one.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[Anonymous Coward]

Just imagine if you could do both with ease.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[funwithBSD]

I took humanities as a degree because I am a "Renaissance Man" and have a huge span of interest and a good sense of long term trends and a long view on how things should be done now.

Humanities let me play to that strength, more so than a CIS degree.

To eat, I took a job selling parts over the internet in the early 90s in Silicon Valley to pay for my last years at SJSU
Being able to explain the technology in terms non-techs could understand. I was also good at understanding their requirements, so I had better return ratios than my peers, less than 5% of my sales came back, although I was not the top salesman. (Who had 25%, so technically I won if you subtracted returns)

I often read the manuals of open box products so I could understand them. I got put on tech support, and revamped the return system, saving more money and time. (Simple labelling system for the Return Auth Code, let us know when it was issued, and what the product inside was. More valuable items like CPU, Mem, HDs got priority over mice or keyboards)

Then the IT "manager" dropped a box of parts on my desk and a copy of a Novell 4 manual and said: "You like reading manuals? Read this, get it working, and you are out of tech support and you are my IT guy. And yes, you get a raise."

  I had the foresight to include drivers for both 80X frame types, so when we acquired a new company, it was able to make it the bridge between their older system and our newer one.

Moved to Sac to run the store they opened there, then they folded, but I landed a job at a small development house where I was responsible for "anything that had a wire".
I never looked back. I loved IT. I loved understanding, designing and building complex solutions that made sense and stood the test of time. One is 12 years old, and while upgraded and expanded, the architecture is the same. (Informatica/Bussiness Objects cluster)

I started being targeted to come in and fix complex problems in complex environments that were stumping everyone. I am pretty good at it, from what I am told.
Jobs and years later, I am an Executive Solution Architect, and I have 25 years or more of adventures left. =) I am working to be a Distinguished Engineer and perhaps even an IBM Fellow at the end of my career.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[chmod a x mojo]

Oh my, what a place to drop a letter...

For starters, it's just embarrassing if you teacher makes obvious spelling or grammar mistakes, even if it's not a language teacher.

Don't worry, I do the same thing sometimes, usually it's with the letter "s" though.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[funwithBSD]

The HUM degree was HARD. I was 18-23, and working + school was tough.

I actually found the BSIS comically easy, and watched people flounder.

But then I was 37, not 21, and I had 12 years of IT experience. Even adding in being a new Dad, it was just a few hours every night, and some time on the weekend. Easy peasey, I found the Online experience much better suited to my INTJ personality.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[funwithBSD]

No, just wasted on ShanghaiBill.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[funwithBSD]

In IT, I get to do both, Doofus,

I get to do BOTH.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[funwithBSD]

I took:

2 semesters of Physics
2 of Chem
1 of a "General sciences"
2 of Calc.
Granted, the physics was not actually required, but I took them at the end of HS as part of a Uni summer program.

If I took O-Chem or another physics class, I could have gotten a Chem minor. The cutbacks in 91-92 meant I could not get into the classes unless I was a chem/physics major.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[blagooly]

This is it. Well stated. The problem today is young people are being taught what to think, not how to think. Mr Shakes his spear and Chaucer are negated for sexual and race politics.

Say this and that, these are the acceptable opinions. Shout down and attack those who dare to disagree.

So of course, they have no respect. Their wise elders fill them with bullshit, that they are expected to repeat. They know this. It is time for them to speak out about this.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[funwithBSD]

I used pointers early in the into C class I had to take. We worked in groups which then did "peer" reviews. One of my "peers" gave me a "0" because my code was "too complicated, we haven't covered this stuff"

The teacher adjusted his grade down for participation, and mine up for using pointers.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy shit, a chem minor with no p-chem?

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI: Sandytaru is female. And married.

.
Not stalking, just remember seeing the name on a post earlier today.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[funwithBSD]

BTW, my love of complex systems came from looking at engineering and architectural feats of mankind, like the Cathedrals, Roman Aqueducts and buildings.

Not to mention the art of Escher, and the surrealists.

Oh, and the philosophical aspects too. My greatest tool is Socrates/Plato's Dichotomy: A thing cannot be true and untrue at the same time (If A, then not B), for eliminating factors causing problems. And Occam Razor. And more besides... a lot of our IT ideals come from the philosophers. Even Nietzsche can come in handy at 2AM. "Screw it. Screw EVERYTHING! I AM GOING HOME!"

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[I'm New Around Here]

I tend to hit the "i" instead of the "e". But I usually catch myself, and correct it.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[funwithBSD]

But I get embarrassed when I do it.. STUPID! STUPID STUPID!

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[Anonymous Coward]

His statement was a generalization- I doubt he meant *every single humanity major ever*. Also, it's not that the humanities are uninteresting, it's just that most people who major in them are. I recall talking to an English professor who was aggravated that his students couldn't seem to grasp abstract concepts and comparisons. He stated he was always glad when CS majors took his classes, because they had interesting insights.

This is something I noticed as well when I was in college. I would talk to people who were majoring in music, or art, or literature, and although they were friendly and nice people, conversations about subjects *in their field* were almost always shallow. I loved breaking down books and critically analyzing their parts and why I thought they were so good. Cadence, foreshadowing, phrasing, referencing- it could all add up to a brilliant work or a pretentious POS. Unfortunately, in trying to make those points in a "discussion" with English majors, I would just get blank stares and be told, "that's not what I have in my notes."

Ok, I am being a bit facetious. Still, I could often have a far more meaningful, well-thought conversation about a book or piece of art with a fellow CS major than with an english or art major. It's certainly not that they were all empty husks trying to get the easiest degree they could or find a mate, but a majority were.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[funwithBSD]

Maybe you are right, maybe it was P-Chem. Give an old man a break, it was 22 years ago.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[The Cat]

People who study art history create things like Star Wars, Jazz, Bioshock, the Muppets and the Avengers.

Those things inspire other human beings to create things like spaceflight, Pro Audio, VR headsets, CG Animation and robotics.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[funwithBSD]

I get the urge to break out into "O What a Piece of Work is Man!" during meetings.

Especially when suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[funwithBSD]

Maybe she is open to sperm doners?

Who knows? /creepy

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[chmod a x mojo]

Ok, I'll bite. I'm currently a STEM major. The main reason, at least that I have personally observed anyways, of why STEM majors dislike being forced to take a lot of humanities:

1: Most of them are useless, at least to us. We (usually) don't need philosophy classes to teach us logic and argument, knowing that the Mesopotamians had a primitive battery technology is equally useless, and we really dislike the subjectivity in grading in literature / composition courses. My one history class I had to take, early civ, was extremely interesting; yet I have forgotten most of it since I literally have not had to use a single thing I learned in the class.

2: There is a disparity in the classes needed for each. Humanities majors need to take maybe two "science" classes and maybe college algebra, these classes are generally big pit classes where you are spoon fed grade school basic science... I.E. " A scientist comes up with an idea to test, this is called a hypothesis........". Meanwhile the STEM majors have to take classes from ALL the humanities - philosophy, non-western culture, religious studies / womens studies, history, literature, composition ETC.

3: Refer back to point 1 about usefulness of many of the courses, the STEM courses, once past the stuff the humanities majors need to take, are MUCH more difficult and need greater time devotion than many of the humanities classes. We resent having to take time off from studying for useful classes for stuff we will never use.
Conversely for the humanities taking basic science classes, at least that is teaching basic trouble shooting skills, skills that can actually be useful in the humanities.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[funwithBSD]

I got a "D" on an art paper once. or would have.
The subject was declared to be "What is Art?" (i know, I know, but that is what the prof wanted)

Most everyone got into esthetics, beauty, meaning, and such qualities.

I put forth the idea that Art was boiled down to two requirements:

1. It must be an Artifact, literally "made with hands"
2. It must speak to us something about the human condition

That was his initial grade. Then he thought about it. He couldn't reconcile why the idea offended him. So he gave it to his brother to read.
His brother was in the CS field. Electrical engineer and architect I think.

"He has it right. He cut all your BS out of it and got it down to two ideals, and he is dead on. You just don't like it."

I got an A+, and he submitted my paper for a publication. (rejected of course, they were probably just as insulted)

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[blagooly]

Heh.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[funwithBSD]

I disagree, I spent more time with reading, research then writing papers, than I ever did in BSIS.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[russotto]

Indeed. Note conversely that while most STEM majors take a lot of humanities classes, humanities majors rarely must take more than a couple of STEM classes.

Or, well, ANY. As a CS major, I took the same English, Philosophy, and Film (OK, that one was a walk) classes that majors in those fields took. To fulfill their math and science credits, most humanities majors would take special watered down "X for non-X majors" classes.

We also had "Physics for Engineering Majors", which was actually HARDER than the classes for the Physics majors. Same concepts, they just didn't use round numbers as much.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[funwithBSD]

I also disagree on point 1.
Most of the pure CIS students I work with cannot debate or put together a coherent argument why one course of action is better than the other. Mostly it comes down to "I am right, because I say so." Often it comes down to trying to shout people down.

They also almost never take into consideration the business and political aspects. I don't play politics, I am straight forward and forthright and it serves me well. But knowing what the political players are up to, how they likely will try to get their way allows me to end run them before they form an bad technical solution based on politics.

I am often the peacemaker between the political, business/sales, and technical factions in any situation. Defanging the politics, get the sales weenies their sale, and make the tech people understand that there are controls in place to prevent a bad solution from being sold.

Not an easy job, it does fail sometimes... but when it works, it works well.

Everybody walks away happy, except for the political players. Don't care if they like it or not, I am not here to score points.

I learned all that from reading Machiavelli, Ceaser, Cicero, Kissinger and a host of others I don't want to type on how to handle people, and manipulate the manipulators.

Not from Knuth.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[chmod a x mojo]

Well, like I said, that was from my personal observations. Your peers seem to have been significantly different than mine.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[phantomfive]

Humanities has changed. It's really sad actually, when you think what could be:

"Not so long ago, colleges still reflected the humanist tradition, which was founded....on the all-consuming desire to engage with the genius and radical difference of the past. "

Re: I started with a Humanities Degree

[lymond01]

Personally I'm excellent at spelling but it often doesn't come through in my writing...

I know! This is why I'm on the national spelling bee competitive tour! You too?!

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[Darinbob]

Most humanities majors still have to take the math classes, just as math people have to take writing classes. Plus many schools require at least the freshman level physics or chemistry.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[TotallyAmazed]

In other words, you DO play politics (manipulating others, which if done to accomplish a mission is called leadership).

On the other hand could it be the STEM people tend to stutter & brain lock when presented with an exceptionally stupid person? Happens to me all the time. It's a combination of "what, you really think 110% of the ELECTRONS are part a the nucleus -- wtf!?" and (being unwilling to | realizing the futilitiy of) trying to teach them.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[Anonymous Coward]

I'l take 10 clones please!

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[fredprado]

In my experience the most arrogance come from people in humanities. They are arrogant to the extreme about what they know and about what they thing they don't need to know even more.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[fredprado]

I beg your pardon but I have never seen a STEM major glorifying his ignorance in any area, especially language, and I have seen a LOT of humanities majors glorifying their mathematical illiteracy and using it as honer badge.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[HnT]

But unless your humanities studies were focused specifically on communication and not e.g. on history or philosophy, I don't see what "humanities" has to do with improving your communication skills. And with everyone preaching "soft skills", I wonder how many IT or science related degrees worth their student loans don't already offer "soft skills" and "communication" trainings and courses.

You do not need a PhD in linguistics to communicate well, on the contrary it might make matters worse and you will find just as "awkward" humanities majors as you find in "STEM".

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[TeknoHog]

Oh my, what a place to drop a letter...

For starters, it's just embarrassing if you teacher makes obvious spelling or grammar mistakes, even if it's not a language teacher.

Don't worry, I do the same thing sometimes, usually it's with the letter "s" though.

Ah! I knew a post like this would hit Muphry's law sooner or later.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll leave off the extended argument about the source and subjective nature of "usefulness," and just point out that people aren't born able to write flawlessly any more than they're born knowing how to do physics equations or program computers. People start with traits and inclinations toward tasks, sure, but instruction matters, practice matters, etc.

The humanities, literature in particular, are incredibly good at teaching people to deal with, analyze, and parse out subtext and hidden subjectivities in language. And there is subtext and subjectivity in all but the very smallest pieces of written text; because everything that's ever been written has been written by a human being, with a point of view, and all the weird baggage a human carries around in their head at all times.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never understood why math/science/programming geeks are stereotypically bad at spelling (or language in general). It should be about the same kind of attention to detail in both cases.

Because some have this idiotic arrogance about the subject, and refuse to acknowledge the importance.

While I sneered at the humanities requirements in science degrees when I was younger I changed my opinion while earning an undergraduate degree later in life. But by that time my writing skills had evolved already through professional employment.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[Bigbutt]

There are others who like writing docs. I brought that to my team. I do it as a matter of defence. When the guys come to me with a question, I point them to the docs. So I get bothered less for little things. We do get more questions from other teams because we better understand how things work at the company.

[John]

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[sribe]

In my experience the most arrogance come from people in humanities. They are arrogant to the extreme about what they know and about what they thing they don't need to know even more.

In my experience, that varies greatly within the particular field, and between colleges. In other words, it's a minority, but yeah, they are annoying as hell...

