Should Universities De-Prioritize English Departments for Engineering? (thebaffler.com) 338
Some American colleges and universities are cutting entire departments. But the Baffler magazine wonders if something else is going on:
The ostensible reason provided for these cuts and terminations is "prioritization," a term used by university administrators to rank which programs deserve funding and attention. One such "prioritization" committee at St. Joseph's College in New York described it as a ranking of "centrality and essentiality," "demand and opportunity," and "productivity, revenue, and resources." If the terms sound like university administrator gobbledygook, that's because they are, cleverly disguising administrative judgments as some sort of due process. Around the country it is terms just like these that have been thrown at social science and liberal arts departments. Suddenly, faculty in these departments are expected to justify why they exist and why anyone would need a degree in English.
The two examples from Indiana, from Marian University and Purdue, also reveal how terms like "prioritization" are being used to disguise politically motivated excisions. Prioritization routinely argues that engineering departments need to be the ones getting more money and resources from the administration. Unlike English or political science, which are seen as useless and pointless majors, engineering and computer science carry an implicit promise of a job. Who needs to have read Shakespeare or know about how our political system works when you can rush off to be one among the armies of coders who make our digiverse possible?
That is the dream. In reality, "prioritization" debates, particularly in deep red states, are excellent cover for changing the political demographics of American colleges and universities. The Marian University case is instructive in this sense; the ostensible championing of STEM fields maps neatly onto the project of eliminating the most left-leaning professor, inevitably in departments that teach English or history or political science. If you have a right-leaning board of trustees in a red state like Indiana, professors like Johnny Goldfinger are unwanted, even threatening to those who would like student voters to know less rather than more about the processes of democracy. In a country where everything is riven and divided around political lines, this could well be a covert attack against the otherwise enduring liberal-ness of the college campus....
Despite what current debates about liberal arts would have you believe, not all employers are looking for software developers. A long-range perspective proscribes a rounded education, geared not just for the moment we are in. It is very likely that coding and other functions that administrators believe are the ones that deserve the most priority will be carried out via artificial intelligence processes that can do the painstaking work with far greater accuracy and speed than a human ever can. A liberal arts education is essential to surviving in our polarized world. In educating students in how to respect differences and create dialogue over disagreement, a liberal arts education provides skills essential to maintaining a healthy and functioning democracy.
Creating arbitrary epistemological rankings, where one kind of knowledge is given precedence over others, is failing to attend to the needs of the whole student capable of earning a wage but also of leading a good life....
It only makes sense if the actual purpose of slicing off departments and professors is part of a larger political project that has nothing at all to do with providing the best education.
The two examples from Indiana, from Marian University and Purdue, also reveal how terms like "prioritization" are being used to disguise politically motivated excisions. Prioritization routinely argues that engineering departments need to be the ones getting more money and resources from the administration. Unlike English or political science, which are seen as useless and pointless majors, engineering and computer science carry an implicit promise of a job. Who needs to have read Shakespeare or know about how our political system works when you can rush off to be one among the armies of coders who make our digiverse possible?
That is the dream. In reality, "prioritization" debates, particularly in deep red states, are excellent cover for changing the political demographics of American colleges and universities. The Marian University case is instructive in this sense; the ostensible championing of STEM fields maps neatly onto the project of eliminating the most left-leaning professor, inevitably in departments that teach English or history or political science. If you have a right-leaning board of trustees in a red state like Indiana, professors like Johnny Goldfinger are unwanted, even threatening to those who would like student voters to know less rather than more about the processes of democracy. In a country where everything is riven and divided around political lines, this could well be a covert attack against the otherwise enduring liberal-ness of the college campus....
Despite what current debates about liberal arts would have you believe, not all employers are looking for software developers. A long-range perspective proscribes a rounded education, geared not just for the moment we are in. It is very likely that coding and other functions that administrators believe are the ones that deserve the most priority will be carried out via artificial intelligence processes that can do the painstaking work with far greater accuracy and speed than a human ever can. A liberal arts education is essential to surviving in our polarized world. In educating students in how to respect differences and create dialogue over disagreement, a liberal arts education provides skills essential to maintaining a healthy and functioning democracy.
Creating arbitrary epistemological rankings, where one kind of knowledge is given precedence over others, is failing to attend to the needs of the whole student capable of earning a wage but also of leading a good life....
It only makes sense if the actual purpose of slicing off departments and professors is part of a larger political project that has nothing at all to do with providing the best education.
