Two Cultures, Both Lacking Dignity
In academia, where we lay our scene, from ancient grudge break to new mutiny
For reasons that escape me, a new outbreak of the STEM vs. not-STEM argument bubbled to the top of the garbage stew that is Twitter last week. This included some aggressively silly assertions about who complains about taking what, and whose non-major classes are more watered down, and whose test scores are higher, and other things that make me despair for the profession. It’s rarely an argument with a lot of new material to offer, but this round seemed especially childish and petty.
There were, however, a short handful of things I wanted to call out and comment on, two good and two bad. Taking the bad first so as to end on an upward trajectory, we’ll start with this pair of tweets that I responded to on the Bird Site:
As I said, I don’t entirely disagree, but at the same time, there’s a kind of ignorant arrogance to this that is every bit the equal of the worst sorts of “scientism.” Sneering that technical expertise makes one a mere tool is every bit as stupidly offensive as “Oh, you’re an English major? Hope you enjoy selling coffee to people who know how to write code…”
In fact, I would say that it is every bit as bad to have the upper reaches of government dominated by people with minimal knowledge of science and technology as it would be to have a pure technocracy with rulers who know nothing about history. Government of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers is not something to crow about, it’s something to lament.
Of course, things aren’t necessarily better when there’s some agreement between the Two Cultures, as in this pseudonymous tweet:
I got a chuckle out of the tweet a couple of quote-layers down (“why are we doing stem vs humanities discourse when we know the real enemy: computer science”), but there’s a kind of sneering classism to this that I find really unappealing. The contempt for applied or pre-professional subjects is particularly unbecoming when it comes (as it often does) from people who in other contexts natter on about how they find Bernie Sanders problematically neoliberal. (Not a shot at this specific tweeter, who I know little about.)
This is part and parcel of the broader problem (which I am also susceptible to) of talking about “higher education” as if nothing outside the top 100-ish schools in the US News rankings mattered— private non-profit research universities, flagship state universities, and non-profit four-year colleges. But the bulk of actually existing higher education, in terms of student enrollments, is in the tiers below that, and it’s those schools that make “business” the most popular major in America. A lot of the elite schools don’t even offer Business as a major, and many faculty at those schools will aggressively resist any attempt to introduce anything that even looks like a move in that direction.
This is a not-unreasonable split, but mostly for unflattering reasons. The implicit assumption is that anyone attending a school in the elite tier already has the social capital needed (either through family background or simply because they’re getting a degree from one of those schools) that they can afford to devote themselves to the higher callings of more abstract academic majors. They don’t need “a degree in Line Goes Up” or another applied/ pre-professional major because any degree at all from one of those schools has enough cachet to open doors.
To the extent that higher education, broadly speaking, is an engine of upward mobility, though, it’s mostly through those lower-tier schools and those narrowly focused degrees. They’re letting a bunch of first-generation students at regional universities check a box to get themselves a white-collar job and start on the path to their children majoring in Obscure Studies at an upper-tier college some years down the road. In an ideal world, maybe we wouldn’t need those students to check that box, but this is the system we have at the moment, and sneering at them is just ugly.
Moving toward the more positive side of things, as much as it pains me to see someone from amherst making a good point, the thread out of this particular round that came closest to matching my take on the Two Cultures split as it currently exists is this one:
I don’t know that I’d agree with Philosophy as the particularly essential not-STEM course of study (I’d probably go for History instead with a goal of having a somewhat better understanding of at least some part of the world; I think the appeal of Philosophy is mostly that it’s operating in a mode that STEM majors find more congenial). But I definitely share the sense that the problem between the Cultures is not symmetrical.
A local piece of anecdata along these lines: for many years, we’ve had Physics majors with super-high GPAs denied by Phi Beta Kappa, and a couple of our faculty who are in PBK (I’m not) started going to the annual induction meetings to argue for them. Their report has consistently been that students from STEM majors are dinged for being “too narrow” in their academics because they haven’t taken courses beyond the minimum Gen Ed requirements for not-STEM subjects. At the same time, students in not-STEM majors who did only the minimum possible course work in science and math sail through without an issue, because they’re double-majoring in two subfields of literary studies. It’s been a massive source of frustration, to the point where one of those colleagues has written the whole organization off.
This goes back to the tendency to interpret subjects as depending on innate talent when we’re not good at them, and to a lesser degree (and in the opposite direction) the more hierarchical nature of STEM subjects. Just, you know, to get in the obligatory references to Things I Bang On About.
Finally, I also flagged this tweet as worth highlighting:
I think “any” is a little too strong— I’m a Liberal Arts College Guy, which means I’m in favor of asking some breadth from our students. But I agree with the sentiment in that I think the usefulness of course requirements is roughly inversely proportional to their specificity. That is, I’m in favor of the classic “Distribution Requirement” form of breadth, where students have to take some number of courses outside their major in some fairly broad areas. I think those areas should be very broad, though— Arts and Literature, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, that kind of thing— and relatively few in number. I’m against systems with lots of narrow categories and systems where it’s not trivial to figure out which courses count and which don’t.
My reasoning there is that a broad and simple requirement gives students a bit more agency in what they choose to study, which will tend to lead to greater investment in whatever they do choose, and a better chance that they’ll enjoy it. A system with too many categories and definitions that are too narrow is going to force students into taking classes they’re not intrinsically interested in, and increase the chances that they’ll end up resenting the whole subject when a particular class doesn’t click with them.
Yes, this will result in some students following the path of least effort and taking the minimum possible number of 101-level courses needed to get out. That’s going to happen in a system with more specific requirements, too— in fact, I think it makes the problem worse, because it’s mapping out the lowest-effort path even more clearly than a distribution requirement would (“Just take some course that has one of these codes that meets at a convenient time…”). Getting students to explore more broadly is an advising problem, first and foremost, and as someone who advises students I would much rather have the conversation about “You should take a wider range of courses” than one that starts “Well, you could take that, but it doesn’t actually count toward the category that you need to complete before graduation, so…”
(Guess which kind of system I currently labor under?)
So, that’s a bunch of fairly specific responses to things that were said in the recent outbreak. I have mental notes toward some more general comments on the current state of the Two Cultures thing, but this has run a tad long both in terms of word count and the fraction of my writing time that it’s consumed, so I’ll stop here and maybe pick that up later.
If you want to see whether that follow-up materializes, here’s a button:
If you want to agree with or object to anything I’ve already written, the comments will be open:
I read an article in a national newspaper recently that said something about a 2 degree C atmospheric warming (35.6 degrees F). Whoever wrote that knew how to type a number into a unit converter but doesn't understand you can't do that with differences. I just brought that up to say we could use some basic science literacy (especially for science reporters!).
I think anybody in charge of anything is seriously incapacitated if they are a narrow domain-specific expert in every respect. That's pretty rare, mind you, but I've met folks like that in academia who really just know and value their area of specialization and maybe a few adjacent areas of inquiry and think everything else is a waste of time. A lab or research center that is led by someone who was promoted strictly because of their research expertise is 9 times out of 10 going to be in a bad way because that leader will have trouble communicating with whomever holds the purse strings further up the line and trouble managing a wide range of personalities and perspectives. Same goes for artistic collaborations, etc. Various kinds of generalism have their own issues, but they do enable people to make connections and build relationships, as well as to make calculated decisions about what's worth time, energy and resources.