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Except looking at the requirements out side of my major and minor I had to have the following:
2 Literature courses (6 credits)
2 Composition classes (6 credits)
2 Speech courses (6 credits)
1 year of foreign language (6 credits)
1 or 2 history courses (I don't really remember 3 credits)
1 philosophy course (3 credits)
1 economics course (3 credits)
1 sociology course (3 credits)
1 art class (2 credits)
Now add in a few other misc Gen eds and it seems like my CS major + math minor (2 classes short of a dual major) was a fairly well rounded education. Since I ended up having to take something like 40+ credits of liberal arts classes to me it would be nice if liberal arts students had to take a comparable number of science and math courses since I believe that they had to have something like 15-18 credits of math and science at my school. To me the worst part was that they didn't have to go through a full year sequence of any subject like everyone did for speech, composition or foreign language. Personally I would love to see a requirement where it was 1 year calculus plus an additional math class (pick college statistics or college algebra) and 1 year physics, or 1 year chemistry, or 1 year biology and another science class.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[germansausage]

The problem is Engineers can read and write but Artsies can't do math.
 
My engineering degree required 5 full-year Arts courses along with all the math science and engineering. These were the same courses that students in the faculty of Arts took. Writing a coherent essay is something anybody should be able to do,
 
On the other hand, how do you teach even beginning level engineering classes to someone who last took math and science in the 10th grade. Even if you dumbed it down for the Artsies, first year physics for example, without trig and calculus would be impossible. Chem 100 without Chem 11 and 12?

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[CRCulver]

I beg your pardon but I have never seen a STEM major glorifying his ignorance in any area, especially language.

Whenever discussions of foreign languages come up on Slashdot, one gets posts from among the STEM-heavy crowd here that "Learning a foreign language is a waste of time, because everyone around the world should just -- and does -- learn English" (nevermind benefits in terms of getting a window into those foreigners' culture and what they are saying about you). I don't see how that any different from people flaunting their innumeracy by saying things like "Oh, maths is hard, and I don't need it, so why learn it?"

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[Bob the Super Hamste]

I shared your beliefs while in college on the BS liberal arts requirements and yes there can be some very subjective grading in some of those classes (still disagree with my intro to ethics course grading) but just muddle through these and give the professor what they want in such cases. Now looking back part of a college education is to produce well rounded people who have a basic understanding of a broad array of topics which is why it is done and a fair amount of it does come in handy. Even looking back I probably got more out of taking the intro the ethics philosophy course than I would have gotten out of the intro to logic philosophy course since logic is something that I got plenty of in my CS major and math minor.

For example I regularly have to write papers as well as speak in my job which is related to my major. Some times it is just a simple speak at department meetings, other times it is in meetings with customers or even with people very high up in my companies management (a Fortune 50 company and I have been in a meeting with C level executives). Now add in I frequently am asked to work on proposals, white papers, design docs, and requirement specs yet most of my time is spend designing and implementing things. Even things that I thought I would never need to use like the basic understanding of the Vedic texts have come in handy in understanding other cultures when I have go on business trips. Even looking at things outside of work having a basic understanding of economics, and various social sciences has at least helped me to understand why people who have diametrically opposed political views to mine should not be just ignored.

I do agree that it would be nice if there were more stringent requirements for liberal arts majors to have more science and math courses, especially a complete year long sequence for math and a science. Personally I would like to see a full year of calculus plus another math class and a full year of physics, chemistry, or biology and another science class for liberal arts majors at a minimum but at least the school I went to at the time had a requirement of 2 math courses (choose from a list of like 4) and 3 science courses (choose from a list of like 6) required so not too bad when compared to what others have said about their schools.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Well there have been plenty of times that I wanted to repeat various literary phrases especially when someone says that it doesn't need to be Shakespeare. Shakespeare is actually fairly low brow in a number of cases it is just the language was different than now but there are still some lines that are easily understood like this one from Antony and Cleopatra:

He ploughed her, and she cropt

Like I said this isn't high brow stuff here, it is just the common terms to him were different and Shakespeare would have no idea what you were saying if you said twerking much like most have no idea what you are saying if you said "I bite my thumb at you". Then there was the sign I put above a door to the conference room a number of us were working in for an extend period of time while on a project that wasn't going well.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[CanHasDIY]

Every time I quote Shakespeare, I have an irresistible urge to punctuate the quotation with a pause, followed by a Gomer Pye-esque "Shazam!"

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[Kielistic]

That is an assertion that I just do not believe. The subset of STEM educated people that frown on foreign language is probably no higher than the subset of STEM educated that frown on math. Though both subsets are non empty it is absurd to say STEM people dislike foreign languages. There are almost definitely less of them in the STEM group than there are in the general population.

tl;dr [citation needed]

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[I'm New Around Here]

I had to read chmod's post three times to figure out which letter you dropped.

Welcome to the "Dropped R's Club", there's punch and doughnuts available to the right.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[iamwahoo2]

So from what I gather, your coworkers have degrees, most likely took humanities classes to get those degrees, and it did not seem to do a whole lot of good. So who is benefiting from them paying for those humanities classes?

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[funwithBSD]

I work for IBM. My peers are generally more intelligent but less resourceful than I am, and less innovative.

They really look to solve a problem once, never looking to solve it again, until the first solution is so totally broken they are forced to do so.

I am on the constant lookout for new possible solutions that are better, or faster, and always cheaper. Why in this day an age we use agents that must be installed and maintained at significant cost instead of agentless probes to get the data we want... no idea, except that it is way "IBM does it".

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[funwithBSD]

Then that is "stutter & brain lock" is a clear failing to empathize and understand other people. An this is an INTJ telling you that... so you have a real issue.

Sales weenies job is to sell the customer. The technical people need to make sure that the solution fits their models. (Which as I have pointed out, are too ridged)

I on the other hand, want to make sure that if we sell the customer Magic Pixie Dust (tm) like they are demanding, that we (IBM, but more specficially the tech people) are protected in the contract language in case it turns out it is not bio-degradable or soy based.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[oh_my_080980980]

Wait, programmer have interesting things to say?

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[oh_my_080980980]

Because programmers aren't arrogant? Wow....

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[aestrivex]

modded one of your other comments up, and one of your other comments down, and now I am undoing both of these to make a point that needs to be made (it is a shame, because the post I modded up was a good post, and the post I modded down was a bad post).

You have namedropped about personality type twice in this thread. Moreover, you have namedropped about personality types at somewhat random times and in ways that convey little wisdom. It suggests that you have internalized the aspects of the personality type you identify with into interpreting your experiences (which is pretty common among the internet communities devoted to discussing personality typologies). This is very bad practice which in my mind calls the integrity of your character somewhat into question. Typology is far from a thorough description of a person (and has no basis in science nor really any evidence), which is something that "serious" participants in the typology communities all seem to eventually observe and subsequently fall into disillusion over. This is not a damning factors for typology models, per se (I think they are overlooked in academia), but they ought to be a hint that internalizing the model like you are doing is unwise. (To be fair, you do not appear to be doing it very severely.)

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[fredprado]

Most are not. They also tend to be highly curious and have a lot of different interests.

Sure there are the obnoxious one, but they are much fewer in number than those from humanities and way less obnoxious.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[Darinbob]

When I was in university, a BA in Computer Science took only basic science and math prereqs, same as any student in any major plus a few extra. However BS in Computer Engineering took lots more math and science, because it was a BS degree instead of BA. I don't know what current requirements are though.

However my university was on college system, rather than a "school of engineering" type of thing, so all students in a particular college all had the same graduation requirements even if they had a science major versus a humanities one. It was common though for engineering students to pick the college with the minimum amount of non-science requirements or with the most amount of overlap. I have seen places with school of engineering where they greatly reduce the humanities courses, which in essence is just as much a dumbing down of the curriculum as would a humanities school that reduces amount of math and science requirements.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[frank_adrian314159]

Are you sure that the idea "offended" him? He might have just been thinking that your model was too simplistic.

What do you mean by "created by hand"? Everything is "created by hand", even something that was created by typing software and commands into a keyboard, unless you've found a way to manipulate matter using your telekinetic abilities.

And "speaks to us about the human condition"? What cannot be separated from the human condition? Even if you have to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon to do so.

So I think your teacher's original grade was correct (unless you had a model of what these terms meant). That he decided to change your grade speaks more of lack of confidence in his own beliefs rather than the quality of your paper.

Or else he was just tired of a tedious argument with you.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[bbsalem]

The problem with humanities majors is not that they can't communicate, but that they have nothing interesting to say.

But, they will get your attention when they pack you off to prison or worse for writtng that program which was widely used to create some perceived injustice, What if your "sin" was to be a quant or to set up some HST server that destroyed the equities markets by unleashing speculation and sucking away most of the useful capital in the economy? Then you wish that you had some advance knowledge of politics, history, and economics, not to mention ethics and philosophy. The very speed with which technology is now yielding results should give you pause that you will live to see its consequences and you could be on the list of people who get blamed for its consequences.

In my experience, engineers are particularly bad at forseeing unintended consequences, and part of the reason for that is their naivete about humanities subjects, such as history and politics. It does not vindicate your efforts to simply assert that these aren't science and aren't interesting to you, that may simply mean that by being a geek or a nerd that you are insensitive to the nuances of living by perception and impressions, the way most people iive and think. To be out in front of the subjective with rationalizations, even very well based ones, does not protect you from the effects of most of mankind acting on impressions and fears, especially if they come to the conclusion that you are the cause of their fears. Increasingly technical people are becoming the focus of subjective fears in other people, if for no other reason than that you must take the humanities more seriously.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[rhyous]

Me too. English major. Now I am a Senior Software Developer. I have my thesis left for my Masters of CS.

I feel that I have the best of both worlds.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[redlemming]

1. It must be an Artifact, literally "made with hands"

Is a dance an artifact? Do you intend your definition to exclude dance from the arts?

What about stage acting? There is certainly art involved in that. Where is the artifact there?

What about the martial arts? Is a martial artist somehow involved in creating an artifact while pursuing/studying/practing that art?

Your definition would be better if you changed "Artifact" to "Artifact or Performance", since none of the usual definitions of "Artifact" can easily be considered to include performance art.

Even then, it's not clear how we fit the martial arts in.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[funwithBSD]

I would say they failed to understand the lessons, because as others state elsewhere they found the grades are arbitrary, the subjects are arbitrary... useless.

got news for ya, most PEOPLE are arbitrary. Humanities teaches you to understand and predict the arbitrary behavior and work around it.

In a purely academic or technological discussion, rational thought and logic are the tools we use. However...

You try to apply logic and rational thought when others are reacting emotionally or irrationally, they tend to win.

Demagoguery and appeals to emotion come naturally to most humans, and most humans react to those tactics, so you must know how to counter it.
You won't learn that in STEM, you learn it in HUM and in some ways BUS classes. Which is why I went for a Business Information Systems degree, not a straight CIS degree.

If you don't speak the language of the guys that hold the purse strings, you will fail without funding.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[funwithBSD]

One presumes one uses hands in preparing or performing those arts, unless it is multiple amputees performing.

Thus "Made with hands".

You could also point to stage notes, written plays, manuals, etc.

A STEM student I would presume would appreciate the clarity and elegance of reducing art to two actualy "requirements" and not dozens of end user needs like beauty, aesthetics, etc.

But it is apparently above your head.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[funwithBSD]

This must have changed since I was at SJSU in the early 90s.

I never heard it expressed that math ignorance was a good thing.

In fact, the only time it came up was when Chem/Phys mocked Bio as "Science for people that can't do math."

Geometry is important to HUM. How do you study Pythagoras, Roman architecture and art, Renaissance architecture and art, without it?

And as the Digital world eclipses the brick and mud world the HUM people better get with the fucking program.

Some of Andy Warhol's early digital work done on an Amiga was nearly lost recently.

http://www.wired.com/2014/04/a...

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[CRCulver]

Note the OP's wording that I was responding to, "I have never seen a STEM major glorifying his ignorance". If he paid attention in Slashdot discussions on the topic, he would have seen a STEM major, indeed he would have seen multiple ones. Whether that is a significant proportion of STEM majors, however, is another debate.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[redlemming]

One point I was trying to make is that you are using the word "artifact" in a manner that even most scientists and engineers -- and we're not the worlds most semantically aware people -- will not recognize as valid. Certainly some justification is required if you want to go off the beaten path. You might, for example, attempt to find something in the OED that you can cite as justifying your definition. Or you could find a well known piece of writing that uses the word in this manner.

Another point is that you haven't explicitly showed your definition to be valid to all arts. This is like giving the solution to a PDE without showing how you got it.

Another point: Maxwell's equations are concise (at least in their modern form, they certainly weren't concise in the 19th century), but it still takes entire books to explain them and show how to apply them to hard problems. Even then, students have to spend lots of time trying to use them, fail, then learn from their mistakes to really understand them. The typical undergraduate class in EM doesn't even begin to let people solve the kinds of problems that students in a graduate class learn how to solve.

Conciseness is nice, but it is not an end in itself.

You will find very no papers in STEM journals that are two sentences, even if the key ideas could be summarized in a few sentences for an audience with the right (usually highly specialized even within STEM) background.

Conciseness, to be useful, always requires support, typically in the form of lots of non-concise text, and often in the form of many hours of effort learning the implications of a concise formulation.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[funwithBSD]

You must not know the meaning of the word artifact:

An object made by a human being, typically an item of cultural or historical interest:
e.g. gold and silver artifacts

see the OED....
QED.

