One of the challenges facing the country right now in this time of economic crisis is that we’re also about to be confronted by the result of a decade of neglect of the nation’s infrastructure, in particular, the chronic starvation of our universities. It’s an insidious problem, because as administrations have discovered time and again, you can cut an education budget and nothing bad happens, from their perspective. The faculty get a pay freeze; we tighten our belts. The universities lose public funds; we raise tuition a little bit. A few faculty are lost to attrition, and the state decides to defer their replacement for a year or two or indefinitely; the remaining faculty scramble to cover the manpower loss. We can continue to do our jobs, but behind the scenes, the stresses simply grow and worsen.
I can testify to this from personal experience. My biology department struggles every year with the routine business of retirements and sabbatical leaves — we have absolutely no fat in this group, with every member playing an essential role in the curriculum, so every departure, even temporary ones, increases the strain. We have to frantically rearrange schedules to cover our deficits, we have to drop courses for a year (so the students have to juggle their schedules as well), and we hang by our fingernails waiting for the administration to do basic things, like approve temporary hires or allow us to do a search for replacement faculty. Since the state is contributing less and less every year, we will soon reach a point where we simply won’t be allowed to replace essential personnel, and then the whole system is going to break down.
The University of Florida has reached that point. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has been told to cut 10% from its budget. Since the biggest chunk of any university’s budget is salaries, that means a lot of people are going on the chopping block — and the administration has decided to simply get rid of entire departments wholesale, including geology. Think about it: a college of science that simply cuts off and throws away an entire discipline. Is that really a place that is supporting science and education? The partitions we set up with these labels are entirely arbitrary, and we are all interdependent. My own discipline of biology is dead without mathematics, chemistry, and physics, and yes, geology is part of the environment we want our students to know. Now it’s true that if all we aimed to do was churn out pre-meds, we could dispense with geology; heck, we could toss out all those ecologists, too, and hone ourselves down to nothing but a service department for instruction in physiology and anatomy.
But we wouldn’t be a university anymore. We’d be a trade school.
The United States is supposed to take some pride in its educational system — at least, we’re accustomed to hearing politicians stand up and brag about how our universities are the envy of the world. It’s a lie. We’re being steadily eroded away, and all that’s holding it up right now is the desperate struggles of the faculty within it. We’re at the breaking point, though, where the losses can’t be supported much more, and the whole edifice is going to fall apart.
Here’s what you need to do. Write to the University of Florida administration and explain to them that what they’re doing is debilitating, and is going to irreparably weaken the mission of the university. Unfortunately, their hands are probably tied; they’ve got a shrinking budget and have to cut somewhere, and they will do so, but at this point all we can do is ask them to hold off on completely destroying a scientific asset.
The next layer of the problem is the state government. They keep seeing the educational system as a great target for saving money with budget cuts, because the effects will not be manifest for several years — and so they steadily hack and slash and chop, and the universities suffer…and now they’re at the point where they begin to break, and they keep cutting. Write to the Florida legislature! Tell them that we need to support higher education, that as a scientific and technological nation, we are dependent on a well-educated citizenry!
It’s not just Florida, either — your state is blithely gutting its system of higher education, too. Minnesota, for instance, has cut investment in higher ed by 28% between 2000 and 2007, while raising tuition 68% over the same period. We haven’t been given less to do, either — our workload increases while salaries fail to keep up with inflation. This is happening everywhere. We are all Florida.
Another part of the problem is…you. Why do you keep electing cretins to your legislatures who despise the “intellectual elite”, who think being smart is a sin, who are so short-sighted that they care nothing for investing in strengthening the country in ways that take ten or more years to pay off? Stop it! Your representatives should be people who value education enough to commit to at least maintaining the current meager level of funding, but instead we get chains of ignoramuses who want to demolish the universities…and simultaneously want to control them to support their favorite ideological nonsense, via “academic freedom” bills. This is also a long-term goal: we have to work to restore our government to some level of sanity. It’s been the domain of fools and thieves for far too long.
Yes, you gotta love the “Wall Street populists” Ugh!
Can we give up on humanity yet? ‘Hey we want a cure for cancer! But we want you to do it cheap!’ ‘Uhhh, can’t be done.’ ‘Okthenbye.’
Hooray for Bureaucracy!
What does “Liberal Arts” mean? It sounds like something that could do with cutting, rather than geology.