Degree in English no... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Degree in English no... (Score:5, Insightful)
" most of us prefer working with predictable things"
And this is why many systems are brittle. Many engineers don't know what to do when the problem contains incomplete information. So they bang out a system that manages the information they do have and falls splat when confronted by anything outside their imagined boundaries.
Re: Degree in English no... (Score:5, Insightful)
As if English majors can do any better...
To be fair though, the best engineers have to be able to navigate ambiguity and uncertainty. An engineer who can only work with well-defined specs is always going to be just a cog.
Re: Degree in English no... (Score:4, Informative)
I don't even understand this whole discussion. There are two components to English; literature and language.
Most English majors are about English literature, they're entirely meaningless, and any benefit in terms of language ability comes only from exposure to a sheer variation of literature, and even much of that is unhelpful because much of the studied literature is written using outdated forms of the English language.
Really, English is a pointless thing to get a degree in, it doesn't meaningfully, to any practical extent, make you a better communicator.
It's about as useful as a degree in washing dishes. I'm sure if you spent 3 years on it you could make them shinier than most people, but who cares when 0 years study means you can come up with a sufficiently useful result.
Why people in this thread thing English degrees somehow make people better communicators I've no idea. There are different subjects for that; psychology helps you understand personality types better and hence how to get what you want from people with differing personality traits. Communicating to larger audience is better learnt from a marketing and communications degree.
The fact most people don't even understand what an English degree largely entails IMO is just further evidence of the utter pointlessness of them. About the only circumstance in which I'd ever recommend and English degree is if you really really want to become an author, but even then it's of questionable benefit given the vast majority of authors don't have one and imagination and creativity are significantly more important, or history and the ability to research if writing non-fiction. If you want to be a technical author then again, an English degree is useless, you need to understand your subject matter, so math, science, computing, engineering, whatever.
Re:Degree in English no... (Score:5, Funny)
" most of us prefer working with predictable things"
And this is why many systems are brittle. Many engineers don't know what to do when the problem contains incomplete information. So they bang out a system that manages the information they do have and falls splat when confronted by anything outside their imagined boundaries.
That's why when Engineers get stuck on a problem, we bring in the Gender studies majors.
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It is true that many engineers have problems with incomplete information, just like any normal human would. But unlike normal humans, there are some engineers who can solve problem like this. And that is what makes engineers superior to normal humans. As an example look into how Voyager was build. Oh, and there are two of them, just in case something unexpected would happen to the other.
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correlation =/= causation. (Score:3)
" most of us prefer working with predictable things"
And this is why many systems are brittle. Many engineers don't know what to do when the problem contains incomplete information. So they bang out a system that manages the information they do have and falls splat when confronted by anything outside their imagined boundaries.
That is not why. There are many reasons why systems are brittle, and they do not necessarily center themselves around your thesis. Do better with your logical propositions.
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You sound like a manager. There are two main reasons why engineers don't want to work with people. One - some of us are introvert.
The early-morning, extrovertation activities will continue until morale improves.
Re: Degree in English no... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Degree in English no... (Score:5, Insightful)
There are two main reasons why engineers don't want to work with people. One - some of us are introvert. Two - most of us prefer working with predictable things
It doesn't matter what you prefer. If you can't communicate effectively then you are not just worthless, you are actually an impediment. People have to waste their time figuring out how to communicate ideas to you, and what you're talking about, and errors in communication will occur.
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If you want to make shit work, first you have to be able to comprehend what shit is and what shit does.
If you already know, great. No communication necessary. In every other case, you need to be able to exchange data with other humans.
Re:Degree in English no... (Score:5, Interesting)
Many engineers, especially in the IT are also autistic (quite many most likely without proper diagnosis). There are few things about autistic people and social interaction that studies have shown:
- Group of autistic people are as good as communication as group of neurotypical are.
- Mixed group of autistic and neutotypical are worse than autistic and neurotypical groups
- If you put a neurotypical person in a group of autistic people, the neurotypical will have very hard time being social, while others are doing just fine.
So what I am trying to say is this: Engineers are not bad at communication. They are as good in communication as others are when talking within their own group. Communication between different groups is difficult, because they speak different "language". Engineers have to spend their whole life trying to understand other group in everyday life, unlike the other group. Perhaps it would be best to teach the other group to understand engineers as that group seems to think they are so good in communication?