And the most influential STEM equations are elegent and have just a few terms but profound implications effects: F=MA, E=MC2, a2 + b2 = c2, i2 = 1, dS >= 0, F - E + V = 2, logXY = logX + logY

Please engage brain before making comments.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[funwithBSD]

And, btw, my THESIS statement of the paper was just 2 sentences. There were around 15 to 20 pages of backup and examples/counter examples of art.

The best counter example: The signed urinal called "Fountain" by Marcel Duchamp. It is simply a discarded urinal, signed by R. Mutt - 1917.

It is a "piece of art" who's exact cultural relevance according to my two criteria is very difficult to identify.

It is only explainable as art because it was considered shockingly scandalous and poor taste in 1917. Dadaism is the context, and explaining the human condition at the time as to be so out of touch from a basic human function that it was "scandalous" (R. Mutt was a male name used by a female artist, the signature is done by hand, that is the only "making by art" done here) tells us a great deal about the times.

But it does meet the criteria, and thus is art, regardless of it's aesthetics or beauty, or golden ratios, whatever other arbitrary and subjective properties you wish to assign.

Re:I started with a Humanities Degree

[CanHasDIY]

Then there was the sign I put above a door to the conference room a number of us were working in for an extend period of time while on a project that wasn't going well.

"Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here?"

Re: I started with a Humanities Degree

[readin]

No. I learned in 4th grade about different thinking styles. I can spell very well when I see things written down or when I'm writing. But listening or speaking is not something I do well. My wife is foreign and used to get very irritated at me when she would ask me what a word meant when she was reading, and I couldn't tell her when she spelled it out loud. It took her a while to learn that she either had to spell it very slowly or let me look at it.

Getting back to the 4th grade spelling test: when the teacher asked me a word and I had to spell it out loud, I suddenly discovered that I couldn't speak and spell at the same time. Translating what I would imagine on the written page into a spoken letter while keeping track of where I was in the word turned out to be extremely difficult for me.

I've improved over the years, but it didn't come naturally.

MIT, you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should we trust a mouthpiece of an organization that murders students?

Re: MIT, you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, _one_ guy dies, and you're all hating on them.

Re: MIT, you say?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Sony releases a few semi-dangerous CDs and they're *still* angry about that. The company that released the vulnerable OS is off the hook.

Yeah, the tech crowd sure is fickle.

Re: MIT, you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's ok if you murder just one guy?

Re:MIT, you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're talking about Aaron Swartz, he was murdered by Aaron Swartz.
And he wasn't a student, at MIT or anywhere else.

Re:MIT, you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

How did suicide get promoted to murder?

Re:MIT, you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rape culture.
Thanks Obama!

Re: MIT, you say?

[Hognoxious]

http://forum.leinsterfans.com/...

Re:MIT, you say?

[Jane Q. Public]

Why should we trust a mouthpiece of an organization that murders students?

Which (while I may not agree with you 100%), leads straight into the skill I was going to suggest adding: skepticism.

The ability to check whether your "knowledge of the past and other cultures" is accurate, or you're being fed FUD. The ability to tell whether the "numbers and statistics" other people hand you are correct, and not mistaken or fudged.

"... the insights of great writers and artists", but not the uncritical acceptance of same.

It is pretty difficult to have the ability "to open up to change; and the ability to navigate ambiguity" without a healthy dose of skepticism.

Re:MIT, you say?

[sribe]

Why should we trust a mouthpiece of an organization that murders students?

I certainly do not condone their complacence in that case. But Aaron Swarzt was not an MIT student. That fact often seems to get lost in the hullabaloo of indignation around here.

Re:MIT, you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, Aaron Swartz was merely the murder weapon that the real killer used to murder Aaron Swartz.

Re:MIT, you say?

[I'm New Around Here]

So, what was that? Some sort of pedestrian accident?

--(inspired by) George Carlin

Re: MIT, you say?

[serviscope_minor]

Sony releases a few semi-dangerous CDs and they're *still* angry about that.

Way to trivialise. It's just one of the nastier example in a long pattern of behaviour from before that incident up to the present day. As usual, they only apologized for getting caught. Make no mistake, it's not the one incident that makes people hate Sony.

The company that released the vulnerable OS is off the hook.

Wait what? Microsoft is off the hook for its evils now? Have you even read slashdot?

Re: MIT, you say?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Way to trivialise. It's just one of the nastier example in a long pattern of behaviour from before that incident up to the present day. As usual, they only apologized for getting caught. Make no mistake, it's not the one incident that makes people hate Sony.

Were you even around /. during that time? Before the Geohot incident, before the removal of OtherOS, etc?

(BTW, going after geohot was justified. He leaked their goddamned root keys and taunted Sony.)

Wait what? Microsoft is off the hook for its evils now? Have you even read slashdot?

...said by someone who's UID is over 3 times mine.

No, seriously. The way people talk about Windows 7 around here you'd think it came with free hand jobs and cheetos on install.

Re: MIT, you say?

[serviscope_minor]

Were you even around /. during that time? Before the Geohot incident, before the removal of OtherOS, etc?

Yes. What's your point? Sony are totally untrustowrthy evil fuckers?

BTW, going after geohot was justified.

I disagree. I happen to thing people have a right to do what they want with hardware they own. ...said by someone who's UID is over 3 times mine.

Yay UID pissing contest. For all I know you've een doing nothing but posting and never bothered to actually read anything.

No, seriously. The way people talk about Windows 7 around here you'd think it came with free hand jobs and cheetos on install.

In comparison to Vista and 8, perhaps. But that's not saying much.

More "Black Studies"

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't think of anything more beneficial than masses of Black Studies Ph.Ds that have had their hatred honed to an exquisitely fine point. Such beings will be crucial when we finally put whitey against the wall.

Yay "humanities."

Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's apply STEM (well, Engineering only, I guess) techiques to make these Humanities guys irrelevant. If a problem is so poorly defined or understood that it's considered an art, isn't it time that we examined these problems scientifically, such that they become sciences, not art? Ultimately, absolutely everything is a science.

(pre-emptively: yes, I know science is an art! However, science has rules; whereas the so-called 'humanities' do not actually have any rules. The rules in science are defined by reality, not some dictator or committee)

Re:Meh

[kruach aum]

If the rules of science were defined by reality, reality would have changed when Einstein proved Newton wrong. After all, reality defined Newton's laws first, but then defined them differently a couple hundred years later.

Additionally, some of the humanities do have rules. There are rules for what is considered to be a rational argument, and there are rules that determine what conclusions you can draw based on your data set. There are rules to history, there are rules to (analytic) philosophy (continental philosophy is another story), and there are rules to psychology. Your ignorance of them does not make them disappear, just like your ignorance of the way theory formation occurs in science doesn't make it not happen.

Re:Meh

[Hognoxious]

Let's apply STEM (well, Engineering only, I guess) techiques[sic] to make these Humanities guys irrelevant. If a problem is so poorly defined or understood that it's considered an art, isn't it time that we examined these problems scientifically, such that they become sciences, not art? Ultimately, absolutely everything is a science.

They should try that with economics. What could possibly go wrong?

Re:Meh

[CanHasDIY]

Let's apply STEM (well, Engineering only, I guess) techiques[sic] to make these Humanities guys irrelevant. If a problem is so poorly defined or understood that it's considered an art, isn't it time that we examined these problems scientifically, such that they become sciences, not art? Ultimately, absolutely everything is a science.

They should try that with economics. What could possibly go wrong?

You mean, other than the fact that economists might actually start acting like humans?

Re:Meh

[mysidia]

Additionally, some of the humanities do have rules. There are rules for what is considered to be a rational argument

Philosophy is the foundation of science and Psychology IS science. Exclude Philosophy and its subfields including logic and ethics as special exceptions.

What's left?

Re:Meh

[Krishnoid]

They should try that with economics. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, for one, they could end up classifying it as a humanities subject.

Re:Meh

[sribe]

Philosophy is the foundation of science...

I'd feel much better about the liberal arts education that many kids get these days if philosophy didn't seem so rare. I swear it seems like you can get a degree without ever seeing anything other than the steaming bullshit ladled out by "deconstructionists".

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

If the rules of science were defined by reality, reality would have changed when Einstein proved Newton wrong

Er what? You seem to have this argument backwards. Maybe you should re-read what you said?

Additionally, some of the humanities do have rules

I agree -- we are starting to see logic creeping in. I applaud this.

The bottom line is that I believe we need to use logic and critical reasoning from first principles as a tool to prevent the bullshit ambiguity that continually spews from the mouths of those only educated in 'soft' subjects -- and, specifically, the humanities.

Re:Meh

[kruach aum]

I don't have it backwards. I'm pointing out the absurd implication of what the original poster said. Unless he wants to commit himself to the claim that what Newton did is not science (but then, why is what Einstein did science? I see no reason to assume that relativity won't be superseded by a more complete theory in the future), this is what would follow from it.

critical thinking

[kruach aum]

"science issues are always embedded in broader human realities, from deeply felt cultural traditions to building codes to political tensions. So our students also need an in-depth understanding of human complexities"

I wish they taught how the word "so" works in the humanities, then we wouldn't see such unwarranted conclusion-drawing. The fact that certain cultures have deeply felt traditions about the value of pi does not mean that a mathematician should be aware of them to be a competent mathematician, or even a competent human being. The fact that other cultures have deeply felt traditions concerning the transfer of blood does not mean that a biochemist needs to know about Jehovah's witnesses. The fact that there is a strong anti-science bent to political factions on both sides of the spectrum in the US is completely irrelevant to me thinking about the nature of consciousness.

Which of course does not disprove the wider point that there is value to the humanities. There is just more value to some of the humanities, and less value to others. I'm thinking specifically of the ones that make you not write incoherent ramblings and try to pass them off as persuasive arguments.

Re:critical thinking

[Hognoxious]

The fact that certain cultures have deeply felt traditions about the value of pi does not mean that a mathematician should be aware of them to be a competent mathematician, or even a competent human being.

It does if he's trying to explain why a speedometer is reading wrong.

The fact that other cultures have deeply felt traditions concerning the transfer of blood does not mean that a biochemist needs to know about Jehovah's witnesses.

It might to a doctor trying to convince parents to not let a child die.

I know the twitter generation have short attention spans so here's the tl;dr version: sometimes being right isn't enough, and how you say it matters as much as what you say.

Re:critical thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish they taught how the word "so" works in the humanities, then we wouldn't see such unwarranted conclusion-drawing.

I find it interesting that you open your paragraph with a non-scientific (or at least, at odds with Linguistics, a science) claim that there is an objective use of the word "so" that should be taught (prescriptivism, a tenant of English studies, a part of humanities), and then go on to make an otherwise pro-science post. Gives some credence to your argument that there needs to be more science education, though!

Re:critical thinking

[kruach aum]

You're drawing an unwarranted conclusion there. Just because I think there is a wrong way to use "so" does not mean I think there is an objectively correct way to use it. It's like the Sorites' paradox. Just because ten grains of rice is not a heap and a thousand grains of rice is, does not mean there is a definite number of grains of rice above which it's definitely a heap and below which it definitely isn't. Similarly, there is no objectively correct use of the word "so" (which a prescriptivist would argue), but there are objectively wrong ways. For example, "I used the so to pump gas," "When so lighting struck so barn, so fire department was called." or "So so so so so, so so so so so so so!" are all incorrect uses of the word "so" when it is intended to mean what it is generally intended to mean.

Re:critical thinking

[CRCulver]

For example, "I used the so to pump gas," "When so lighting struck so barn, so fire department was called." or "So so so so so, so so so so so so so!" are all incorrect uses of the word "so" when it is intended to mean what it is generally intended to mean.

If those first two utterances were actually produced in real speech, then there is a good chance that they cannot be called "objectively incorrect" ways of using the world, inasmuch as human speech naturally features semantic shift or coining of new lexemes in the idiolects of individuals. This has been well understood now for over a century (everyone would benefit from reading a little Saussure).

Re:critical thinking

[Hognoxious]

a tenant of English studies

ITYM real-estate law.

Re:critical thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that certain cultures have deeply felt traditions about the value of pi does not mean that a mathematician should be aware of them to be a competent mathematician.

If a culture believes that their particular beliefs about pi compel them to attack you, or if your economy stands to gain by winning some of those individuals to your side, then not necessarily you but your society does benefit from having experts in that wrong belief around.

During the Cold War, for example, scholars interested in the indigenous beliefs of minority peoples in Russia found themselves in heavy demand (Indiana University in Bloomington was a magnet for them), because as part of their training they also had a knowledge of a people's culture useful to a US military who wanted to understand its adversary and gain a strategic edge. (Based on their deeply held pagan, Muslim or Buddhist identities, some minorities were at odds with the nominally atheist Soviet state or culturally Orthodox Russian people and the US felt that a wedge could be put between them if need be.)

After September 11, the same thing happened with experts in various aspects of Arab, Afghani or Pakistani society with its Muslim culture. Believe all you want in the error of Islam, but understanding it was key to understanding the very real phenomenon of the spread of extremism.

Re:critical thinking

[Hognoxious]

"So" sounds like the French word for bucket, so while you couldn't strictly pump gas with it you could, in the broader sense, use it to transfer fuel.

