Why shouldn't STEM be prioritized over humanities, etc?

Great Debates
41

I’m not sure you can automatically assign all the successes to STEM and all the failure to the arts and humanities… Claiming their role is ‘propaganda to reduce consumption’ is a huge oversimplification, to the point of being silly.

You can sit and read research papers on loss of polar ice all day, it won’t have the impact of a film of a starving polar bear. Science discovers problems and solutions, the arts make them understandable to non-scientists, and makes people care. They make people get angry and upset about issues; they get attention, in a way that dry science just doesn’t. While science itself might be objective and logical, it’s carried out, funded and applied by humans, who aren’t. Our beliefs, desires and culture often get higher priority than simple logical comparison of the options. At the simplest level, who would want a Tesla, regardless of the stats, if they looked stupid?

42

One thing the humanities teach - or should teach - is critical thinking when applied to ideas, people, and social situations. Critical evaluation of what we see on the internet, evaluating articles and points of view, checking sources, the ability to recognise propaganda and populism, etc.

This is a highly valuable and highly necessary skill today.

Also, science can be used either to help or harm the world, and the way it is used in society falls outside the fields of pure science.

Scientists themselves need a balanced education that is not only STEM subjects, and the population in general needs the ability to think about and evaluate the uses of science.

43

Yep. The single most popular major on my campus, by a factor of almost two to one over second place, is Business Administration.

To be honest, I’m not sure what the hell they learn in some of those classes. Some of the courses seem like useful, practical business skills, like Business Accounting, but there are others like Business Writing that, based on what I’ve heard from students who have taken it, seems to be a “How to write a professional email” course. No doubt this is a useful skill for someone in a business environment, but does it really need to be a 3-credit class at an institution that is supposed to be about intellectual achievement?

I think this is true, although I think it’s also not as hard as some people make out to get through with a C in STEM classes too.

I teach in the humanities in the California State University system, and I readily concede that it’s not too hard to pass my class. If you turn up to lectures and class discussions and pay some attention; if you do all (or at least most) of the required reading; and if you put some reasonable effort into your essays, and into studying for exams, you’ll likely pass. The vast majority of my D’s and F’s go to students who stop coming to class, or who fail to turn in significant amounts of work.

It is, however, hard to get an A. My grade curves for my classes generally look something like a compressed normal curve, with a large number of students in the C and B range, small numbers in the D and A range, with a small spike at F that represents students who stop coming to class. The dropout rate is generally greatest for the freshman classes, where students who are new to college sometimes get overwhelmed.

Because it’s hard to get an A, the difference between a C student and an A student in my classes is, generally, even larger than the gap between those two grades implies. One problem with this, in terms of post-graduation consequences, is that it’s my impression that a significant number of employers just ask their potential employees to confirm that they have received the degree, without looking at transcripts. A student who half-assed his way through college with all C’s gets the same sheet of paper as the student who got an A in almost all of her classes (unless the university prints Latin honors on the degree, which some don’t). If I were an employer hiring students out of college, in any discipline, I’d want not only their college GPA, and GPA in their major, but I’d also want to see a full official transcript of their college degree.

Some students who didn’t get all A’s might still make outstanding employees, but I think that transcripts can tell you quite a lot about the student, and a lot of employers don’t seem to ask for them.

44

They might be, in some cases, but they needn’t be, and they shouldn’t be.

And expectations can sometimes bite students in the ass. I teach a freshman American history course that is required (by state law) of basically every student who passes through our university. This means that my classes contain students from the full gamut of our university community - all ages; all races and ethnicities; rich and poor; students from every major.

Because it’s a required classes that is outside the major of a vast majority of our students, there is quite a lot of resentment among some students at having to be in the class at all. There is also, in many cases, an assumption (often based on high-school experiences) that history is really easy, and all you have to do is remember a few dates and a few big events, and you’ll glide through with at least a C. Some of these students get a real shock when I give them difficult primary source documents to read, and when it becomes clear that they need to read them closely, and make a genuine effort to understand the nuances of the arguments.

Understanding the Puritans’ ideas about the definition of freedom, or the debates over free speech in the trial of Peter Zenger, or the arguments about federalism and factions that James Madison makes in Federalist #51, or the debates between Angelina Grimke and Catharine Beecher over women’s proper political role, is not easy. And it’s especially difficult if you try to read these sources the same way that you read your Instagram feed - in the last five minutes before class, while also watching a YouTube video. In the early parts of the semester, when I ask students to write short analytical paragraphs explaining the documents they’ve read (or, at least, were supposed to read), I end up handing out a lot of failing grades.