Re: Degree in English no... (Score:2)
If anything, engineers are well known for their lack of communication skills and avoidance to work with others. With a huge rise over the past 20 years of foreigners coming to US colleges for technical schools, English should be mandatory. Maybe then we'd have a better selection of Indians that actually can communicate and create websites that don't have broken English. ;)
No, no, and nope.
First, it's not in engineers the gift of communication is smaller of larger than in other sciences. There are plenty of "useless" sciences thst have pretty much the same share of introverts and socially awkward people. It's just that in engineering, being so ends not to hamper your career, since the main trick you have to offer can stand for itself and doesn't depend on anyone's goodwill as much as it does in less substantiated sciences.
Second, unlike majoring in a foreign language, majorin
Re: Degree in English no... (Score:2)
Re: Degree in English no... (Score:2)
In speaking or in writing?
Re:Degree in English no... (Score:4, Interesting)
People with limited communication skills are easier to keep marginalized. This is why when you look around, so much of society is run by lawyers and so little by people with STEM backgrounds. A lawyer's training in language and persuasion gives him a leg up.
The Establishment would rather science and engineering become more like trades and less like a profession. It wants productive workers stuck in their narrow silos.
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Looking at the author's writing, I wonder why we need English majors as well:
Proscribes means to prohibit or forbid. So basically that sentence says people don't need a rounded education, exactly the opposite of what thesis the author was attempting to convey. Tech majors can speak E
Re:Degree in English no... (Score:5, Informative)
Or not.
https://www.bestcolleges.com/n... [bestcolleges.com]
"According to the NCAA, among the 65 autonomy schools in Division I, only 25 recorded a positive net generated revenue in 2019."
"It's worse for Division I non-autonomy schools, or those outside the Power Five conferences. All 64 of these institutions lost money in 2019, with a median deficit of $23 million per school."
"Of the 125 FCS schools, all reported a negative net generated revenue in 2019, with a median loss of $14.3 million per institution."
"And not one college in the NCAA's Division II or III saw their revenues exceed expenses that year."
https://www.axios.com/college-... [axios.com]
""At some point, the students have to start asking, 'Why am I paying $1,000 to support this football team when I have no interest in going?'""
Sorry, but tuition is funding your sports-ball. Not the other way around.
Re: Degree in English no... (Score:3)
Most of the writers you mention are not taught until college.
I also disagree with your argument that college is nothing more than job training. Slashdot is a prime example of how college graduates tend to view themselves as well-rounded even when they are not. What is worse, society treats college graduates as if they are well-rounded so they are often put in positions they are unqualified for.
I agree that English Literature is sort of a leisure degree, but rhet/comp is not. Unfortunately, because k-12 scho
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It isn't like they are going to start requiring STEM students to do a double major in English Lit, etc.
And of the 3 English/Writing courses I had to take - English Lit, "Writing about Literature", and Technical Communications - the Technical Communications was the most useful to me in every other class I took for my BS, and is the most useful non-coding class I've taken that I still use a majority of the skills for.
Re:Degree in English no... (Score:4, Interesting)
K-12 will teach you the basics of English reading/writing. College will teach you attention to detail.
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Interesting. Here we have trade and tech schools that offer pretty pure applied programs. Universities are for teaching people how to *think.* Want to learn Java frameworks and not sweat through calculus? Tech school.
Re: Degree in English no... (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe you misunderstood the article. When it said âoeShould Universities De-Prioritize English Departments for Engineering?â it was not referring to âoeEnglish departments in engineeringâ (as you said). It had nothing to do with teaching English to engineers.
Just chiming in here. You are correct - the article is based on the concept that some Universities are beginning to alter their structure. It then delves into politics. I'll delve into practicalities.
It was asking the question, should English departments be cut / de-prioritized / receive less funding in favor of putting more money towards engineering.
This is a survival issue. With a bunch of factors.
Fact 1 - There are majors that have better employment prospects than others.
Fact 2 - Many demand that their student loans be unrepaid. This is a demand for a free education and living.
Fact 3 - To comply with their demands, the University system in the USA must completely change, the research system needs gutted, severe austerity must be imposed.
Given that fact 1 exists, if loans are to continue to be made, it is financially responsible for the University to prioritize it's efforts on career paths that allow the person taking out the loan to have a reasonable chance of paying it back.
A thousand engineers are going to have much better prospects of gainful employment than a thousand Gender studies or Philosophy majors.
Way back in the day when I was in school, majors like English, women's studies (it's name then) and Philosophy were fairly small departments, with generally offspring of the well to do. Now, the courses that are based on giving your opinion are much larger.