It's still wrong though, because in English it's not a noun at all which is the only type of word that can correctly appear in that place.

Re:critical thinking

[kruach aum]

Yes, knowledge of culture is important, but the argument the dean was making is that specific knowledge of culture and beliefs is important to all MIT graduates, which I disagree with. Most knowledge can potentially become useful, but there is so much knowledge that no one person can ever obtain all of it. That's why, contrary to the oft-quoted Heinlein line, specialization is not just for insects, but rather a necessity of being human.

Re:critical thinking

[CRCulver]

It's still wrong though, because in English it's not a noun at all which is the only type of word that can correctly appear in that place.

Words can and regularly do shift from one lexical category to another. Pas was a noun in late Latin (meaning 'step'), it is now a negation marker in French and Occitan. Latin nescio quid was a verb-object phrase ('I don't know what") and then became a noun meaning "something". In the language I work with most intensively, Meadow Mari, a phrase "necessary-unnecessary" has come to mean "rubbish" (in the sense "You're talking rubbish"). It's after midnight here and I'm tired, but if you really wanted I could come back tomorrow and post probably another fifty examples off the top of my head. This is the sort of thing I deal with on a daily basis.

Human speech is malleable and continually undergoes various aspects of language change. It all starts in the speech of individuals using a lexeme in a new context where other speakers of the language can grasp at what he or she means, and in an utterance like "I used the so to pump gas" it's clear as day what "so" means.

Re:critical thinking

[aestrivex]

It feels to me as though your claims are overstated here. That is to say, linguistic categories and words shift over time, but they do so in a way that continues to convey meaning most of the time to most parties involved. To say that any word can be used as a substitute for any other word in some other context is true as long as the word can be understood by its audience.

The phrase "I used a so to pump gas" is really a perfect example, because although you claimed that it is clear as day what "so" means, the complete opposite is true. It is not clear what a so is. It is clear enough that the so, whatever it is, is being used to pump gas. Maybe the nature of the so is not important, and the speaker only wishes to convey that they pumped gas, in which case the speaker succeeded at conveying the important information. But because the speaker drew attention to the so pragmatically, that isn't likely. But from reading on the internet, and not having the so pointed out to me, I still don't know what the so is. I only know what it was used for and that ostensibly, because of its use case, it is probably some kind of siphon or pump. But if the word refers to anything more specific, like some specific type of siphon I would have no way of knowing.

Although I agree...

[computational super]

Well, he's right, but unfortunately, the study of humanities in modern higher education has become a wasteland of anti-academic thinkers who viciously punish nonconformity and "ists" with an ax to grind and a debt to wring out of people whose ancestors they believe slighted their ancestors. He's describing what humanities ought to be rather than what they actually are.

Re:Although I agree...

[CRCulver]

Well, he's right, but unfortunately, the study of humanities in modern higher education has become a wasteland of anti-academic thinkers who viciously punish nonconformity and "ists" with an ax to grind and a debt to wring out of people whose ancestors they believe slighted their ancestors.

It is sad when people interested in the sciences, who should be trained in recognizing a range of values at their hands, tar everyone with the same brush.

Though I later moved into linguistics, I began my academic career at a Classics department at a US university, and I never heard any of my lecturers pushing any particular political agenda or trying to evoke outrage. Even the one faculty member there deeply interested in the position of women in antiquity was producing interesting, accessible scholarship for people interested in daily life in earlier eras of history, and none of it was coloured by the agenda some attribute to Women's Studies.

As I have had contact with other universities, I've encountered many other such scholars. Sure, there are odd, agenda-driven departments out there, but let's have some perspective, please.

Re:Although I agree...

[Anonymous Coward]

Throughout my career I've been affiliated with a state school, an Ivy League school, a small private college, and a Catholic university, and I've never found these mythical small-minded academics. Do you speak from experience, or is this just what you imagine?

Re:Although I agree...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll just leave this shit right here: The Harvard Bait and Switch

See also FIRE: The Foundation for Individual Freedom in Academia.

You're one of those nutters who think that Generalizations are bad because you have no Idea what outliers are and don't realize that generalizations don't limit individuals to being outliers; Nor do you care to do any fucking research at all before you flap your anecdotal gums, because you haven't a clue whether you're an outlier or in the middle of the trend -- It just doesn't fucking matter to you, it's all about YOUR experience. Oh how dare they drip a bit of paint on Your special Snowflake experience when talking about the vast majority of experience.

Fuck off idiot.

Re:Although I agree...

[CRCulver]

I am aware of FIRE's work and they 1) deal with only 400 institutions (the US has nearly 5,000, and furthermore the humanities are studied worldwide), 2) they are interested in speech by students, which may in some cases overlap with what faculty at humanities departments are lecturing in, but is by no means the same.

Then, in a rant on "outliers" versus "the middle of a trend", you link to a YouTube video dealing with one single university. Again, can we have some sense of perspective, please?

Re:Although I agree...

[sribe]

You're one of those nutters who think that Generalizations are bad because you have no Idea what outliers are and don't realize that generalizations don't limit individuals to being outliers; Nor do you care to do any fucking research at all before you flap your anecdotal gums, because you haven't a clue whether you're an outlier or in the middle of the trend -- It just doesn't fucking matter to you, it's all about YOUR experience. Oh how dare they drip a bit of paint on Your special Snowflake experience when talking about the vast majority of experience.

Uhmmmmm, no. You're the one confusing outliers and trends.

Re:Although I agree...

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Yup. I've numerous problems with the humanities beyond the chronic ideological indoctrination (in particular feminism) that has been introduced by social engineers.

First is the assumption that nobody outside of the humanities knows how to debate or think critically. No, sorry, critical thinking is far more crucial in STEM fields because if you don't think critically your stuff won't physically work, and debate gets really easy when you're relying on evidence rather than rhetoric.

Second is this notion that my complicated buzzwords are just as valid as your scientific terminology. No it isn't, I forget who said it (Chomsky?) but that's basically a case of authority envy. Much of the humanities is pulled out of someone's posterior, and any field where "theories" can be invented on the spur of the moment and taken as canon across the board based largely on who is talking about them is better suited to a coffee shop than serious academia. You get this a lot in discussions where polisoc101s start talking about what are essentially extremely simple concepts and cloaking them in their own self anointedly axiomatic newspeak.

Third, this idea that based on the above the humanities should be telling STEM endeavours what to do. This is both massively condescending by saying that science doesn't understand what morals or ethics are, and is inserting an unneccessary middleman into human development. You know, the kind of human development that led to washing machines, cars, computers, those labour saving devices that allow you to enjoy your latte at starbucks and share the photo you took on your iphone with your besties on facebook.

And finally fourth, the majority, I think the large majority of third level graduates are humanities graduates. What this tells me is that the humanities are taking valuable funding away from STEM courses at the third level.

Now I love history, the arts, I think philosophy is kind of interesting, languages are great, literature is a hobby of mine, I very much see the need for these things, but we as a society need to de-emphasise the authority of the humanities and proceed on an evidence based footing henceforth, rather than ideological. Funding is a limited pot, so perhaps it would be best to seperate STEM and the humanities into different institutions entirely, let them stand on their own merits. I know it's unlikely to happen but one can dream.

That's the whole point

[Anonymous Coward]

While universities churn out one-trick-pony STEM graduates with the political and social sensibility of a psychopathic eight year old, the real rulers of society can do what they want.

After all, anyone who is concerned about anything else than the latest Web browser or FPGA must be an idiot.

It's a perfect system, create STEM graduates with loads of debt and outsource the very jobs they would have gotten, but make sure they don't have the political and social savvy to fight it.

Keep it up nerds, you're paying for the rope, the gallows and the hangman and you deride anyone trying to take off your blinders.

"the ability to navigate ambiguity"

[unimacs]

This is a tough one for lots of developers.

Yes, studying humanities can be helpful

[MpVpRb]

..as part of an engineering degree

No, a degree in English literature will not help you find a job

Re:Yes, studying humanities can be helpful

[Austerity Empowers]

That's the problem, the humanities that are taught are irrelevant and useless. Partly due to it being what those in charge want to teach, partly due to someone pursuing a STEM degree being very focused on their GPA for getting a job, not wanting to lose potentially tens of thousands of dollars in starting salary because a professor in a subjective exam gave a B rather than an A.

They take far too much time to pursue seriously, for every credit earned in humanities there is some very valuable STEM subject being ignored, and you can torpedo your job opportunities. That's why we're against humanities. I graduated with my undergrad degree with 143 credit hours, a huge chunk wasted in basic humanities. As a result I had to make hard choices about RF design, power and control theory that proveably have limited my career options to the digital world. All because I had to take silly courses in essay writing, english lit, world history, soviet history and economics (the latter I thought might involve numbers and be slightly scientific, HA!). 15 years later I'd still rather have junked all that, and taken more core EE and CS courses, it would have been far better value for my money.

Re:Yes, studying humanities can be helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

>All because I had to take silly courses in essay writing, english lit, world history, soviet history and economics (the latter I thought might involve numbers and be slightly scientific, HA!).

You should've taken foreign language courses instead. They count towards the humanities requirements, at least in the engineering program I was in, and have proven to be infinitely useful.

Granted, they were a PITA but I didn't go to college to have a good time.

Re:Yes, studying humanities can be helpful

[SABME]

No, a degree in English literature will not help you find a job

I got my English major in 1988. I've been employed continuously since then, with the exception of a few months during the bursting of the tech bubble. I did not obtain a second degree (however, I have accumulated a fair amount of work experience over the last 26 years).

Re:Yes, studying humanities can be helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

If my British Literature course was replaced by a course that would hand out MCSEs, CCNAs, or other economically meaningful certificates, that is the route that should be taken.

However, one should have a wider perspective than just the latest tech stuff. For example, it is a mind boggler how few people know that one reason Russia dislikes the US is because the US invaded them (Murmansk and Archangelsk). Is this in the history books? Not really unless you take the time to go hunt stuff like this down to learn.

Another thing lost is that people need to be a part of the government. How many people actually not just vote, but actually come to jury duty when called, or actually throw their hat into the ring and run for election [1]?

I understand the importance of STEM, but there is a lot more than just that. Not knowing economics, and the decisions people make on that which benefit the Ponzi types. Not knowing government which means one less responsible person involved in keeping corruption at bay. Not knowing basic language skills, and being run around in circles by Europeans who do possess those skills. Not knowing basic literature, and being lost when references are tossed about at parties.

I'll even go out on a limb. Learning things like combat, both directly (verbal/physical) and indirectly (economic). In the US, this is something to be shunned, but in the real world, one has to fight/train, or else will always lose to someone that does. This is why China runs rings around the US, and why gun control is a major issue in the US while it isn't a concern whatsoever in any other country.

Of course, I'm going to don the tinfoil hat here: There should be skills one has that don't require electricity or civilization to use. Basic stuff like starting a fire, building a structure, basic first aid, sanitation, not getting eaten by the local fauna. Right now, one can get buy in an urban environment knowing no other skill other than cunning, or how to lie convincingly. Who knows if that may be the case when fuel and food costs are too expensive to support the population density we have now, especially coupled with the two hockey-stick charts of global warming and exponential population growth?

Heinlein is right; specialization is for insects.

[1]: I'm sure virtually anyone reading this would be a very good candidate for office. Even the Goatse person or the guy who posts the Golden Girls lyrics or the Jefferson lyrics with each topic.

Re:Yes, studying humanities can be helpful

[Austerity Empowers]

I would have taken mandarin, but then in realizing why I was taking it, I would have changed majors entirely. In any event because they are useful, they cost money, and were not an option.

Given how incredibly specialized STEM fields are, with my direct experience being electrical and computer engineering, I would still have preferred no foreign language and more tech courses. Courses I still want to take, but that time has passed and college classes are far too expensive for anything but casual study.

I resent the humanities, they wasted my time and money. I want to help the future by seeing them relegated to where they belong: frou frou education for the super wealthy.

Re:Yes, studying humanities can be helpful

[Austerity Empowers]

Since soviet studies was an elective I was stuck with, I do actually know that though I suspect the mutual dislike between Russia and the USA is far more complex than invasion, perhaps the reason for the invasion and the very polarized leadership each country has. If harboring a grudge over invasions was it, Americans would still be sore at Great Britain for ... quite a few early issues and headaches.

Regardless, the reason most of us spend money to go get an advanced degree is exclusively for the economic value. This isn't news, better spoken men than me have made comments over this through the century. None of us are going to school for a broader education, to become worldly or well rounded. In fact I quite specifically was happy to leave "well rounded" behind in high school and get on with what I really wanted to do. I didn't go to school not knowing what major I wanted or what I wanted to do with life, I had quite specific objectives and could convince my parents that their investment would have a return, and I wasn't wrong. That doesn't mean I don't resent the waste and unnecessary barriers created by humanities requirements. I'm fairly certain we overpaid 100% as a direct result.

I should also point out that quite a lot of people graduate with humanities degrees and we're still a shambles. I find it hard to believe they're that useful.

Re: Yes, studying humanities can be helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

Your a fool who never learned how to read a book outside of academia. If you had paid attention in the humanities courses you might have learned how to do this.

