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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.
I know it's not fashionable to RTFA, but to skip the very first word of the summary? That's going for a new low.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
The article, presumably written by a liberal arts major
I realize it’s a rather long summary; but the first two words of the lede state quite clearly that the dude is an engineering professor.
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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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.
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-Robert A. Heinlein
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I agree, but this is about humanities, who is really the expert here? I am a human, I am every bit an expert as you or that person holding a degree.
Speaking as a physical object, I'm every bit an expert on physics as someone holding a degree.
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Yes, but that's not really pertinent to the discussion, now is it? Shanghai Bill said, "the author's probably some liberal arts major". I presented evidence that the author was in fact, a distinguished faculty member at some of the top engineering schools. That's it. You want to change the topic at hand, you are welcome to do so, but it might be more appropriate to start a new thread. Which is something you would have learned in a freshman composition course in a motherfucking liberal arts program
Absolutely. I invite you to examine the data for yourself. ShanghaiBill's been posting here for a good long time. His comment history is publicly available. I can say with a 98% confidence interval that if ShanghaiBill is known for anything, it's something that caused him to spend 90 days in a country jail somewhere in the Florida panhandle.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Jonathan Haidt gives a lot of references and examples, both of explicit mission statements and indicators (actually, he ranks a couple of hundred schools based on objective criteria):
He says it's somewhat analogous to how universities split along religious/secular lines a century ago.
Because I'm such an nerd I visited classes from other departments in my free time and also watched lectures online. I happen to know that those from the humanities learn about the scientific method. How to collect data and how important it is to disprove the null hypothesis if you process your statistical data. They learn to be aware of biases that THEY as the observer and processor of the data can bring into it and so forth.
They learn about it, but not enough. Have you seen things that pass for "scientific research" in most social sciences these days?
People who use statistics in social sciences (including those that completely depend on it for their work) tend to learn about statistics and math in a very shallow way. There are exceptions of course, but most of these people were not very good at math in school and/or do not like math very much. So they learn things very superficially, here's a stats software package (e.g. SPSS), we do this test in this situation, that test in that situation, enter your data, click click, what's the p-value? Make a conclusion. A lot of the conclusions are just plain garbage. Reproducibility? Errr, right...
Then there is the completely unrelated issue that a lot of "humanities" today is just plain lightly dressed-up political activism (e.g. gender studies). Then this activism spreads to other fields which should be about objective (as much as possible) study, such as history and classics. That's a whole other topic.
Finally, there is the problem that a lot of liberal arts & humanities have closed onto themselves, and became arcane self-referential disciplines without a real or obvious connection to the outside world. Sure, the same happens in some fields of natural sciences, but people generally have an easier idea of how natural science and engineering affect the "real world". When it comes to post-modern literary criticism - not so much.
The bad wrap the liberal arts & humanities get is mostly the liberal arts' & humanities' fault. It's not they are not relevant, it's that over the past few decades they themselves have made their own fields look less relevant to the rest of society.
It's ShanghaiBill's quality critical thinking that gets him through the day.