Here in England most of the universities plead poverty but they persist in “teaching” stupid subjects that only exist so that thick/lazy/disinterested kids can get a degree (as decreed by our gov’t, 50% of kids should get a degree).
I suppose I shouldn’t blame them (the kids or the universtiries), they’re reacting to the market, such as it is. Though I would prefer that universities had more of a driving force in the market rather than just being a passenger.
Then, hopefully, there would be no more Yoghurt Knitting degrees.
I view education spending similarly as I view infrastructure spending. I think it’s justified via social utility: educated citizens earn more, start businesses, and contribute more to society, generally, more than those that are not. The biggest problem with not seeing the effects of these cuts is that you can’t put a figure on the opportunity cost. I would argue it’s impossible, although those in office might suggest otherwise???
Worse than that, actually (and here, the state govt is prolly mostly to blame). Last election in Florida, a ballot measure that would have allowed community colleges to tax the local areas to keep afloat failed (of course).
It’s always interested me to see that whatever ballot measures pass, no matter how much they cost (since that’s part of the requirement, telling us the estimated cost), the ones that might actually – gasp – raise taxes always fail..
See here for the 2008 ballot measures: http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Florida_2008_ballot_measures
The one concerned is Am. 8.
Israel has suffered several strikes by the universities and students in the past two years for academia being completely neglected at the expense of religion (we have a LOT of state-funded religious studies) and security (which goes hand-in-hand and should be read “the right kind of ideological crap that makes people gleeful go to war/resume the occupation”).
Last time we had a strike (due to the concerted effort of college professors like you, actually) – the state brought in an enormous bloodline transfer to the universities, virtually giving CPR to the entire Israeli academia.
I think the popular uprising against neglecting higher education is important, but I think it’s critical that professors like you, in many numbers, cry out publicly, and collectively, against it.
I’ve been wondering when we were going to reach the breaking point for a few years now. Not happy to see it finally coming to a head.
I can relate to that. It’s not only in the US where it’s happening. I teach in a smallish Canadian university and we are being slowly starved to death financially. All the things you cite in the opening paragraph are happening here. Infrastructure decay, faculty positions not replaced, staff positions cut, and all the while we are asked to do more and more; and we are pushed to use the latest techno widget, even if its worth in class is dubious – not using it is considered an unwillingness to keep with the trends (nobody evaluates the worth of the trends).
We work 70 to 80 hours a week as it is. I have 4 young children and need to have time for family. The stresses are immense. Work is a constant exercise of triage. One has to look at the list of things that need to be done in a day and decide what can be ignored. There’s never enough time to do it all, much less do it to the level you would like to do it. And with the constant distraction of the barrage of e-mail I often get In-box Anxiety (something other faculty have also expressed to me).
Thirty years ago when I was a grad student there was the same number of teaching faculty in our department, but there were half of the students, and only one degree program. We now have three degree programs and three “options”. Someone has to administer all of the extras.
But the thing that burns my ass the most is when I meet people I don’t know and they learn that I teach a the university and they say “Oh, it must be so nice to have your summers of”. They are shocked when I tell them that summer just means that you don’t work evenings and weekends. They think we lecture for 6 hours per week and the rest is “free time”. Nearly as deluded as Xtians.
ZK @ No. 3:
The liberal arts are less a particular department or field of study in most universities, and more an approach to higher eduction. A liberal arts education emphasizes breadth of knowledge. Rather than having students immediately specialize in biology or history, a liberal arts education requires that a student take not only the history or biology courses, but also mathematics, fine arts, social sciences, and natural sciences. The goal is to create well-rounded, critically thinking individuals that will be capable no matter where they decide to go in the future.
If a university were to get rid of its liberal arts program, it would basically turn that institution into a technical, vocational, or professional school, which is exactly what we don’t want to see happen.
xander
Liberal arts? Get rid of some absurd department/course like “Women’s studies” or “Urban Studies”. Any decent social studies program should include thorough coverage of women and urban people, but to make seperate degrees out of them is simply bizarre. We are all people; why should we cordon off two groups of people for special, isolated study at the degree level? Cover those groups of people like you would any other, such as native peoples of the Asian Steppe. What kind of job can you get with a degree in those subjects? You’re not unifying humanity and creating a social synthesis, you’re divying it up and contributing to division.