Re: Yes, studying humanities can be helpful

[Austerity Empowers]

Perhaps you mean several dozen books, or actually journal papers, because if you've ever tried to implement cutting edge technology described only in academic journals, you'd understand that a lot of assumptions are made about the reader and the depth of his MATHEMATICAL background. Yeah you can follow references and rediscover hundred year old obscure math. Do all that, or you take a course by a studied scholar who has done all that and can boil it down for you. That same professor may also be willing to be your reference when you want to take a job at some cutting edge company working in the field. In return he has someone who is exposed to ideas from elsewhere, possibly with NDAs on them, whose brain he can pick to continue being the expert he's paid to be. It works out quite nicely.

Or you can read all the books yourself, become an expert yourself, send your resume to HR who will put it on the heap and maybe get a call back, one day, if no one else is available.

Re:Yes, studying humanities can be helpful

[TheSync]

I also know an English major who was able to "pull it out of the fire" by converting to an online education expert.

On the other hand, the statistics show that the college majors with highest recent graduate unemployment rates are the arts (11.1%), humanities and liberal arts (9.4%), social sciences (8.9%) and law and public policy (8.1%).

In particular, English has a 9.2% unemployment rate, which is better than Film & Photographic Arts at 12.9%, and architecture at 13.9%.

On the other hand, experienced graduates who were English majors average $52,000 per year income, while working architects average $64,000. Working experienced Film & Photographic artists only average $50,000.

Re:Yes, studying humanities can be helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

>I would have taken mandarin

What a coincidence; the language courses I took happened to be Mandarin as well.

Re:Yes, studying humanities can be helpful

[fph il quozientatore]

To be fair, non-STEM-majors are taught a lot of irrelevant and useless science courses, too. It's more of a general problem with "introductory" courses for people that won't pursue that subject anymore.

Re:Yes, studying humanities can be helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

So, in summary, if it's not directly of economic value, it's useless, and you can't deal with subjective communications. And economics is ALSO on the chopping block for you, despite it being how you express pretty much your entire value system used here.

Re: Yes, studying humanities can be helpful

[Kielistic]

And if you had have paid attention pretty much anywhere you might have learned that your and you're aren't the same words. Nothing better than stating the humanities give rise to greater literacy while not even being able to keep up the facade for a measly two sentences.

"Your a fool" may be my favourite statement to read. It makes me laugh every time.

Re:Yes, studying humanities can be helpful

[Austerity Empowers]

Balancing your personal budget is as much "economics" as using the restroom is "biology". If you honestly don't see that then I question if you were even paying attention in the course.

This isn't 1850, we're not sending young wealthy children off to be polished and rounded out for high society. We're educating massive amount of commoners who cannot, generally, afford the education they're receiving without taking on a tremendous amount of debt. The only reason they show up is that the degree is a requirement for a higher paying job they'd like to fill, and the corporate world is using university degrees as a form of certification (similar to the bar or board for lawyers and doctors). It makes no sense to inflate the debt these students take, the high risk of default (which often falls on our government) for anything not specifically related to their degree program. Not to mention they may simply not be interested in the subject, thus what is the purpose in forcing it on them?

There's room in the world for the humanities and the fine arts, and I have nothing to say to those who wish to pursue them. My objection is entirely on forcing them on STEM programs as required core-education.

This is why

[xevioso]

Which is exactly why I got a history MA rather than a computer sciences degree, even though I do IT for a loving. I believe I'm a much more rounded human being with the information I gained during that time, and my interest in the humanities has never waned.

Sadly, I was earning 35K a year fresh out of grad school doing basic IT work in San Francisco in an office with MBAs also fresh out of grad school, who were easily earning 150K or more a year, plus bonuses.

I always joked with them that the only difference between them and me was that they happened to find money interesting.

Re:This is why

[gweihir]

There is rather strong indication by now that MBAs usually destroy more value than they create.

Re:This is why

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're doing IT for a loving you're definitely in the wrong field.....

Re:This is why

[HungWeiLo]

[Anecdote] One of my first jobs out of school was working with a bunch of self-taught developers of which none of them except one person had a STEM degree. Econ, environmental studies, theater, political science. The product they wrote ended up being very popular in that particular market niche and took a healthy slice from the dominant player in that market. I've never encountered another workplace setup like that ever again.

Re:This is why

[Anonymous Coward]

>I do IT for a loving

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

The problem with the Humanities

[Nutria]

is that while Math majors know Shakespeare, English majors do not know Euclid.

(This is not originally my idea.)

Re:The problem with the Humanities

[CRCulver]

This gap has been talked about since C.P. Snow's famous Two Cultures lecture, but this describes only a general trend, and one more prevalent in general society than the academy;. It certainly does not mean that all humanities students are ignorant of the sciences, and when one works in an academic setting one regularly finds counterexamples. For example, a Classics scholar working with papyri or other manuscripts will probably gain a solid knowledge of optics, the chemistry of paper, etc. I have read publications on aspects of philology that employed statistics to a degree you would think the writer had read maths at uni instead. Historians often have to read detailed archeological dig reports, and that brings in other scientific phenomena they are more likely to be aware of than many peopel who gained a degree in other science fields.

Re:The problem with the Humanities

[hey!]

Actually, in the medieval roots of "liberal arts", mathematics in general and Euclid specifically were about half the curriculum.

The old standard curriculum was divided into two parts: the "trivium", or basic curriculum and the "quadrivium", or advanced curriculum:

Trivium:
(1) grammar
(2) logic (arguably mathematical)
(3) rhetoric

Quadrivium:
(4) arithmetic (Euclid)
(5) geometry (Euclid)
(6) music (theory, not performance, also somewhat mathematical)
(7) astronomy.

With a few tweaks, this could become a kick-ass modern basic education.
 

Re:The problem with the Humanities

[gweihir]

Indeed. And humanities majors are a lot more prone to think they know it all than STEM folks are, because STEM folks get their own limitations shown to them all the time. That is where some of the most evil and destructive ideas come from.

Re:The problem with the Humanities

[gweihir]

Your mistake here is to assume that humanities majors are scientists or work as scientists. A tiny fraction are and do, but almost all do not. For STEM people it is necessary to remain part scientist throughout their whole career or they will not be good at what they do. Humanities graduates out of academia just need to give pretty speeches now and then.

Re:The problem with the Humanities

[digsbo]

The only tweak I'd make is to add dialectic (Socratic, not Hegelian or Marxist) to the rhetoric. But try selling a rigorous curriculum like that in today's Humanities departments. 85% of them won't allow it. It's too demanding.

Re:The problem with the Humanities

[Anonymous Coward]

And worse than not knowing Euclid, they don't know Euler, Poincare, Gauss, Newton, Curie, Maxwell, Einstein, Riemann, Ada, Shannon...

These are some of the classic theoreticians and mathematicians who made our world what it is.

It is not enough to know just a tiny piece of the picture. As an engineering graduate from over 20 years ago, I studied the classics: Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, various translations of the Bible, and many more authors than I care to name. I wrote papers. I wrote essays. I studied political history from various eras and civilizations.

The truth is that Engineering and IT majors are getting far more of the humanities, than those who study the humanities are getting of the foundations of technology and science.

Professor Fitzgerald is making the wrong case. We shouldn't be teaching even more humanities to engineering students. We should be teaching more science and technology to the humanities students.

Re:The problem with the Humanities

[Kojiro Ganryu Sasaki]

1: It seems fairly common among humanities students that, unless they also study some "hard science" subject on the side, they are fully aware of their own weakness in those subjects and do their utmost to avoid having to come close to them.

2: It seems fairly endemic among STEM students that they believe that all humanities stuff is useless garbage that matters to nobody and that everything can be solved by "logic".

3: Evil and destructive ideas? What?

Re:The problem with the Humanities

[phantomfive]

The problem with humanities is that they don't even teach humanities anymore. Seriously, if you took a Shakespeare class, you already know more about Shakespeare than an English major at UCLA. That is not a joke.

However, English majors will have taken classes about gender, sexuality, and class, which you may not have ever learned.

So in other words, English majors know neither Shakespeare nor Euclid. Is it any wonder they struggle after graduating?

Re:The problem with the Humanities

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent "Zing!"

Also correct.

He?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you miss the part where this was written by a woman? Imparting the notion that women exist is apparently something else that humanities departments are good for.

I think he's right

[ErichTheRed]

Disclaimer: I'm a STEM graduate (chemistry) and have been out of school for about 15 years.

The company I work for is essentially an IT services and consulting firm. Since IT and software development is not a profession like engineering or medicine, educational backgrounds differ wildly from person to person. One of the extremely rare traits that is great for our new hires to have is the critical thinking/troubleshooting/organization skills that STEM education provides, combined with a good grasp of communications skills that the humanities provide. While an English or fine arts major may not have the technical background to do some of the work we do, it's sure nice to find a STEM graduate who can write in complete sentences and document their work well.

One of the other things that a well-rounded education does for you is that it makes you a more interesting person. I've had the opportunity to work with lots of people over the years. Those who are 100% tech-focused and those who are 100% "fluff"-focused aren't very pleasant to deal with. Somewhere in the middle of these extremes (further towards the technical in my field) can make a very knowledgeable co-worker who is also plugged into daily life and can talk intelligently about other subjects. People who are all the way over to the techie side do very good technical work, but you certainly wouldn't put them in front of a customer and won't get good documentation of their excellent work.

I'm really not trying for self-promotion here, but I do feel that one of the reasons I haven't been unemployed for a very long time is because I'm flexible enough and have a good enough personality that employers don't feel like they're forced to keep me around just for my knowledge.

When I was in school, bashing my brain finishing my science education, I do remember looking at the humanities, psychology and communications majors and thinking they couldn't possibly amount to anything. Looking back, I'm glad a well-rounded education was forced on me in the form of required general education classes. Allowing someone to get through schooling without at least some attempt at exploring the other side (and this cuts both ways...) means they get the equivalent of a DeVry or ITT Technical Institute education.

Re:I think he's right

[roman_mir]

It's all fine and dandy except for one tiny problem: "humanities" that are described there are all nonsense government propaganda aimed at creating a herd of collectivist borg. Who is teaching real economics and not Keynesian crap? Who of them is teaching people to understand what freedoms are? (ability to be free from government intrusion rather than some ideology based around everybody getting equal shitty outcome based on immoral ideology of redistribution of people's lives to others?)

Humanities COULD play a crucial role in creating an actual individual, instead they are today nothing but propaganda in the hands of the ruling elite, whose only purpose is to ensure that people are poor, violent, uneducated slaves.

Re:I think he's right

[manu0601]

Who is teaching real economics and not Keynesian crap?

By "real economics", you mean the current mess that brings a global crisis every 3 years?

Re:I think he's right

[Anonymous Coward]

The most interesting IT guys, developers...really any professionals that I've met didn't go to college at all. Unless the profession requires a degree (doctor, teacher) I think you get more real world skills to succeed by NOT going to college. What they teach in college just doesn't transfer into skills kids need to succeed in the real world.

I dropped out in 9th grade.

Re:I think he's right

[roman_mir]

So just hoh daft are you, not seeing clearly that it is Keynesian socialist crap that destroyed the economy? That is the mainstream cralp, government approved and shrink wrapped by these humanity profs for your consumption. Last time USA had real economics was before Sherman act was used for the first time and private property rights were destroyed.

Re:I think he's right

[Anonymous Coward]

wrong. every time we have an economic crisis it is the result of rolling back regulations to get closer to your free market radnian fantasy world. just because your religion has told you something is good for you does not make it so.

Re:I think he's right

[internerdj]

Experience gives detailed in depth knowledge, education gives general broad knowledge. Being too far on either end of the spectrum can cause some difficulties. I've had several cases in my career where very good senior engineers were baffled by a problem too far afield of their experience and education, when the answer is basic 2nd year CS material.

Re:I think he's right

[Anonymous Coward]

Humanities COULD play a crucial role in creating an actual individual, instead they are today nothing but propaganda in the hands of the ruling elite, whose only purpose is to ensure that people are poor, violent, uneducated slaves.

You're absolutely right. I know a guy who was born in the USSR, and then somehow his govenrment let him leave and go to Canada, but Canada is just as much a socialist country, with strong teacher unions and subsidies for schools teaching the propaganda. He was brought up from propaganda, and it shows.

For example, he complains about other people not teaching real economics or valuable humanities, but he won't start a business to teach those things himself.

This is typical entitled lefty behavior: whining about problems instead of working to fix them. But since he's brought up on public education, he doesn't realize that he is the very thing he hates. He reminds of me of that Dave Chappelle skit the black white supremacist

Re:I think he's right

[bhiestand]

Experience gives detailed in depth knowledge, education gives general broad knowledge. Being too far on either end of the spectrum can cause some difficulties. I've had several cases in my career where very good senior engineers were baffled by a problem too far afield of their experience and education, when the answer is basic 2nd year CS material.

I agree on breadth vs. depth, but I think you're unfairly categorizing "education" as breadth. While undergrad is about broad knowledge, grad school is about specialized knowledge.

A CS undergrad at a good uni is going to be studying history, religion, politics, physical sciences, math, and a wide range of CS topics. A CS grad student is going to be focused on, say, machine learning, with more closely related courses. By the time they're doctoral candidates, they should have a very deep knowledge in one particular field combined with a broad knowledge of related fields... which should allow them to go multidisciplinary or work with people from other disciplines.

I suspect you know all of this and agree, but I wanted to bring it up just in case.

Bacteria.

