Hear, hear! It's my job as a medievalist to point out, in support, that the original seven liberal arts were rhetoric, grammar, logic (the trivium), astronomy, music, arithmetic, and geometry (the quadrivium), so this idea goes way back...
I asked my students a few weeks ago where they would put physics on a scale with 0 = liberal arts and 10 = engineering. (Okay, I can see you might object to that scale but that's what it was.) Almost all my students put it around 8 or 9. I told them I thought it should be about 2. Both english and physics are trying to understand the world around us: english maybe more about people's values and perceptions, and physics more about the physical universe. But both share the liberal arts hunger to understand. Not nearly as elegant as your piece, but for what it's worth.
Every time the "if only we had a humanities major there" comment comes up, I am reminded that Peter Theil had a Philosophy degree, and many of the worst offenders likewise have humanities degrees.
To be a bit prickly towards the physics side, I did feel like I left undergrad physics with a lot of theoretical knowledge and little practical experience, and it wasn't until a few years of grad school in applied physics that I felt like I could do anything useful for work. So it's kind of "liberal artsy" in the pejorative sense there
If given my druthers for curriculum design, I'd try and weave computing into every class (and not just the "this is the one problem set where you busy out Matlab/Python/mathematica but everywhere). Software Carpentry is a very good basis to start from.
The fact that Mathematics made its way into the "STEM" categorization is interesting to consider. In terms of immediate applicability to employment, it often acts are a more traditional "liberal art" then I suspect people tend to think. You might not use art history much for a job, but I'm not writing proofs or doing linear algebra for my job either.
Thanks for this. It OUGHT not have to be said but it's good to say it.
It's tempting to go on to polemicize who is the more sinned against than sinning, but you stopped at the right point.
Hear, hear! It's my job as a medievalist to point out, in support, that the original seven liberal arts were rhetoric, grammar, logic (the trivium), astronomy, music, arithmetic, and geometry (the quadrivium), so this idea goes way back...
I asked my students a few weeks ago where they would put physics on a scale with 0 = liberal arts and 10 = engineering. (Okay, I can see you might object to that scale but that's what it was.) Almost all my students put it around 8 or 9. I told them I thought it should be about 2. Both english and physics are trying to understand the world around us: english maybe more about people's values and perceptions, and physics more about the physical universe. But both share the liberal arts hunger to understand. Not nearly as elegant as your piece, but for what it's worth.
Every time the "if only we had a humanities major there" comment comes up, I am reminded that Peter Theil had a Philosophy degree, and many of the worst offenders likewise have humanities degrees.
To be a bit prickly towards the physics side, I did feel like I left undergrad physics with a lot of theoretical knowledge and little practical experience, and it wasn't until a few years of grad school in applied physics that I felt like I could do anything useful for work. So it's kind of "liberal artsy" in the pejorative sense there
If given my druthers for curriculum design, I'd try and weave computing into every class (and not just the "this is the one problem set where you busy out Matlab/Python/mathematica but everywhere). Software Carpentry is a very good basis to start from.
The fact that Mathematics made its way into the "STEM" categorization is interesting to consider. In terms of immediate applicability to employment, it often acts are a more traditional "liberal art" then I suspect people tend to think. You might not use art history much for a job, but I'm not writing proofs or doing linear algebra for my job either.