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'Why Liberal Arts and the Humanities Are as Important as Engineering' (wadhwa.com)
Engineering professor Vivek Wadha writes: A technological shift is in progress that will change the rules of innovation. A broad range of technologies, such as computing, artificial intelligence, digital medicine, robotics and synthetic biology, are advancing exponentially and converging, making amazing things possible. With the convergence of medicine, artificial intelligence and sensors, we can create digital doctors that monitor our health and help us prevent disease; with the advances in genomics and gene editing, we have the ability to create plants that are drought resistant and that feed the planet; with robots powered by artificial intelligence, we can build digital companions for the elderly. Nanomaterial advances are enabling a new generation of solar and storage technologies that will make energy affordable and available to all.
Creating solutions such as these requires a knowledge of fields such as biology, education, health sciences and human behavior. Tackling today's biggest social and technological challenges requires the ability to think critically about their human context, which is something that humanities graduates happen to be best trained to do. An engineering degree is very valuable, but the sense of empathy that comes from music, arts, literature and psychology provides a big advantage in design. A history major who has studied the Enlightenment or the rise and fall of the Roman Empire gains an insight into the human elements of technology and the importance of its usability. A psychologist is more likely to know how to motivate people and to understand what users want than is an engineer who has only worked in the technology trenches. A musician or artist is king in a world in which you can 3D-print anything that you can imagine.
Creating solutions such as these requires a knowledge of fields such as biology, education, health sciences and human behavior. Tackling today's biggest social and technological challenges requires the ability to think critically about their human context, which is something that humanities graduates happen to be best trained to do. An engineering degree is very valuable, but the sense of empathy that comes from music, arts, literature and psychology provides a big advantage in design. A history major who has studied the Enlightenment or the rise and fall of the Roman Empire gains an insight into the human elements of technology and the importance of its usability. A psychologist is more likely to know how to motivate people and to understand what users want than is an engineer who has only worked in the technology trenches. A musician or artist is king in a world in which you can 3D-print anything that you can imagine.
You don't need a music, arts, literature or psychology to have empathy. Further, there really is a war on the middle class jobs - construction workers, plumbers, electricians, etc.. We've basically stereotyped these jobs as the low-class when the majority of people with degrees can't wire in a new light switch or change their car tire.
You want liberal arts and the humanities because you _can_ teach critical thinking. If you're dealing with someone that doesn't get that naturally you need a subject simple enough they can grasp it. Liberal arts fits the bill. Maybe they won't grasp everything, but unlike Math there's value in being 50% right.
As for why you want to train people to think critically, well, if you don't like dictatorships & fascism then you want an electorate that thinks critically. I mean, ever notice how one of the 1st things a dictator does is go after the intelligentsia?
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Tanking enrolment means less profit for the university.
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Only enrolment in Gender Studies remained stable. No surprise there. They cry the loudest to get "diversity programme" running. There are lucrative (although parasitic) jobs for that segment.
I hate to agree with Ben Stein, but about 40 years ago (while finishing college at beer drenched Michigan State) I read a short essay in Playboy and never forgot it...
If I recall correctly at my advanced age, the claim was that before World War II when far fewer Americans went to college, many students from wealthy backgrounds studied liberal arts because they would not really have to work or else they already had nice careers waiting for them because of their birth.
After World War II and the G.I. Bill explosion in college students, many students from modest backgrounds wanted to study liberal arts so they, too, could have the traditional polish of the wealthy. But Stein claimed this was a fallacy - that those working class background students assumed that the intellectual, liberal arts background caused those in the upper class to become successful, but actually they had the liberal arts education precisely because their wealthier backgrounds allowed them the luxury of not really having to learn a trade.
Of course, we will always need English professors, historians, philosophers, et cetera, but not nearly at the quantity produced by colleges each year.
Looking back, I had a great time at a big, fairly average college in the late 1970's, but now I realize it was only because my late father had worked so hard, lived cheaply, and invested for many years. But as a straight economic investment in my future, it did not really pay off. Of course I have no one to blame for my choices but myself.
Tom from Traverse City
Snow noted the divide, and suggested that "Literary" types needed to learn science, while noting that "Scientific" types already knew, or at least valued, Arts and Literature.
The debate has now been going for over 50 years and shows no signs of resolution.
While I'm not sure that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics should be the touchstone, I would argue that any graduand that can't demonstrate both a knowledge of the scientific method and an appreciation of art or literature should be required to do so before they can graduate.
I'd also like to see something like Ethics 101 and Aesthetics 101 as compulsory subjects.
I'm realistic enough not to actually expect any of these things to happen.
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Humanities asks questions. Engineering provides solutions. That's pretty much the difference right there.
Can you think of any fields in technology where you might find value in the study of Linguistics? How about Logic?
Fun fact: Within my lifetime, Ontology moved from being mostly a humanities field to being mostly an engineering discipline. It was very interesting to watch it happen, as computer science researchers raided 2500 years of philosophy and start to build things out of it.
It gave me a new respect for the humanities, and philosophy in particular. Philosophy is, in a sense, the primordial soup from which new academic disciplines arise. And once they take form, they often jump faculties surprisingly quickly.
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The GP's fail aside, it's a pretty poor argument he's making, not least he's conflating a medical science (psychology) as a liberal art. When you cut away his conflation of psychology as a liberal art you're left with an argument that comes back to needing liberal arts majors for liberal arts things.
Um, well, no shit? Who knew you needed a musician for say, video game or film music? who knew you needed an artist to produce compelling visual imagery?
The problem IMO with his argument is that he's trying to push one idea - that liberal arts is more important for engineering like stuff than given credit for, but then completely fails to back that up with any kind of evidence that it's useful outside of it's core area of focus - i.e. music for musicians, art for artists. Even his history major example, sure, so they can tell us from the enlightenment why usability is good (apparently, I'm curious what the relevance is myself, last I checked they didn't have touch screen tablets, keyboards, console controllers, and mice back then, but let's go with it) but that doesn't change the fact that they're still useless at actually building a good UI, they're just telling us what we already know. To build a good UI you need a UX expert who understands what analytics to track and how to convert them into a better design, or a psychologist from the medical sciences field. What you definitely don't need is a history major, unless apparently you need to be told what we already know - that people like good UIs better.
They learn about it, but not enough. Have you seen things that pass for "scientific research" in most social sciences these days?>
Too true. Even when journals in "social disciplines" do publish articles with statistical analysis of their data, they accept levels of significance so low they would be laughed at in any "hard science" publiction. The null hypothesis is far from excluded, and the expectation is that a substantial fraction of the articles are just reporting false positives.
When he says:
he's flat out dead wrong.
One glaring example: Psychologists, with the best of training, are WORSE THAN CHANCE (to a level that even hard scientists would consider significant) at predicting whether a particular person will commit violence. To quote one: "The only proven predictor of future violence is past violence."
(This, of course, throws the whole "psychological testing for gun licensing" push into a cocked hat. If it were done, it would {in addition to exposing medical records and discouraging those in need of treatment from seeking professional help} selectively disarm, and deny civil rights to, more non-violent than violent.)
Another example, from biology/ecology. Studies were made looking for cycles in populations of wild animals of various species. They defined a "peak" as a year where there were more of the critter than in the previous or following year, a "low" when there were less. Then they computed the average length of cycles. They got pretty much the same average across many, diverse, species worldwide. It was quite a curiosity, and for a while was enshrined as a law of ecology.
As far back as the late '60s this was used as a glaring example of misuse of statistics in a first-of-the-sequence undergrad statistics course. It seems that, using that definition, you see the same "period" if you sample a random number sequence. They were measuring noise.
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