[inode_buddha]

I support bacteria. Its the only culture some people have.

Re:Bacteria.

[Type44Q]

I support bacteria. Its the only culture some people have.

Actually, most have an overabundance of fungus.

:p

Re:Bacteria.

[Type44Q]

Candida, to be specific.

She's baking a loaf of bread and I think it's sourdough.

-Jim Carrey's character in Me, Myself & Irene

I've heard this before

[timholman]

I'm not quite sure where Dean Fitzgerald is coming from with this editorial. It's not as if every accredited ABET school doesn't already teach humanities as part of its engineering curriculum. In fact, the ABET 2000 accreditation process requires every engineering school to demonstrate that its undergraduate students are exposed to cultural, ethical, and economic concepts.

As someone who works at a university and teaches engineering courses, I've heard similar remarks from faculty members in the humanities throughout my career. To me this is just another example of the old "engineers aren't fully rounded human beings, because they haven't majored in the humanities" spiel.

"So our students also need an in-depth understanding of human complexities - the political, cultural, and economic realities that shape our existence - as well as fluency in the powerful forms of thinking and creativity cultivated by the humanities, arts, and social sciences."

I agree completely. But where are they going to get that understanding? From my experience, probably not in a humanities classroom.

In too many humanities courses, it's not about critical thinking, it's about figuring out the personal beliefs of the professor, because in many cases your grade depends on not offending those beliefs. I saw it when I was a student, and I still see it as a faculty member today. Too much of the grading in the humanities curriculum is entirely subjective, and in that sense I mean that it's the professor's opinion that counts the most ... and the students know it.

When I give an exam problem, the student's political and religious beliefs are completely irrelevant to their grades. The answer is either right or wrong, with partial credit assigned according to a standard rubric. My personal prejudices are meaningless. I wouldn't have it any other way, and neither would my colleagues.

A good engineering course teaches the essence of critical thinking: look at a problem, analyze it, write down a system of relevant equations, and solve it. What passes for critical thinking in many humanities courses is: "Repeat back my personal viewpoint verbatim, or else suffer the consequences with your grade."

So I think I'll take this latest editorial from Dean Fitzgerald with a very, very large shaker of salt. This strikes me as yet another in a very long series of not-so-subtle digs at STEM curriculums.

Re:I've heard this before

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a faculty member at a Tier I research university. In the Art Department. However, my artwork bridges art and STEM disciplines. I build robots, create virtual reality worlds for chickens, etc. I also teach at this intersection.

I have never had the experience you are describing as a student, or as a faculty member and I certainly do not grade projects based on my personal beliefs. That is terribly unprofessional behavior. I recently had a student turn in a project based on an extreme right wing ideology which I do not agree with. It is not my job to judge the merit of their beliefs. It is my job to judge the quality of the work they have done and whether what they have created clearly communicates to their audience.

Most faculty I know employ grading rubrics to remove as much subjectivity from their evaluations as possible.

Also, I think the big issue is that the critical thinking which takes place in STEM tends to be narrow in focus, identify a very particular problem and solve it. The critical thinking in the Arts and Humanities tends to be much broader in focus. This is not to say one is more valuable than the other, but that when people with each skill set are combined on an interdisciplinary team the types of problems they can solve and the quality of the solution is often better than those developed independently.

Also, creative activities in the humanities and arts help us to make sense of the cultural shifts that occur in response to groundbreaking scientific discoveries and technological advancements. And also to ask the question, just because we can do something, should we?

Re:I've heard this before

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a case of a member of the administration of an university trying to justify the existence of their department at the university. Outside of the English and technical communications courses, none of the "humanities" courses that I took in college have been of use in the 20+ years since I graduated. Yes, some of the courses were interesting. But I could have just checked out the books from a library, read them and saved a lot of time and expense that were wasted on those courses. The few examples that she gives in her editorial are going to be outweighed by the many other graduates who also feel that they were a waste of time or at best, a place where they could sit in the back of the room to do the homework for their real classes.

Re:I've heard this before

[Hognoxious]

it's not about critical thinking, it's about figuring out the personal beliefs of the professor, because in many cases your grade depends on not offending those beliefs.

s/professor/boss/ and s/grade/continued employment/

Pretty good preparation for the world of work, no?

Re:I've heard this before

[real gumby]

I'm not quite sure where Dean Fitzgerald is coming from with this editorial. It's not as if every accredited ABET school doesn't already teach humanities as part of its engineering curriculum. ...This strikes me as yet another in a very long series of not-so-subtle digs at STEM curriculums.

I think you miss two important points of her essay.

The first is that she is at MIT. She makes the point that MIT has already "drunk the kool aid" of the importance of the humanities and that even in a highly "STEM" institution like that, Humanities are considered crucial. In fact MIT has only 6 "schools", and Humanities is one of them on par with Engineering and Science.

But MIT can get away with setting its own standards, and that leads to her other point: that there is a strong emerging fetishism with STEM, and with degrees that train (as opposed to educate) you with "skills" that soon become irrelevant. A desire for more science and engineering graduates does seem like a good thing given where the USA is right now, and we have evidence from the sputnik scare that it probably can have a good result. But if we fetishize it at the expense of the humanities, we won't get what we want (a stronger, more dynamic society that helps everyone).

She's not advocating that, say, Bowdoin adopt MIT's requirement that humanities majors take multivariate calculus, E&M, do lab work etc. just like everyone else. But she is saying that if even one the most prestigious "STEM" schools considers the liberal arts crucial, perhaps they are. And the fact that someone from MIT is writing it, rather than someone from a liberal arts-only school, makes it a more convincing argument.

In too many humanities courses, it's not about critical thinking, it's about figuring out the personal beliefs of the professor, because in many cases your grade depends on not offending those beliefs.

There are poorly taught classes in Engineering and especially CS as well. Personally, all the thermo I took at MIT was worthless and I had to learn it all over again in my 40s.

Yes, it's hard to identify crappy liberal arts teaching, especially when some of the interesting work does challenge orthodox thinking (since of course some of the crappiest also challenge orthodoxy). But really is that all that different from an engineering class that teaches only the stuff that's easiest to teach? It can be objectively valid, yet useless in the real world.

Note: I have a course 21 (humanities) degree from MIT.

Re:I've heard this before

[Anonymous Coward]

Its clearly a failure of critical thinking that it is being equated to:

A good engineering course teaches the essence of critical thinking: look at a problem, analyze it, write down a system of relevant equations, and solve it.

Critical thinking isn't problem solving. I suppose that's just thinking, minus the "critical." Don't get me wrong, thinking itself is important and a lot of people can't "look at a problem, analyze it," etc.

Critical thinking, on the other hand, is really about asking about the approach to the problem itself. Why is such-and-such a "problem" to begin with, how has that arisen, in what ways are responses to this problem pre-figured by how such-and-such is described as a "problem." These approaches require larger context: cultural, social, political, and historical, if only to expose a student to the fact that things CAN BE different.

It is a world without critical thinking that would make everyone problem-solving computers. Alas, its already upon us.

Re:I've heard this before

[Anonymous Coward]

People who have "drunk the kool aid" and find it tasty think that everyone else should even though there are several reasons they shouldn't. 1) it's expensive - 25% of the education bill from MIT is still quite a lot of cash, 2) it's something that they don't want to take and 3) is useless for most people later in life. Why is this even an issue? It is because student loan debt and overall college expenses are out of control. For publicly funded universities, there is pressure to cut funding and frankly most arts & humanities courses can be replaced by having students buy a book or dvd. Eliminating those courses and departments would divert a lot of funds into something useful.

Re:I've heard this before

[kick6]

But if we fetishize it at the expense of the humanities, we won't get what we want (a stronger, more dynamic society that helps everyone).

Who is this "we" that wants that, and when did they decide it was the university's mission to provide?

Re:I've heard this before

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you might be missing the point... not everyone has the same experience of grading being entirely subjective. However, part of why the humanities is important is learning to appreciate and negotiate that subjectivity. It's part of human experience. Dismissing someone's perspective as "subjective" and therefore entirely arbitrary, and therefore unworthy of serious attention--even if it's your own perspective--is *why* there's this stereotype about STEM fields.

Approaching other people that way will not get you very far with other people.

Re:I've heard this before

[Anonymous Coward]

p.s. Many of the comments in these threads just reinforce the stereotype of STEM students. You essentially have a bunch of STEM individuals stereotyping humanities students without any insight whatsoever. The difference is that humanities students would at least have a dialog with themselves about their own stereotyping and how to get out of it.

I say this as a STEM student myself.

Re:I've heard this before

[CRCulver]

Who is this "we" that wants that, and when did they decide it was the university's mission to provide?

"We" could be seen as the universities' own mission statements. For example, the university I did my undergraduate studies at claims that it is "working to expand knowledge in the service of humanity through learning, justice and faith." But it's not just my fairly small Jesuit institution that has such social goals. I searched for the mission statements of Ivy League unis and got things like the following:

Cornell also aims, through public service, to enhance the lives and livelihoods of our students, the people of New York, and others around the world.

...

Dartmouth fosters lasting bonds among faculty, staff, and students, which encourage a culture of integrity, self-reliance, and collegiality and instill a sense of responsibility for each other and for the broader world.

I am fairly sure that this kind of talk, that a university trains graduates to go and make the world a better place for their fellow human beings, is no contemporary political correctness but probably goes back centuries -- Victorian literature, for example, often ascribes that mission to Cambridge and Oxford.

Re:I've heard this before

[russotto]

The first is that she is at MIT. She makes the point that MIT has already "drunk the kool aid" of the importance of the humanities and that even in a highly "STEM" institution like that, Humanities are considered crucial. In fact MIT has only 6 "schools", and Humanities is one of them on par with Engineering and Science.

MIT has a Humanities department to maintain their accreditation.

Re:I've heard this before

[internerdj]

My use of humanities courses has grown as much as my advanced math courses. Over my career I've used foreign language studies and psychology extensively in addition to the communication related courses. I've known of a few people who've had to some intesive historical research for technical projects and some computer science research requires a solid foundation in philosophical studies. Every education will have some stuff that you never use even in your own field, but a good education will expose you to the types of learning that you will need to grow your knowledge to complete any task.

Re:I've heard this before

[frank_adrian314159]

I am fairly sure that this kind of talk, that a university trains graduates to go and make the world a better place for their fellow human beings, is no contemporary political correctness but probably goes back centuries -- Victorian literature, for example, often ascribes that mission to Cambridge and Oxford.

Absolutely. It goes back to the idea of Christian charity and a universal need for salvation (which comes from outside oneself, of course) and winds its way though the centuries to "The White Man's Burden" and cultural exceptionalism of all types. And you can see the linkages only if you have enough knowledge about history to see the links and how they're connected.

Technology detox

[musth]

What other essential knowledge or skills should we add to this imaginary 'toolbox'?"

Whatever they are (and Heinlein's list is very good), the skills that we need to live as well-rounded humans cannot be perceived, checked off, or checked in like items on a requirements list or lines of code. A great problem with technology, and with most practitioners of it, is the instrumental view of the world it inculcates. As the Dean says, the humanities represent a very different way of thinking and understanding the world.

Probably the best thing that could happen to most technology majors is a several-years-long break from it.

preaching from the choir

[jafac]

MIT doesn't need to justify Humanities degrees.

The business world must. Maybe such degrees are okay for people who are already independently wealthy? But right now, our broken job market doesn't think they're worth much.

Re:preaching from the choir

[internerdj]

I skimmed the article ( a little better than normal for /.), but it looked like he was arguing about the importance of humanities courses rather than humanities degrees. I'd agree with him that our current focus on STEM doesn't need to harm humanities courses. As I've grown in my field, I've found as great a wealth in my humanities classes as I have in my more advanced math courses.

Re:preaching from the choir

[Anonymous Coward]

Academic degrees do not equal vocational training - they are just that, academic. My academic degrees are not the same as the professional degrees and vocational certificates of my family and friends. The fact that my degrees are in Computer Science, and that I instantly walked out of school and into a cool job, is something situational to certain majors. The idea that graduating from college automatically lands you a job is a hold-over from the 80's - where banks would hire kids fresh out of college to be salarymen.

Re:preaching from the choir

[Anonymous Coward]

But right now, our broken job market doesn't think they're worth much.

Art majors are a dime a dozen. We have known it for years. You have to be exceptional at it to make money at it. With a bit of con work to go along with it to hukster some patron to come off a retarded amount of money for something which in reality has no value.

For example my sister-in-laws real sister (dont ask). She is taking art history as a major. What a useless degree. I told her so. She was rightfully offended. However, she is also now changing majors as what I pointed out to her made sense.

If you pick a degree in which there are 600 jobs in the entire world what are your chances of getting that job? Especially when there are thousands of other people exactly like you getting the *same* degree.

Pick something you are competent at. Something where there is a decent demand for it.

You can 'jump the major' at the work place but in engineering it is the exception not the rule. I know maybe 2-3 people out of my 20 year career that did not major in CS that are actually good at it. The rest ... not so much and I make a *very* good living fixing their fuckups. The 'lie' people tell each other is the title in the major does not matter. At first it *really* matters. As you get further away from it not so much as experience is a better factor.