A liberal education can still be given. But it should be a given that there is life beyond the diploma, and that the University should prepare you for that life.
And the deconstructionist ideal that all education must be free of charge is so unrealistic that it's a complete non-starter. Even the public K-12 education comes with a real cost.
More wokeness (Score:5, Insightful)
This article is pretty damn woke. Worrying about politics instead of skills.
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So you have no problem producing biased AI facial recognition systems or language systems that only recognize the Queen's English.
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I'd be happy if they could even do that reliably.
Universities are run as businesses (Score:2)
The real question is why do English professors feel that engineering students should be subsidising English departments and English professor salaries?
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It's not just English, it's all humanities, like history as well. Imagine a society where people can't understand how human communication works, and treat everything like a technical issue.
In fact, we see such idiocy on Slashdot. People so obviously out of touch with the real world that they take everything literally and can't understand simple concepts such as context. Look at the sheer number of fauxtistic idiots on this site who take one sentence and try to form a who
Re: Universities are run as businesses (Score:3, Insightful)
Engineering has long been a cash cow for universities. But these students are adding years onto their already decades long debt to subsidise humanity departments. Surely if they are going to spend that money, they should get back personal education in return?
Re: Universities are run as businesses (Score:4, Informative)
You didn't answer my question so I'll ask it again: Why should engineering students take on a larger debt than they need to in order to fund English departments?
Why not, but you think eliminating these departments will reduce costs ? What planet do you live on ?
In the red states this is all about ensuring students are programmed to "rightthink". Also what about American Football, many universities push that to the exclusion of all else due to its money making potential, the money from that program seems to only go into the pockets of the admins and sports department.
Re: Universities are run as businesses (Score:3)
If you don't recognise what I'm posting as the truth, I suspect your position at a university was a very low level one.
Re: Universities are run as businesses (Score:2)
Defund SPORTS (Score:5, Insightful)
and keep everything else.
Problems solveded.
Re: Defund SPORTS (Score:2)
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Indeed. I never understood why sports have so much importance and money in us universities.
Because in many areas of the country, college sports is a substantial portion of the university's income and publicity. More over, individuals who do well in college sports and end up being drafted to the NFL/NBA/MLB/etc. get seven figure salaries as a matter of course.
There's a living to be made in engineering. There's money to be made in sports.
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That's been studied to death and the fact is that, except for a very few exceptions, major sport programs are a net loss.
As to the individuals who "do well" in college sports... you realize that's a narrow, narrow funnel, right? The odds of any given individual making it through from jr. high, high school, and college to the NFL are astronomical.
I agree with the parent poster. If the NFL wants farm leagues let them pay for them.
Makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
"eliminating the most left-leaning professor" sounds like a good idea. Those people have little to do with the Enlightenment. I speak from personal experience when I say they are little more than religious fanatics of the new leftist religion.
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However, and unfortunately, many (most??) of the humanitarian departments in the North American universities are leftist ideology centers, totally detached from reality and actually extremely harmful.
Do you have evidence to back up those claims?
Re:Makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you have evidence to back up those claims?
Nah, we're in a post-truth world. The narrative is more important than the facts. As long as you can defend your opinion, it's correct.
Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Makes sense (Score:4, Informative)
Google "math is racist" and you'll have your answer.
And Boolean algebra is part of math, so you have stake in this too, oh great programmer.
The liberal arts departments have been trying to get more of their courses into the engineering curriculum since forever. Engineering is running out of hours for their courses even without the extra "core" liberal arts classes, a few years ago their was serious discussion about making engineering programs five years instead of four.
This is just the latest iteration of that debate. And it was made worse by the liberal arts departments declaring all white people intrinsically racist.
And then we have the idiot Berkeley professor stirring things up. I can't call him a racist, but I certainly can and do call him a classist, or maybe a class enemy in the Left's vernacular.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch... [snopes.com]
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Google "math is racist" and you'll have your answer.
You miss the point.
I've been fortunate to interact with a bunch of people from wildly different backgrounds, and it's quite easy to confuse them simply by relying on some of the pop-culture shorthand that me and other native-born white people grew up with.
And it's not always easy to predict what's confusing. What I think is an easy to understand scenario might only be obvious because I've seen it a dozen versions of it play out on TV. Someone seeing that scenario for the first time will probably be confused
Adding word to the ban list (Score:2)
I nominate "wow" for the New Year's 2022 ban list of overused words and expressions. That along with "oh wait" from two posts down the page.
