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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'?"
An MIT?
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.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Why should we trust a mouthpiece of an organization that murders students?
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.
This is a tough one for lots of developers.
..as part of an engineering degree
No, a degree in English literature will not help you find a job
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.
They should try that with economics. What could possibly go wrong?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
is that while Math majors know Shakespeare, English majors do not know Euclid.
(This is not originally my idea.)
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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.
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.
It does if he's trying to explain why a speedometer is reading wrong.
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.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I support bacteria. Its the only culture some people have.
C|N>K
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.
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.
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.
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.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
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?
STEM careers can allow you to live a decent lifestyle; humanities can turn that into a life worth living.
-Bob-
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.
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.
"Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts." -- Norman Mailer
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
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).
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.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
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?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
ITYM real-estate law.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
And you want to put more into it? That sounds like it will only make things worse.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"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.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
What other essential knowledge or skills should we add to this imaginary 'toolbox'?
One that sets many apart: learn to communicate in another language.
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.
I think not...(*poof*)
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?
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.
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?
I comment occasionally so that I can mod others -1 overrated or -1 offtopic.
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.
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?
If I have a disease, I want my doctor to heal me; not ponder my deeply felt cultural traditions.
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.
They should try that with economics. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, for one, they could end up classifying it as a humanities subject.
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".
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.
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.
...students majoring in the humanities need a few hard science courses.
...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.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
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.
[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.
Well, apparently, you only have to fool the majority of people for a little while.
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.
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.
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.