All you need is a degree is a lie. You need the right degree and the right experience and someone who feels like throwing you a bone. Just having the degree will get you a job is also a lie. The 1998-1999 era was a fluke. When I started the *best* (and I mean the guru/experienced guys) programmers made maybe 60k a year, and starting around 25k. That was 20 years ago. Inflation has moved on to about 2x what it was then. Low and behold it is almost exactly that now. It was just a return to norms. You dont beat the market, it makes you its bitch.

Re:preaching from the choir

[feedayeen]

Educators may not like it, but the entire K-uni system is geared to vocational training. In the US, it costs taxpayers ~100k to pay for a K-12 education for each student. Public universities are further subsidized about 10-20k per pupil leading to a net cost of ~200k to taxpayers to produce a college educated student. You'd need to be able to justify an increase in tax revenue of at least 5k a year to justify such expenses given a 40 year long career. Based on tax brackets, this would mean 10-15k a year increase in salary. This isn't even covering the money that students themselves spend which is typically now on the order of 30k for a 4 year program.

Lifestyle

[sinequonon]

STEM careers can allow you to live a decent lifestyle; humanities can turn that into a life worth living.

Re:Lifestyle

[dysmal]

...and business degrees turn you into a person unworthy of living!

Re:Lifestyle

[Anonymous Coward]

STEM careers can allow you to live a decent lifestyle; humanities can turn that into a life worth living.

No degree has ever had an effect on my life or lifestyle. I am not defined by the shit I study. Do you think I'm a terrorist because I looked up how to make a pipe bomb? Eat a dick moron.

Re:Lifestyle

[stdarg]

Your arrogance is astounding. STEM careers can allow you to live a decent lifestyle and lead a life worth living.

And here's why Humanities are attacked:

[Anonymous Coward]

Social sciences is a misnomer because they aren't sciences, and some of them are not even arts. Many of them are as harmful as phrenology, specially when used in courts. For example, psychologists, influenced by feminists, erroneously postulated that rapers cannot reintegrate into society, that as soon as they leave prison they will rape again, and therefore they should be chemically castrated or be kept in prison for a long time without furlough. However, recent social studies using facts rather than assumptions actually found that violators rarely fall back into crime, with only 5% of them posing any risk (people identified with a profile of mental disorders), while the usual rate of reoffenses for other delinquents is 30% or higher. This study means that many men have been chemically castrated or faced longer prison times due to wrong assumptions taken as science facts. Other social pseudosciences like "Women Studies" or "Sociology" persist in repeating long-time ago discredited lies and marxist propaganda that doesn't resist scientific, economic, nor mathematical scrutiny. Sociology in particular is the only field of science whose students often refuse to acknowledge as science even though that automatically implies falling grades, and is well known for the "Sokal Scandal", an hoax in which they have fall more than once.

Lastly, "Climate Change" is known to fudge data, create models with no predictive power (aka. writing science fiction), rely on statistic correlations with infinitesimals so the results become white noise, and have their proponents constantly fall on fallacies such as argumentum ad verecundiam, argumentum ad populum, and Circular logic, behaving more as a religious zealots preaching doomsday and shunning the nonbelievers, rather than as serious sciencists.

Re:And here's why Humanities are attacked:

[gweihir]

And there you fall flat on your face at the end. Climatology is hard science and what it produces is reliable. What they tell the press is a different story and strongly influenced by the public not wanting to hear what they have found. Although the catastrophe is pretty much ensured at this time, it is something like 200 years away and most people are incapable of thinking in that time-frame.

Re:And here's why Humanities are attacked:

[Anonymous Coward]

Climatology is hard science and what it produces is reliable

What horseshit. They are fucking all over the place. Just like when one asshole said "I predicted 3 of the last big earthquakes! Listen to my system!" and the government official admitted "He did predict them, but he also predicted 300 big earthquakes that never happened."

When climate scientists claim an "accurate predictive model" to be "only" 30% off -- that shows you don't know what the fuck you're doing. Can you imagine if speedometers or thermometers or anything else was "only" 30% off? Fucking chaos!

Re:And here's why Humanities are attacked:

[gweihir]

You do not understand how science works at all. Or what an error-corridor is. Lucky for you, you will not have to eat your words. But the children of your grand-children will curse you if they find out what you say these days.

Re: Re: And here's why Humanities are attacked:

[Anonymous Coward]

If your model predicts a 45 angle / and your data gets a 0 angle _, the model is wrong, period. My grand-children would actually be more worried by the Yellowstone Supervolcano and by the way politics has introduced pseudoscience and political propaganda in high schools, than by this. Also, politicians have failed to explain how do we actually save the world if we still "pollute" (lol) the world with the same amount of air (CO2), but to feel better we deviate huge sums of cash to corrupt countries to buy "CO2 Bonds" from them. That's actually what the IPCC and the UN suggests, and note that they are the ones that decide where the grant money for public research goes, so you as a researcher won't get any unless you find a creative way to "glue" Climate-Change support inside your totally unrelated study of apes or the Himalayas.

Note also, that "Climate-Change hysteria" is a US fabrication. Outside the US, the manipulation done by political lobbies in this issue and their true intentions is far more apparent. It just happened there's a political faction who bet a WHOLE LOAD of money on Green Energies based on false premises (China & India industry would skyrocket the costs of oil), discovered they were wrong and that their technology sucks and is unsellable, so they have to resort now on using guilt-based and scare tactics to MAKE AN EXCUSE to give their politicians justification to waste people's money on a technology that is neither efficient, green nor renovable (sure, the Sun is renovable, but the materials from which the panels are made are not, and the fabrication process is acknowledged to be highly contaminant).

humanities is all about

[Anonymous Coward]

learning about the capacity of a person's inhumanity

Humanities are great, if you can handle it

[Andover Chick]

The humanities are a great way for a STEM student to round him/herself. Especially since Russia/India/China graduate so many vanilla STEM students that being able to communicate effectively and think critically are a great way stand-out. But the humanities can be difficult, time consuming, and expensive.

QOTD

[firewrought]

"Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts." -- Norman Mailer

Little known MIT fact

[paiute]

I believe the system is still the same as when I was there (before the electron had been discovered). If you majored in a science or engineering, you had to take 8 classes in a declared humanities concentration. That would qualify as a minor at other schools.

Re:Little known MIT fact

[snsh]

They require you to take 8 subjects, of which several are distributed among predefined categories. I believe they discontinued the most ridiculous requirement of having a specific HUM-D/HASS-D subset of 20 or so subjects which were frequently oversubscribed because everyone in the school had to take ~three subjects from that subset. Those HASS-D subjects often covered obscure topics like "fairy tales".

Years and years ago, MIT's humanities department had a simple mission to "teach these nerds something about civilization" but since then it's grown and tries to compete with Harvard. They give out minors and majors. From what I've seen, half the the students who major/minor in HASS do it on top of a STEM degree, since it's not that hard to complete the extra subjects if you work efficiently. The other half of HASS majors are mostly dropouts from STEM courses.

Oh!

[Anonymous Coward]

the humanity...

Most people do not use that toolbox...

[gweihir]

And you want to put more into it? That sounds like it will only make things worse.

Technology & Humanity

[LionKimbro]

Snippet of a recent conversation:

Friend: "...and people are even 3D printing houses!"

Me: (skeptical look)

Friend: "It'll work!"

Me: "I have no doubts that the technology will function just fine. But in this case, it's not the technology that's the problem. We could have cheap housing all over the place, presently, and solve a million housing problems. But the problem isn't the technology."

Friend: "Well what else would it be?"

I explained about Seattle City's law that you can only have 8 people living in a housing unit, regardless of the size, and that this is on the liberal end of things, as far as most cities go.

I explained about zoning, and restriction, and neighbors.

I explained that if you could snap your fingers and make floating or underground housing, for absolutely free, either above or below the city of Seattle, people would rage with anger and complain of crime, undesirables, unsightlys, and plummeting housing values.

The middle class stores most of its wealth in its houses, and so everybody has a gigantic freak-out if anything happens to cause housing prices to go down. We hold as a society the notion that a house is an investment vehicle, and will do anything in our collective power to make sure that housing prices go up, up, up, faster than the rate of inflation. We'll talk about "quality" and "community" and "clean neighborhoods," whatever it takes, to make sure that the next generation spends more on our houses than the generation that came before.

What use is a 3-D printer that can print houses with ease?

What use are robots that can programmatically generate great housing in a for-loop?

I mean, besides becoming "the enemy of all humankind" and having all federal, state, and local laws applied against you with every bit of scrutiny that can be mustered?

You "study the humanities" not so that you learn some kind of scientific truth about the human being. You study the humanities so that you aren't naive, and waste the investment everybody's put into you.

Re:Technology & Humanity

[Krishnoid]

Friend: "...and people are even 3D printing houses!"

Me: Let me know when they start 3D printing Location, Location, and Location.

Re:Technology & Humanity

[Anonymous Coward]

No one 3D printed a house. Not now, and not ever.

Re:Technology & Humanity

[fph il quozientatore]

You are correct in that, once housing is for free, people will find other artificial status symbols and currency dumps. But overall people will be better off, like everyone is (on average) more comfortable now than in the middle age, thanks to sanitation, heating medicine, less manual labor, and many other scientific and technical improvements.

Impopular opinion maybe, but I think the world would be a better place with more people thinking like your friend and less like you.

Re:Technology & Humanity

[Intrepid imaginaut]

What use is a 3-D printer that can print houses with ease?

What use are robots that can programmatically generate great housing in a for-loop?

The developing world called, it would like a word.

You "study the humanities" not so that you learn some kind of scientific truth about the human being. You study the humanities so that you aren't naive, and waste the investment everybody's put into you.

Except it's not neccessary to study the humanities to understand these things. A simple five minute conversation usually does the trick.

Re: Technology & Humanity

[Anonymous Coward]

Except they did, in China. I guess the parent was using sarcasm, but people reading it might not know that.

Re:Technology & Humanity

[Anonymous Coward]

3D printing of houses isn't going to help much, the material cost is still going to be high, and likely a build crew will still be cheaper than first building a printer large enough to print the house, (not to mention a build crew will be needed to assemble the printer).

Unless you are just talking pre-fab houses, which I guess could work, but the problem isn't 3D printing them, it is mass producing them for less than what we currently can do.

An example is manufacture of plastic goods, 3D printing is terrible compared to injection molding once you get to a certain point, but 3D printing the molds is feasible.

Speak another language

[frisket]

What other essential knowledge or skills should we add to this imaginary 'toolbox'?

One that sets many apart: learn to communicate in another language.

Re:Speak another language

[StormReaver]

One that sets many apart: learn to communicate in another language.

I communicate with C, C++, Java, Assembler, Python, BASIC, and others. You may begin sending me money.

Just ask Aaron Swartz

[Anonymous Coward]

>> What other essential knowledge or skills should we add to this imaginary 'toolbox'?"

Lets start "critical thinking" about copy wrongs, non proportional penalties and institutional policy being a tool of interest groups.
Less talk and more action... MIT as no moral stance until the damage they helped happen gets repaired, Can't be? Then those
involved should be excluded from the institution. Talk is cheap

single biggest threat to STEM education

[xeno]

Yes. THIS.

The single biggest thing that renders useless an otherwise-great STEM education is the lack of ability to write well.

Legion are the devs who string together many words, but forget to have a verb or period at the end. Innumerable are the IT wonks who can't scrape together a coherent and concise summary of 1000-page compliance reports. I swear, the collective plural noun for some of the security analysts at work is "a shimmer of tin foil hats" or "a fuckery of subjectivism" ...and they don't even understand the nature of the criticism.

Can I *PLEASE* have a critical thinker and good writer in the house???? Anyone??

Science does no good if you cannot express a coherent hypothesis, imagine a threshold, or string together a sequence of actual actions for testing. In medicine this costs lives.
Technology is an interchange, it does no good if you cannot listen to a problem, and express understanding back. At this moment in software, we're awash in UX implementations that aren't traceable to a functional problem.
Engineering compounds the problem later without functional expression and holistic and temporal views. Ask a Boeing maintenance tech about the plethora of could-have-been-shared 1-off components in 20-40 year old jets.
Math does no good if you cannot draw a picture. Ask the Morton Thiokol guys about their reports on the o-rings on the space shuttle.

Among other "humanities" like history and writing/composition, Tufte ought to be mandatory for high-school seniors in a STEM program.

Re:single biggest threat to STEM education

[Anonymous Coward]

The single biggest thing that renders useless an otherwise-great education is the lack of ability to write well.

Fixed that for you.

I've ran into my share of incoherent developers. The clients and management, however, are often just as bad, if not worse. At the least, you can usually badger the developers and encourage them to use their words until you can piece together the data you need. Everyone else seems to take exception to that.

Re:single biggest threat to STEM education

[timholman]

Yes. THIS.

The single biggest thing that renders useless an otherwise-great STEM education is the lack of ability to write well.

Legion are the devs who string together many words, but forget to have a verb or period at the end. Innumerable are the IT wonks who can't scrape together a coherent and concise summary of 1000-page compliance reports. I swear, the collective plural noun for some of the security analysts at work is "a shimmer of tin foil hats" or "a fuckery of subjectivism" ...and they don't even understand the nature of the criticism.

Can I *PLEASE* have a critical thinker and good writer in the house???? Anyone??

You are absolutely correct. Most people with STEM backgrounds cannot write a coherent paragraph or make a coherent presentation. But guess what? The same is true with most humanities majors.