This is part of emphasizing English as a serious major area of study at universities in the U.S..
Re:Adding word to the ban list (Score:4, Insightful)
I nominate "wow" for the New Year's 2022 ban list of overused words and expressions. That along with "oh wait" from two posts down the page.
This is part of emphasizing English as a serious major area of study at universities in the U.S..
Ok, how about:
Fuck, you're easily led by what Tucker Carlson says you should be angry about.
Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
The humanities teach you that there is no absolute truth, and history is told by the winners.
That's flatly incorrect.
There are absolute truths, and philosophy can indeed teach you that. It can also teach you that people can redefine shit in such a way as to make it seem as if nothing is really true, and a big part of philosophy is figuring that out and countering it.
History is told by the winners, but also by the losers and those on the sidelines watching, artifacts, constructions, art, and culture. Again, the humanities can help sort through all sides and come closer to the truth than any side can. And yes, in some cases it's impossible to get to the absolute truth, but a lot of the humanities is about trying to get as close as possible.
Engineering 305 isn't going to help anyone understand why some blacks fought for the South in the Civil War. History, psychology, philosophy, and sociology will. And understanding why people fight against what appears to be their own self-interest is pretty god damn relevant right about now, and will remain so far into the future.
cuz (Score:5, Insightful)
cuz cermunikashn cleerly izunt uh pryorery if bildin sumfink dat pplz lives depend on and if you can't properly communicate, write documentation, write requirements specifications and get across to people that if the bridge isn't constructed properly and to spec then people DIE, well, obviously that's not important at all.
there was a story here a few years ago about an entrepreneur who refused to hire computer science majors. instead he hired *english language majors* and trained them to become programmers. why? because the computer science majors were incapable of properly communicating, writing documentation and being part of a team, whereas because reading programs uses the same parts of your brain that are involved in *foreign languages*... see how that works?
now all we have to do is get across to universities how important english language training really is in engineering, oh wait this is slashdot, oh well
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English is a foreign language now in the US?
English as a foreign language (Score:2)
Computer programming languages are foreign languages to the English majors the entrepreneur was training to code.
English is a foreign language, however, to US Slashdot participants.
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By English he means "writing skills". The ability to write a comprehensive essay or documentation is a skill that is often overlooked in engineering classes.
Re: cuz (Score:2)
You make very good points.
If people are unable to get any English education before university.
Also if people don't communicate outside classes that teach Shakespeare or middle ages literature.
Also if English majors really focus most of their time on teaching anything about communication in a business context.
I don't know what kind of people assumes a university can't teach or train communication skills without an English department. Must be those who have never had a university education.
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You didn't say how this turned out for that entrepreneur.
Do you have any link which proves that "reading programs uses the same parts of your brain that are involved in *foreign languages*..."? Because programmers don't "read programs". Engineering work is not very close to reading.
You make quite a few assertions that I'm not sure are at all true. It would be nice if you could at least link to that, and, better, if you actually provide proof for things like the claim that English majors are better at workin
Militant liberals are a danger to the bottom line (Score:4, Interesting)
These aren't trump voters, they are just normies trying to prevent their college from being the next nexus of mass protests making a mountain of a mole hill and scaring away new students. Militant liberals are an economic liability.
Fund engineering scholarships (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, I see (Score:4, Informative)
That is the dream. In reality, "prioritization" debates, particularly in deep red states, are excellent cover for changing the political demographics of American colleges and universities. The Marian University case is instructive in this sense; the ostensible championing of STEM fields maps neatly onto the project of eliminating the most left-leaning professor, inevitably in departments that teach English or history or political science. If you have a right-leaning board of trustees in a red state like Indiana, professors like Johnny Goldfinger are unwanted, even threatening to those who would like student voters to know less rather than more about the processes of democracy. In a country where everything is riven and divided around political lines, this could well be a covert attack against the otherwise enduring liberal-ness of the college campus....
Yeah, how dare there be any resistance! lol
Seriously though, from the headline I was half expecting to hear that English departments were on the chopping block because somebody feared that reading ideas from other times (and in ... shudder ... English!) might interfere with the eternal present and the Party.
(But I'm probably just being silly ... it's not like any real world Minitru would, er, rewrite [theguardian.com] all the past's books or anything.)
No (Score:5, Insightful)
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The humanities are how you teach critical thinking skills to people who don't have them naturally. Cutting them will produce worse engineers and even worse citizens
Are you sure you didn't mean to type "critical theory"?
