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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'?"
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
An MIT?
See here.
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.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
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.
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."
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.
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.
...and business degrees turn you into a person unworthy of living!
ITYM real-estate law.
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.
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.
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*)
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.
...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.