Affective Polarization and the Two Cultures
Alternative title: Anybody can teach anything, nobody is guaranteed to teach anything
Wednesday’s post about the latest “Two Cultures” outbreak on Twitter ended up being mostly responses to four specific tweets or threads, but there was one other tweet I had flagged as somewhere between amusing and insightful:
Read narrowly, this is just a cheap shot at one side, but I think that if you broaden it out to include both sides, it hints at one of the big factors making this such an enduring and intractable argument. That is, this is highly subject to “affective polarization,” with both sides of the argument tending to see only the best of their side and only the worst of the other. This specific tweet is about classes that only “claim to teach” one, but the replies to it, and the broader argument, are full of accusations in the other direction: that STEM is the domain of horrible pseudo-teaching.
The actual reality, of course, is somewhere between these extremes. I’ve had absolutely terrible courses on both sides of the cultural divide— an English class in college where the professor went out of her way to be insulting about student work, and a graduate quantum course where the professor basically just read the textbook to us— and also absolutely fantastic courses that still set goals I aspire to in the classroom— a couple of history courses in college stand out, and my graduate E&M course. Most of them were somewhere in between— some good moments, some bad.
As a general matter, I think the bad courses tend to stand out more, because at their worst they can close off an entire course of study. That English class my freshman year was sufficiently unpleasant to put me off the whole field for a couple of years, and left me with a distaste for “theory” (in the not-STEM sense) that lingers to this day. Plenty of people on the other side are all too eager to share with me how their intro physics class did the same thing for their feelings about STEM.
On the other side, even the bad STEM courses I took had aspects that I found redeeming. The last CS course I took in college was so eminently skippable that I almost missed the midterm, but doing the programming assignments did help me learn enough about coding to let me muddle through when I really need to. At the very worst, I had enough intrinsic interest in the underlying topicsof that graduate quantum class that I could look past the bad teaching and hold out hope for better in the next course. (I switched to a different professor for the second semester, who was at the very least a whole lot more entertaining in class…)
The end result is that the most enthusiastic participants in these arguments come in hot with an absurdly caricatured version of the other side’s badness: Lit studies professors who struggle to add single-digit numbers without a calculator, scientists who are completely incapable of comprehending human relationships. Which gives their side a monopoly on teaching whatever it is that they value most.
But, of course, neither of those caricatures are right, and neither side has a monopoly on anything. Or, to put a more positive spin on it, academics on both sides genuinely do excel at the skills they claim for themselves—formal, quantitative rigor for STEM, expressive communication for arts and literature. But the best of them also excel at the skills claimed by the other side. Whatever intellectual skill you might care to name is fully engaged in both STEM and not-STEM fields, when operating at their best.
Of course, that “at their best” is doing a lot of work there, because more or less by definition, “the best” are few in number. Most people in any field are not “the best,” most of them are pretty average, even at the things they’re supposed to be good at. The best writing in the sciences has a clarity of expression that I’d put up there with the best in history and literature, but there’s no shortage of technical articles that leave me saying “Wait, what does that even mean?” The best philosophy and criticism bring a kind of rigor to their analysis that even a quantitative scientist can’t help but admire, but there’s no shortage of woolly thinking and arrant nonsense in those fields. A randomly chosen work from either of these is likely to be pretty mid, as my kids would cringe to hear me say.
The practical upshot of all this is that claims that you have to do course work in one set of disciplines or the other in order to pick up one particular skill or another are mostly crap. You can learn any skill that matters through course work on either side of the “Two Cultures” split, and in practice many students will primarily learn what they need from their “home team.”
I took a whole bunch of college courses in paper-writing disciplines (contrasted with problem-set disciplines), but at the end of the day, the most useful instruction I got in writing came from writing physics papers in graduate school. I was lucky enough to be in a group led by some of the best scientists in the field, and they set extremely high standards for what could be published under their names. The “Paper Torture” sessions at NIST forced me to strip a lot of bullshit and bafflegab out of the drafts I wrote, and made me a much better writer than I would’ve been otherwise. That led me to internalize a set of principles and practices that I’ve used to carve out a pretty good career for myself. And those are something I learned in the STEM-iest of STEM settings, miles away from any of the disciplines that are explicitly focused on the analysis of writing.
Given that, what’s the justification for valuing (and charging big bucks for) liberal arts education? (Where “liberal arts education” is used in the proper sense of “Taking classes across a wide range of different subjects,” not “Majoring in one of the not-STEM fields that are sometimes referred to as ‘the liberal arts.’”) If you don’t need disciplinary breadth because particular disciplines are better at teaching particular skills, what’s the point of making poets take physics, or physicists study poetry?
I think in the end it’s mostly about norms and practices, and habits of mind. That is, different disciplines go about things in different ways— literary scholars seek to describe every story in terms of power relationships between identity groups, physicists seek to describe everything in the universe as a simple harmonic oscillator. Being exposed to a wide range of those approaches helps build a kind of flexibility of mind that comes in handy, a recognition that people from different backgrounds may approach similar situations in different ways, and that they’re not necessarily wrong to do so. We have physics students study poetry not because English faculty can teach them something about writing that physics faculty can’t, but because seeing how English faculty approach thinking about poetry tells you something about the full range of ways of engaging with the world, and that can come in handy down the road.
In an ideal world, all that instruction would involve people who are at their very best, which is in theory why it’s so hard to get a faculty job, and why the sticker price for a liberal-arts college is north of eighty grand a year. In practice, sometimes those things are done well, and sometimes they’re done badly. The tricky part is to remember to attribute both the good and the bad to the correct sides, and not allow either to descend into complete caricature, because that way lies toxic and intractable #discourse.
So, there’s my latest attempt at a sweeping statement on the Two Cultures Thing, something I feel compelled to do every couple of years. If you want to know about the next attempt when it happens, you can click this button:
If you want to respond to anything I said, the comments will be open:
But act promptly, because I’ll be leaving after lunch to go to a Hold Steady show in the mid-Hudson Valley region, and will thus be incommunicado for a bit.