For some students, this snaps them into a realization that they’re going to have to actually get the mental wheels turning if they want to do well in the class. With others, however, all I get is a semester of continued half-assed effort, and resentment that I’m requiring some effort and some intellect. I generally get good evaluations from my students at the end of each semester, but the criticisms on my student evaluations, and my RateMyProfessors page, nearly all relate to how I require too much reading, the reading is too hard, and I am too “harsh” on papers and other written work.

Some of my absolute best students have been STEM students, with a disproportionate number of computer science majors doing really well in my classes. But there are also plenty of STEM majors who do terribly, and I sometimes wonder how well some of these students are doing in their majors. This is particularly the case when some students demonstrate an inability to do 8th-grade math.

In my syllabus, I lay out the grading for my classes, something like this:

  • Essay 1 - 10%
  • Essay 2 - 15%
  • Essay 3 - 20%
  • Final Exam - 20%
  • In-Class Writing (best 10 out of 15) - 20%
  • Class Participation - 15%

You would not believe how many inquiries I get along the lines of, “I got 78 [out of 100] for my first essay, and 83 for my second one, and I have grades of 7, 8, 6, 7, 9, and 8.5 for my in-class writing so far. Can you tell me my overall course grade so far?”

If you’re a university STEM major asking me that question,. you should seriously consider a change of career.

45

ISTM part of the resistance is really to a commonly perceived attitude in non-academic social/political circles that deprecates the Liberal Arts in general and even strictly academic science (“ivory tower”; “book learnin’”; “eggheads”) and that views the purpose of education as little more than job training.

Obviously you need to spend more on what costs more. But at the same time, the answer should not automatically be “we’ll take it from this other department that public opinion does not respect as much”.

46

UofI = University of Illinois.

Partially the fault of my bias - as I sit here in IL, it is generally well known.
Pretty sure my old profile said IL, and I feel like I’m often posting about Chicago.
But no reason any particular poster should know that.

Did the Uof part trip you up or the I?
Because I wonder if there is a larger U of I than Illinois?
Also, I mentioned engineering, which MANY folk would know is a strength of Illinois.

Sorry to cause confusion.

47

Thanks. I always feel that it’s better to spell out what you mean first time, then abbreviate. The info might be available online or in your profile but I think it’s better to not make your audience have to look stuff up or ask.

If you’re talking to folks in Chicago there’s no need. On an international message board, there is. You might mention Chicago locales in half your posts but I, the reader, may have never heard of you before.

48

For what it’s worth, I live in Illinois, I went to the U of I, and I find “UofI” confusing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it written without spaces that way.

49

I am a scientist. 90% of my job is writing (papers, grant proposals, reports). I wish more of my graduate students and postdocs had a liberal arts background, because most of them can’t write for shit when they start, and if they can’t write, it’s very difficult to finish no matter how good they are in the lab. The best student I ever had had a double major Biology and English as an undergrad.

50

I was a dual major in biology/history back in the day and in general wasn’t overly concerned with grades as a feckless young man. But the grade I was proudest of wasn’t in the sciences. It was the A- I got in a course on Colonial Latin America. I was the only A in the class and as noted, not exactly an A+. And I put a lot of effort into that class. Like, a whole lot. Quite a bit of outside research for multiple essays, papers and presentations. That semester I clearly remember (because I found it bemusing) half-assing my way to an “A” in a Comparative Vertebrate Physiology presentation on aquatic anesthesia for fish with maybe one fifth the effort I put into a comparable presentation on the Brazilian gold rush of the early 18th century.

The notion that the humanities courses are necessarily a pushover in college relative to STEM is grossly exaggerated.

51

Like many of you, I[m still waiting in vain to hear what the OP means by “prioritized.”

But if it means that STEM and the humanities/arts should be in opposition or competition with each other, then: no, they shouldn’t be.

Am I the only one who has been remainded of C. P. Snow’s “Two Cultures”?

52

Climate change is happening because people choose to minimize their personal costs in spite of the long-term global harm. They will do so until every single fossil fuel is more expensive than every single renewable source.

Humanities can help in many ways here, whether it’s better messaging about the problem, or simply raising awareness that there are more people on planet earth than you. If you want to cast this as a market problem, well, humanities have you covered there because economists have worked out that a market-based solution like carbon taxes would be very helpful in addressing climate change.