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That's what people who don't naturally have good critical thinking tend to think.
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
Hardly. Debating over the meaning an author had when they wrote what they wrote doesn't teach critical thinking. These days, you're more likely to get a bad grade unless you agree with the professor's point of view. By contrast, the hard sciences do require critical thinking in order to asses the results of an experiment or determine the "best" approach to solving a technical challenge. What should be required for all freshman students is an actual course in critical thinking. Sadly, some people are using the term as a weapon to quash debate just like they use bullsh*t phrases like "you don't believe in science". It goes something like this: "I'm right because critical thinking so STFU."
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The humanities are how you teach critical thinking skills to people who don't have them naturally. Cutting them will produce worse engineers and even worse citizens
Actually, humanities departments are the exact opposite of that. All of humanities is based on feelings, emotion, and 100% subjective judgments of what is good and bad, not any kind of logical or actual critical thinking. It is the reason why we have antihistorical theories like the 1619 project, or the nonsense that is called critical race theory, or the other nonsense of infinite numbers of genders.
Humanities departments should exist to teach everyone the world's cultural heritage. Very very few people
The subjectivity is the point (Score:3)
Humanities is literally teaching the process
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Man, are you going to be surprised if you ever learn what is taught in humanities departments. But you won't, will you? You'll just keep dancing with that strawman.
Probably (Score:3)
I won't disagree with any of the political commentary in TFA. But I will say this. Not every university needs to be all things to all people. If a university wants to be a "science and technology school" there is nothing wrong with specializing in that. People who want to major in English and Poly Sci can go to schools that offer those degrees.
I don't buy sheets and bedding at the butcher shop. I don't get meat at Bed, Bath and Beyond. Nevertheless, I still sleep on sheets and eat meat....not necessarily in that order.
Purdue's Situation (Score:2)
Mitc
NO (Score:5, Insightful)
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Bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
They aren't eliminating English classes, they're simple eliminating English as a major. It's not likely English majors are going to be ending up as engineers, anyway. Engineers will still be able to take all the practical English classes they require.
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Presumably liberal arts schools that specialize in that sort of thing will still offer an English major. There's no reason English majors have to be educated at technical schools.
Universties in US seem pretty political.. (Score:2)
Given that many seem to try to drum out "wrong thinkers" be they left or right, depending on the leanings of the university in question.
The problem then seems to be that in the end the University will not teach balanced views, instead they will be tilted one way in one university and other in another. That sort of thing cannot end well.
I am not sure I buy the premise (Score:2)
Good jobs in those de-emphasized majors (Score:2)
Political Science: Excluding soldiers, there are over 24 million federal, state and local government jobs. "Public Policy" degrees tend to either fail or get no jobs.
English: Want a job in Advertising? Want to do any technical writing? (Manuals, help scripts)? Yeah, get a minor in marketing for Advertising, and a minor in something technical for technical writing. But an English degree is often a better choice and gives you more options. They are not looking to hire their boss, they want someone to
The US doesn't understand universities (Score:4, Insightful)
Everyone complaining that universities are not vocational schools doesn't understand what a university is.
If you want more engineering, open an engineering vocational school, and teach people to be practical engineers.
An engineering school at a university is about teaching people to be research engineers -- people who will study engineering and shape how it works. People from vocational schools will do this too, but their focus is practical day to day work. People from universities may do practical work, but that's not what they're training for. Universities do not produce journeymen or even as their core focus masters in anything. They produce doctors.
You can create really good practical engineers much more cheaply in vocational schools than in universities. This what is wanted by the corporate world, since they want to drive pay down by an over-saturation of the job pool. That's short-term thinking, but we're not going to stop US business from short-term thinking, so we should just give them what they want so they stop screwing everyone over in order to get it.
But we could create better day to day engineers in vocational school than in universities. We get too many people coming out of university engineering programs who haven't been trained to have a work ethic, or have prima-dona complexes, or waste company time on doing things cleverly instead of doing them with long-term maintenance at core. A vocational school mentality would be advantageous there. Think of the engineers in the age of steam. They made things last, made them easy to work on, made them efficient, worked long hours, and accomplished great things. They were mostly NOT the products of universities.
Instead, the US seems hell-bent on taking an expensive system we've built over centuries and breaking it, to make it expensively produce something it doesn't make well.
You need English majors and Linguistics majors and historians. If nothing else, this is where most lawyers come from. And lawyers become politicians. So again, this is short-term thinking. Heck, what would the CIA do if you stopped Yale from producing history majors and political science phds? What would the financial industry do without quants? But that is a different system. One that needs to be nurtured.