A good education for the citizenry is the bedrock of any hopes for a successful nation. If you have a nation composed of the ignorant, how can you hope to compete with other countries with more realistic priorities? Teach our kids what they need to know. Stop babying them with these insane quotas for test scores and race and whatever else. Stop underpaying our teachers. How can you hope to get talent in the classroom if the pay is garbage and they can make better money elsewhere? Stop trying to ram ideology down their throats.
A culture where we pay people millions to play games, yet we have a shortage of Nurses, Cops, and Teachers (three of the most important professions) because their pay is abysmal is suicide in the long run. It’s also cultural/national suicide to disparage people who like to learn, to be anti-intellectual, and to display a callous attitude toward basic scientific research (as Republicans these day have a frightening habit of doing).
Grow up America, and pull your head out of your ass. Execs who move around money are not the foundation of our nation; our educators, law enforcement, and health care professionals are.
ZK @ #3
Liberal arts is sort of a catchall for general education. The school I go to, for instance, is a liberal arts school in the sense that everyone, regardless of what they’re getting a degree in, has to take a couple of years in a foreign language, a few humanities classes, some math, and some science. The idea is to provide a more well-rounded education than students would get if they never took a class outside their major, and I think it’s generally a good idea. In the context of a “college of liberal arts” within a university, I’d assume it includes the humanities or social sciences (maybe both). While there are almost certainly other things that deserve cutting before an entire geology department, it’s not all underwater basket weaving, and treating anything that’s not a natural science as expendable is a mistake.
From what I’ve heard about my state’s budget cuts, next year’s going to be a bitch. As I understand it, we’ve lost 90% of our budget for research databases. I don’t know which databases in particular will be lost, but with a cut that big it’s bound to include databases I use.
PZ, I haven’t posted here before, although I’ve been reading your blog for a long time. I have to comment on this one.
I am a biology and chemistry teacher in a US high school. I see the exact same thing happening now at public primary and secondary schools. With NCLB, we are given more and more responsibilities and less and less time to accomplish the tasks that really help students learn. Our benefits and pay haven’t decreased much yet, but the same thing happens when we lose a teacher or need to hire another due to growth. We are told that the corporation can’t afford to hire a new teacher, so we have bigger class sizes and teachers teaching outside of their specialty area. And then everyone gets upset when our students don’t do as well on standardized tests! Yes, teachers are passionate about teaching and will do whatever it takes to do what’s best for students. We will work late into the night and through the summer with no additional pay, but what happens when we all burn out?
PZ, you say it’s the result of a decade of neglect, but I wonder exactly when this trend began. IS this another thing to blame on the Bush administration? Did it start earlier than that? How much control does the White House have in this? Can eight years with Obama make a difference?
So, Justin, did you just decide to string together a bunch of complaints from both ends of the political spectrum and hope that it would make sense?
The highest paid employee of the Connecticut University system, for that matter the highest paid employee of the state government is Jim Calhoun. Some of you will be nodding and saying “I’m not surprised.” Others will be asking “Jim Who?”
Mr. Calhoun is the coach of the UConn men’s basketball team. He makes $1.6 million per year. Recently, at a press conference, Calhoun got very angry when asked why he made so much when other state employees faced layoffs. How dare someone question why he made more in a year than most state employees make in their lifetimes? The nerve of some people!
Coming to Calhoun’s defense was Geno Auriemma, the second highest paid state employee. Auriemma, who makes a mere $1.2 million per year, is the UConn women’s basketball coach. When asked, Auriemma said that he wasn’t going to give up any of his salary either.
A fair number of assistant professors could continue to teach if UConn got out of the basketball business. It’s time for colleges to remember their job is to provide education, not function as the farm system for professional sports.
Every year I hire foreign students who have come halfway around the planet to get their master’s degrees. Presumably they’re coming here for a reason, what could it be? Do we have something valuable that we shouldn’t be burning as firewood to keep warm in cold economic times?
Here at the University of Idaho, the plan was to close down the undergraduate physics degree program!!! Fortunately outcry prevented this. Strangely enough, women’s studies and other fringe degree programs were not mentioned as candidates for elimination. Perhaps this is from an endowment that helps continue the program? I don’t know for sure. Perhaps those with $$$ who wish to do philanthropy with lasting benefits would consider directed gifts to Universities for the key disciplines. There is a limited supply of money, especially now, and whenever the argument is about how the other guy needs to give more money, one is arguing from a position of weakness. One thing we all can do is scale down our lifestyles. Personal debt currently is roughly equal to the GDP, and many of the disruptions we are seeing is from spending more than we can afford. I think the day of matching our parent’s standard of living may be gone, at least for this generation. The States and Feds can only tax what is actually there. Cutting education is very short sighted, but this crisis was long in coming and will be here a while, I fear. Just some disjointed thoughts from the peanut gallery
Ouch. They’re going to axe Geology?? I’ll bet they have bean-counting cost/benefit reasons for it, with the only important currency being US$$.