If you say climate change is a STEM problem, this is not an objective statement of fact. It’s a political choice that says we need wizards to make energy cheaper because people can’t be expected to change their consumption to save the environment that sustains their own lives, that we need not expect governments to govern on serious issues.

53

That’s for sure. My degree in undergrad was in Biology/Natural Sciences, and while it was a fair amount of work, it was not terribly hard to get an A and get honors/ΦβΚ and all that. I was proudest of the A I got in Russian History, a course taught by a professor from the Naval Academy down the road in Annapolis. He expected us to remember the facts, but his exams emphasized USING the facts he taught to come to coherent conclusions.

54

Right. Basically leaving it to the scientists/engineers to figure out a way to save our butts without us having to make adjustments, or needing to understand what is happening so we can tell if some specific solution is the right move. Which is where skilled communicators would be priceless to have.

55

I never thought about this until now, but that was my experience in college as well. I was more proud of the good grades I got in humanities courses because it involves so much analysis and synthesis of multi-layered material. With a little effort, sometimes you can surprise the professor with some new perspective or information.

By contrast, STEM involved an enormous amount of rote memorization of fairly straightforward and determinate information. I remember biochemistry being simultaneously easy and miserable, which I’d never imagined possible until I had to do something like memorize the structure of all the pentose sugars and their stereoisomers.

56

I was admittedly a tad hyperbolic in order to emphasize the point, but note that the subthread was in response to MrDribble’s flat statement that

I do actually appreciate the efforts of many to promote thought about climate change, but ultimately it is still about emotional manipulation, and that can be employed by the anti position as easily by the pro. There are millions out there that genuinely believe climate change is a hoax and that the real threat is a world government or some other conspiracy. They got manipulated into that belief by emotional argument and because they had no means of distinguishing true from false.

At least to my mind, the greatest science communicators were scientists first, and communicators later. Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, David Attenborough, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, etc. The reverse does not seem nearly as common.

Technology is how we understood climate change and its impacts in the first place, and it’s how we’ll get out of it (if we do).

57

Sure, and how is that going to change if the scientists come up with a really cool and cheap alternative that will save the planet?

It doesn’t matter how much better a Tesla is, or how much more fun, or fuel-efficient, or even someday cheaper, if the potential market genuinely believes that driving a Tesla is un-American and indicative of a “sheeple” who has been brainwashed by the radical left (which sentiment I have heard expressed locally).

But unless the SOCIAL pressures are also there, then a significant chunk of people are going to pick the alternative that is socially more acceptable. Elephant and rhino horn is not cheaper or easier to source or intrinsically better than the alternatives, but there’s still a market (and one of the reasons why the death toll has declined is that they’ve been obliterated in large swathes of their former range).

Now, how do you change social values? Psychology, marketing, communications, and their allied fields are where those sorts of changes will occur.

58

You want to reread my name there, Dr?

59

While he does have a science undergrad degree, David Attenborough was never a working scientist (and his postgrad degree in anthropology is as much a humanities degree as a science one). He is a communicator, first and foremost. One of the first TV ones, and the greatest still.

60

Because self-interest is still a strong driving force. You can only convince people for so long to sacrifice their own well-being for the good of the rest. But if a product is genuinely better, it tends to wear down emotion over time. And it persists regardless of what’s said about the product.

It’s not a perfect process, but the greater the advantage the better it works. My parents, completely on the “hoax” side of the spectrum, still switched to LED lamps. Had they been only equal or slightly better, they’d have stuck with incandescent to stick it to the libs or whatever. But the difference is enough that they can’t ignore it.

It’s intrinsically “better” because of its rarity. People buy it specifically because they think elephants will go extinct and so the value of their ivory piece will go up.

It’s true; there’s (probably) no tech solution to this. But I don’t know that there’s a social solution, either. Ivory buyers aren’t wrong in their belief. In any case, it’s a very different situation to climate change, since energy sources are largely fungible.

Again, there is strong driving force when a product is cheaper or superior. Tesla does no traditional advertising and has a tiny marketing budget.

And to be clear, I’m not completely discounting the role that communication has to play. No one will buy the most awesome thing in the world if they don’t know about it. But these efforts just bring everyone up to the same baseline. The underlying product has to be better, or at least neutral, if you want to have a sustained effect.

Also, that’s just on the consumer side. On the commercial or industrial side, the driving forces are even stronger. If an electric semi truck allows a 10% reduction in running costs, then every trucking company will either switch to that or go out of business. Economics is a strong force.