Just start making vocational schools and stop messing with the University system.
Unless, as the articles suggests, you want to make sure no one becomes a doctor of anything, or looks at the world with that mind-set. Hating people because they're smarter than you is also short-term thinking. The people encouraging that who are actually clever (the lawyers with university degrees who become politicians) who do this are sacrificing the entire country for their own short term gain -- they are sociopaths.
It's a question of funding (Score:2)
The simple fact is that science, technology, and engineering (note that I leave out the M and the A) requires a lot of funding to perform. English requires very little money particularly if you skip the hard cover books. That said, STEM people need to be able to communicate and write well but that really has little to do with reading and interpreting some hard core drinking and smoking author that some people think is great but in reality is wholly tedious.
Engineers Write. Engineers Communicate. (Score:3)
No, they shoud do the opposite. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they shoud do the opposite. The concept of a university should be to first and foremost produce an educated person. That means emphasizing a well-rounded education, with a university diploma meaning that a person who has achieved it has been educated in language, science, history, and the arts. An undergraduate engineering 'degree' is too specialized, and should cease to exist. At the university level, engineering should consist of a few upper-level classes available as electives, and a graduate degree program, because graduate school is where someone with a university education should specialize.
The undergraduate engineering 'degree' should be removed from the concept of a university education and be considered something that belongs at a vocational school instead. I'm not saying that it should be unavailable, there will always be people who aren't suited to a university education. But it's time to stop pretending that an engineering diploma is in any way equivalent to a well-rounded education.
A university's job is not to spit out cogs for the machine. That is the job of a vocational education.
And there will of course be prestigious vocational schools, I can't imagine MIT and GA Tech would go away. But it's time to see that education for what it is, and it's not a full university education.
But... (Score:2)
I look job listing hear is resume. (Score:2)
Given the quality of writing that I see... (Score:5, Interesting)
... in the workplace, I'd surely hate to see English departments shut down. Or should I phrase that as "the lack of quality". I rarely see job ads that don't include wording like "must have excellent oral and written communication skills". Yet, during a typical work day, it's rare not not say to yourself "WTH is this person trying to communicate?" Emails are lousy with sentence fragments, run-on sentences, paragraphs that span multiple screens, misspellings, atrocious grammar, and a host of other things that are jarring to the reader trying to understand what the writer is trying -- and failing -- to say.
Now my education and professional background is in engineering but perhaps I'm old-fashioned. I spent many years working in an academic environment (on government-sponsored contracts) where effective communications was essential. We were encouraged to write technical memoranda, presis, and/or reports -- all peer-reviewed -- on a weekly basis, largely to satisfy contract monitors but also to use as sales tools when visiting potential sponsors. So, my sensitivity to the poor writing skills I see in the workplace my be due to my previous work experiences. The trash communications I see daily in the workplace make me want to laugh in the face of everyone in the business world who makes snide comments about those who've worked in academia.
My (less than) favorite example from the workplace:
Then there's the detailed instructions on how to install a set of software packages that are flat-out wrong but distributed as the official method of ensuring that your development environment is up to snuff for the project. No problem... everyone has Teams so someone who's figured out the real correct installation process can spend/waste their time assisting others working around the flaws in the documented process. If only everyone had the write access to the wiki to be able to correct the poor communications when it's encountered. [sigh]
Re: No. (Score:2)
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think that's bad, you should see the work the locals produce.
I tell kids that English is the single most useful subject that they'll study in high school. It doesn't matter what they decide to do in the future, being able to speak and write effectively will give them a significant advantage.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
>"It doesn't matter what they decide to do in the future, being able to speak and write effectively will give them a significant advantage."
And more important than even that is the ability to reason and think critically. Something sorely lacking in school. I would like to see a reasoning/logic/critical thinking/debate class in lower schools and upper schools as a required subject.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And more important than even that is the ability to reason and think critically.
That's completely worthless if you can't then effectively communicate your ideas.
I would like to see a reasoning/logic/critical thinking/debate class in lower schools and upper schools as a required subject.
I see this quite a bit, but no one ever seems to have thought that through. What would a course like that cover? What would your learning objectives be? What kind of assessments would you use?
Also, have you ever actually taken a course in formal logic? I've found that most of the people who advocate for something like this haven't, but fancy themselves capable logicians anyway because they know a little boolean algebra.