I used to serve on a faculty committee that evaluated essays for the entire university. As a group, we would read a short essay, grade it, and determine if the student needed to take remedial composition courses before graduation.

I never saw any significant correlation between a particular major and writing skill. The good, mediocre, and bad writers were pretty much spread across the entire student body.

The one correlation I've observed in my career is this: good writers universally tend to be good readers. They read for pleasure, and read a wide variety of books. Those also tend to be exactly the people who have good critical thinking skills, because they've had the voices of hundreds or thousands of different authors in their heads all their lives. That exposure to so many different viewpoints is absolutely critical.

If you want to make people better writers, then make them better readers. That is the hard part, and there is no simple solution.

Re:single biggest threat to STEM education

[antifoidulus]

Legion are the devs who string together many words, but forget to have a verb or period at the end.

Yoda-ese 101 as undergrad took glad I am.

Re:single biggest threat to STEM education

[HnT]

The thing is: you do not need a humanities degree to get a working understanding of the things you are wishing for, though admittedly for some of the STEM "nerds" it might take as long as that but it is not like there aren't just as terrible humanities "nerds" as well.

Re:single biggest threat to STEM education

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Words of truth.

Education as a state function

[rdelsambuco]

I would think that critical thinking is exactly what the state wants to limit in it's citizens. And by "state," I mean the nexus of the most powerful and monied bureaucratic and commercial interests. For example, does a company like Apple benefit most from questioning consumers, or from credulous consumers?

STEM vs. Humanities

[Stormy Dragon]

From climate change to poverty to disease, the challenges of our age are unwaveringly human in nature and scale, and engineering and science issues are always embedded in broader human realities, from deeply felt cultural traditions to building codes to political tensions.

If I have a disease, I want my doctor to heal me; not ponder my deeply felt cultural traditions.

Re:STEM vs. Humanities

[novium]

And what if, because of your race or gender, medicine has taken a very different approach to your body and your symptoms? Would you care then? for example, women have often been under-treated (or subject to grossly inappropriate treatments) because the default assumption when presenting with mysterious symptoms has been to dismiss it as mental issues. And truthfully, the history of medicine is one in which a lot of "scientific" studies hinged on flawed assumptions as a product of the biases of the scientists who could not see how the very design of their studies would only confirm to them what they already believed? It's still an issue today.

It may matter to you less about your physician (although it should still matter), but I imagine you hope that your doctor is reading studies and was trained by others who are aware of these things in order to ensure the highest quality of care.

Re:STEM vs. Humanities

[CRCulver]

If I have a disease, I want my doctor to heal me; not ponder my deeply felt cultural traditions.

During the Cold War, linguists and anthropologists interested in the deeply felt cultural traditions of individual peoples in Russia's multiethnic society proved a key strategic resource to the US military. In the 1990s and even more so after 9/11, scholars who understood the relationship between deeply felt cultural traditions in the Muslim world and the spread of extremism were a help in finding ways to defend against said extremism.

Any part of the humanities that looks at a different culture has a potential real-world application in foreign policy and defence.

Re:STEM vs. Humanities

[stdarg]

And what if, because of your race or gender, medicine has taken a very different approach to your body and your symptoms?

Don't tell that to the humanities majors who believe race and gender are artificial constructs invented by Dead White Males to oppress POCs and women.

Re:STEM vs. Humanities

[novium]

um, no, I think you rather misunderstood my point. Which is that the cultural constructs of race and gender have influenced the study of medicine, so that, for example, women's medical complaints are often characterized as psychological in nature.

Or, in contrast, the way that women, people of color, and the lower classes' small rebellions and bits of non-conformity have often been pathologized. (the history of eugenics, forced institutionalization, and forced sterilization in the United States provides many, many examples of that.)

But then they might think for themselves.

[Animats]

I'd suggest knowing more history rather than more literature.

Russia's advance into Ukraine is much like Germany moving into Poland in 1939. This is a very big deal. Yet it isn't even on the front page of CNN today. It's a one-line entry on Fox. On Reuters, it's the top story.

Re:But then they might think for themselves.

[frank_adrian314159]

This is a very big deal. Yet it isn't even on the front page of CNN today.

That's because Wolf Blitzer hasn't found the plane yet.

Heinlein

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought Ayn Rand had a patent on the "traits I happen to mostly have = IDEAL HUMAN BEING" schtick...

Well, I suppose the two were pretty contemporaneous. Might be a prior art issue.

The Humanities are tainted

[epyT-R]

1. They're the primary reason campuses are tainted with center left politics and the propaganda of professional victimhood. This has to go. Universities should rise above any particular ideology so that the on-campus culture is encouraged to judge them all more objectively. Now, there's a good basis for a humanities program.
2. language skills are needed and are probably one of the most important things the humanities offer.
3. 'Social' science is also loaded with marxist dogma. Strip them clean and start over.
4. All of that Mental masturbating while huffing too much vacuum in the ivory tower is also not productive.

This is not an all inclusive list but it is a good start.

Teaching economics

[manu0601]

Teaching economics may come with a hidden political agenda. If this is about telling students that There Is No Alternative, I would prefer them to not be brain washed by that doctrine.

By the same argument

[Livius]

...students majoring in the humanities need a few hard science courses.

MIT Humanities largely a joke ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the humanities classes I took at MIT as an undergrad were a joke - subjective forays into the professor's personal obsessions with little clear redeeming value.

irrelevant and useless?

[snooo53]

...Sigh

Without classics we wouldn't have architecture or democracy.
Without philosophy we wouldn't have logic
Without art we wouldn't have beauty or elegant design.
Without religion we wouldn't have modern science or medicine...of course you wouldn't know about the Medieval monks or the Golden Age of Islam if you hadn't studied History, but I suppose that is another 'irrelevant' humanities study.

Certainly there are plenty of classes out there with questionable value. It's a shame that you missed out on good ones. But by and large, humanities are the difference between learning a trade, and getting an education. These are the foundation for how our modern world and modern science came to exist through the thinkers of the Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment. Some of the biggest scientific and technological breakthroughs come from those who are able to look outside their specific field of study for inspiration. That English lit you found such a waste of time...I suppose then Mary Shelley's Frankenstein wasn't worth writing? After all, who cares about one of the first Science Fiction books .. a genre that has inspired millions of STEM graduates to work on great things? Dismissing humanities as useless is a failure to understand where we came from and how we got here.

Re:irrelevant and useless?

[Anonymous Coward]

Without classics we wouldn't have architecture or democracy.
Without philosophy we wouldn't have logic
Without art we wouldn't have beauty or elegant design.
Without religion we wouldn't have modern science or medicine...of course you wouldn't know about the Medieval monks or the Golden Age of Islam if you hadn't studied History, but I suppose that is another 'irrelevant' humanities study.

Wouldn't have had. Now we do have them and the originating studies are looking more and more like they need to be filed under "history", with the exception of art.

Re:irrelevant and useless?

[stdarg]

Without classics we wouldn't have...

Your list attempts to link humanities to some pretty broad concepts, but it's just words with nothing to back it up. That's the trouble with aphorisms that aren't viscerally true. For instance you can't say "without philosophy we wouldn't have logic" and expect many to agree, surely?

Dismissing humanities as useless is a failure to understand where we came from and how we got here.

I fully agree with that, but at the same time I recognize that "how we got here" is not "the only way we could have gotten here." I think that's the problem with your list.. you seem to think certain humanities and sequences of historical events were strictly necessary for the development of things like logic, beauty, architecture, science, etc. But most of that is happenstance.

Re:irrelevant and useless?

[Austerity Empowers]

And I'm not going to stop you from studying those things. I just don't want to pay for it as part of my degree program, or, that ship having sailed years ago, see the financial burden that my fellow man is taking on for education that is 50% not useful, to prop up an education system that is not keeping abreast of the times.

ppe is the answer

[hlee]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

PPE was developed by Oxford back in the 1920s because they thought a largely humanities driven syllabus centered around ancient history wasn't very practical. Many universities offer it these days, and is one of the best non-STEM courses around.

Red Herring

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Humanities are important. But what passes for them in university these days isn't. They are a melting pot of incompetency with both lecturers and students. Tell a career advisor "I want to get a university degree, but math and formal logic evade me", and he might recommend Philosophy. Seriously.

Recently, in Ruhrort

[udippel]

I noticed some words painted on a defunct building while passing by on a tram. It said something like "Kunst ist keine Krücke, sondern das Rückgrat der Gesellschaft" (my excuses if cited not totally correct) - "Art is not the crutch but the the backbone of society". I have remembered the meaning ever since.
Humanities are on an induced decline - but arts are even more at the receiving end of the queue, because it serves even less in economic terms compared to the humanities.
It is obviously forgotten that man is not a human without art. So Henlein was correct with the 'insects' - highly intelligent in a specialized area or not makes no difference. Ants are surely better in a number of collective functions than humans.

Worker drones, not thinkers!

[Anonymous Coward]

The push for STEM is a push to create worker drones with narrow skills, not well-rounded citizens. "Common core" is utilitarian to the core, teaching only functional skills. What our society wants is a supply of unthinking drones with skills, but no insight or creativity.

Kids, you can resist this by subversively reading books on your own time. Classics of mathematics, philosophy, literature - all the stuff they don't want you to read in school. And now you know why they're pushing e-books, temporary rental of books, digital readers, and so on, to try to wipe this stuff out.

Engineers

[ThatsNotPudding]

If you look at the ranks of terrorists / freedom fighters / loaded descriptor, you see a fair amount of engineers filling 'technical' roles (weapons, bombs, etc.) as they merely see a problem that needs solved... by any means necessary. Humanitarianism is pretty far down on their list.

Eat your vegetables

[iamwahoo2]

Vegetables are good for us.
In fact, I like eating most vegetables.
But if I want a peach pie, I should be able to go the grocery and just purchase the peaches, flour, and sugar that I need. I do not want someone to force me to buy broccoli along with my peach pie ingredients. That does not mean that I will never by broccoli in the future. But right now, I just want a peach pie.

Technical Barbarians

[haapi]

[Nazi architect and politician] Albert Speer said he regretted most that he grew up with a technical education only, in architecture and engineering. He learned little of the liberal arts and humanities, and nothing of philosophy.

"It was this lopsided education that made it so easy for many of us to fall under the spell of Nazism," he said. "We were technical barbarians, who did a fine job, but never inquired about the purpose, or the ultimate results.

Re:Technical Barbarians

[IndieVoter]

OK, so what becomes of a Gender Studies graduate who got through a PhD program and never took a real science class? Today's Politicians.

Humanities

[IndieVoter]

These types of defenses always seem to come from fully entrenched Academics who have a cushy tenured job. I have to wonder if you polled 100 PhDs in a variety of liberal arts subjects, especially after they have been out of school for 5 years, the points would be considered valid. I do not debate the importance of a wide base of knowledge. I do, however, object to using tax payer money to crank out millions of college grads with no job skills and little prospects of paying their own way in the world. For a reality check, tag along on a college tour at a randomly selected college. You will see first hand what is being sold these days. 95% is leafy campus, beautiful people, great football team, 'social responsibility', Nobel prize winners (whom you will never see or hear from), cafeteria, and Greek system. They use the word 'diversity' a LOT, but there really isn't much.... mostly Asians and Whites. My son attends one of the 'other' types. Before the college tour, we saw nice kids in good physical shape, and seemingly happy. The intro presentation started with the following statement "our goal is to provide a great education, with an undergrad degree in 4 years leading to a job in the selected major course of study". And. they are doing that. Compare with a tour at another college in the same public system where we were bombarded with political correctness and reminded of the exact numbers of minorities at the school. Then, we were told how they have the biggest Gender Studies department in the country. The parents looked at each other, and a number of us started laughing out loud. Things went downhill from there..... If we are truly trying to create a more 'aware' student, then lets start with better reading, writing, and math skills. And, lets dump tenure in the early grades so we can focus on TEACHING, not politics. But, hey, the teacher unions are now the number one campaign contributor to the current administration in Washington.

The most useful course that I took at the 'tute

[Anonymous Coward]

Chinese was my best course that I took at the 'tute. It was far more useful than Courses 3 and 5; now I get to eat tofu every night. Life is good!

stress

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been of the belief for a long time that one of the biggest problems we now face is that humans are analog creatures, but the world we are making is a cold binary world, requiring robotic precision to maintain oneself above the law (for example). Look at sports matches, the "line" is now computerised. Driving - a slight slip and your over the limit and fined. "You're with us or against us", "No, the computer says you still owe money, sorry, there's nothing I can do, you just have to pay unfortunately" - ...I wonder how long before we start dying of stress en masse due to the insane amounts of precision required by our machines?

dept head defends her shitty classes

[PJ6]

I don't care how many humanities courses you take, you're not going to take away anything significant from history or philosophy or ethics or civics or music, when going to MIT. It's just not gonna happen. There isn't time, it's NOT the reason you go there, and has jack shit to do with the value of your degree.

Everyone's already got 800 or close on the verbal portion of their SAT, nobody's going to learn how to be a better writer or communicate more effectively by taking a crappy HASS-D.

Classics major here

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wanted to know where I fit into this schema of liberal arts being "easy" and "useless." 'Cause classics seemed pretty tough to me and my STEMmy friends. I almost think that people find it hard to process that there is such a thing as something that's both very difficult to learn *and* "useless" in that financial sense we esteem so highly these days.