Re: (Score:3)
Formal reasoning will only get you so far in "reasoning/logic/critical thinking/debate". There are many gray areas where the formal reasoning is too specific to be useful. There are logics for reasoning with incomplete information (Intuitionistic Logic, etc.) or even inconsistent information (Relevance Logic, etc.), but even then their rules are very tightly constrained. The real world doesn't come nice and packaged for any one formal system.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
>"That's completely worthless if you can't then effectively communicate your ideas."
Lots of topics are symbiotic. I wasn't implying that communication and writing/speaking weren't also very important. But if you have nothing to say because you can't reason your way out of a paper bag or your life is controlled by anecdotes and superstition, that isn't good either.
>"What would a course like that cover? What would your learning objectives be? What kind of assessments would you use?"
I am sure there are
Re: (Score:2)
I am sure there are good courses designed already, somewhere.
If you find one, I'd like to see it. You could also try to put one together yourself, though it may be more difficult that you realize.
The objective would be to
I'll give you a hand here. A learning objective is a measurable outcome. Something like "Students will be able to [specific observable thing]" Assessments, obviously, should follow your objectives.
At at college level, there was no time because I had to fill those spots with stupid, required stuff like foreign language and art appreciation.
You get out of a course what you put in. You likely wasted a real opportunity to build the very skills you've been advocating.
t wasn't offered in my public schools. At at college level, there was no time because
What's stopping you now?
Re: No (Score:2)
I think there should be formal and informal logic classes in k-12. It makes sense to teach symbolic logic around 6th grade before we teach complex mathematics.
On the flip side, it makes sense to teach informal logic and critical thinking before expecting students to craft long essays.
As you mention, it would be a mess as a single class. But if implemented correctly I believe it would make for much better students.
Maths and Science (Score:2)
I would like to see a reasoning/logic/critical thinking/debate class
Most of these are not things you typically learn in English. The first two I got from maths starting with formal geometric proofs around the age of 12-13 where you assemble a set of basic proofs using logic and reasoning to prove e.g. two angles were the same or two lines had the same length etc.
Critical thinking came from science where you have to assess the evidence to determine whether a hypothesis is correct and consistent with the data plus devising experiments to test ideas.
English is about the
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You do realize that universities lack conservative professors, especially ones with tenure?
People tend to get less conservative as they become better educated.
Re: Where do I even start? (Score:2)
That's a question of chicken and egg. Maybe they get more left wing because they're influenced by institutions that are that way. If higher Ed was more balanced maybe people wouldn't change ideologically so much (on average).
Re: (Score:2)
That isn't written in stone. Until the 1960s, academia tended to lean to the right. There's nothing to prevent it from shifting again.
Re: (Score:2)
universities both officially and unofficially suppress right wing ideas
Have any evidence to support that claim?
Re:Where do I even start? (Score:5, Insightful)
Last we checked, the right wing was the group denigrating science and truth. The fish rots from the head, and the head is Dear Leader. Remember, he destroys everything he touches. Now about those hurricane maps and Sharpies. . .
Re: Where do I even start? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not defending the right. They have issues too (for example being anti vax). But just look at what the left does when data comes out undermining its ideology. It's not pretty. You get socially ostracized.
Look what happened recently at MIT when a professor came to speak with ideas not approved of by the liberal administration.
you seem to have forgotten something. (Score:3)
To the left, 'science' is 'whatever supports my worldview', it has very little to do with verifiable facts, testable theories, and diversity of thought.
It has everything to do with compliance, echo chambers, and exclusion of debate.
Its just another example of them redefining a word. Their 'science' is the rest of the worlds 'religion'
Re: (Score:2)
I can only image what you think a degree in theology entails. Let me put it this way: it's a lot closer to your understanding of science than mathematics or computer science. Should we not fund those subjects either?
Re:No, but they should de-prioritize social studie (Score:4, Informative)
The major issue with "theology" degrees is that at a lot of crank religious universities they are pretty much just apologetics training classes. (I have a cousin with such a degree!) Real deal theology classes are fine and dandy, but unless you know what institution someone got their "theology" degree from, they could either be deeply versed in religions, their origins and evolution through time and how they shape society, or they could be garbage spewing morons.
It would be as if christian scientist colleges pumped out MDs. If you needed to know what college your doctor graduated from to determine whether or not they supported vaccinations and blood transfusions, similar shitting on the degree would be warranted.
Re: (Score:2)
As opposed to our techno giants who only have the good of society at heart.