(btw, one of the other 2 doomed departments is Religion…)
I have thought for many years now that the classic College of Arts and Sciences organizational model is woefully antiquated. Sceince departments are almost never well served when the deans and deanlets are historians or poets or political scientists by training. One more of many many problems contributing to this mess.
Before the trickle of “They should cut those Mickey Mouse humanities programs” posts becomes a torrent, I’d like to point out that appeals to ridicule are no less fallacious against things you think are obviously silly than when used by people who think that studying fruit flies is absurd.
Well, Dr. Myers, welcome to the real f@#$ing world! You apparently have been living in your academic bubble. Try working for a large corporation! Budget cuts? Standard operating procedure. Wait for the more fun things like RIFs. Reduction in Force – managers are flat out told to eliminate 10% of their people. Better yet, wait for the 6-sigma training! Blackbelt “gulls” swooping down to steal your ideas and shit on you before claiming victory and flying away. Greenbelt projects! Gauge R&Rs! Oh, the joy. Wait for the “Just shut up or we will close the doors and move this factory to Mexico/China/India!” speeches. The best part was I went through all this stuff when the economy was doing great!
And people wonder why we engineers are so cynical?
I think I am going to send a copy of this to all my state and federal representatives along with a few comments that make it clear that I agree and will not vote for anyone who is anti education/science. Sadly, in my case, that includes John McCain who we already know is part of the problem.
xander @9
“If a university were to get rid of its liberal arts program, it would basically turn that institution into a technical, vocational, or professional school, which is exactly what we don’t want to see happen.”
Funny, because that’s exactly what I do want universities to be. I get quite cross about people going to university to study meaningless twaddle at my expense. I’ll have a few less media studies graduates and a few more scientists and engineers thank you all the same.
I’ve no objection to universities throwing in a few “you must take something outside of your core subject” modules, that’s always been a good idea, I agree. But it seems a bit OTT to then stick the extra bit in the title of the university.
Anyway, it sounds as though North American academia suffers the same problem as English local government: constantly being asked to achieve more with fewer resources.
Poor sods. It must be very demoralising at times.
I’m graduating from the CLAS at UF this semester and am already seeing my degree being devalued. Great.
I can tell you that writing to the administration isn’t going to do anything. They have been embroiled in these budget fights for a few years now, cutting and cutting; this is simply the worst symptom yet. As much as I personally dislike the style with which Pres. Bernie Machen runs UF, I’ve got to admit he’s tried very hard to keep the legislature from cutting our throats completely.
The real problem is the Florida legislature, which is full of some of the biggest idiots in the universe (see Corrine Brown, who was smart enough to make it to the national stage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5tXMLI-OsI). They are in charge of our money and don’t seem to think we need any of it anymore. Most kids go to school here for free thanks to state-sponsored Bright Futures scholarships, so the school is on its knees every year blowing the state legislature in an attempt to get some sort of marginal cash flow.
It’s starting to get pretty pathetic. I’m pretty sure the only thing keeping the school afloat at this point is the money the athletic association is giving us from winning all those championships (I’m only sort of joking).
I can’t wait to get my microbiology degree – from the college of liberal arts, of course – and promptly move to another state where I can actually put it to good use.
flounder99@#20: That would be fair comment if PZ’s post had been about how he should have a perfectly secure job. It wasn’t so it wasn’t.
exactly when this trend began.
1978 with Prop 13 is the traditional date.
IS this another thing to blame on the Bush administration?
Bush didn’t help, because he, too, kept promising to cut taxes rather than do one of the things governments are expected to do, maintain infrastructure.
Did it start earlier than that?
At the federal level, Carter wasn’t a really big spender, but he was tarred with it by Ronald Wilson Reagan, the man who brought us voodoo economics, promising to be able to do everything without actually doing it.
How much control does the White House have in this?
Little direct control, though the feds do spend a lot on financial aid for college students and scientific research which is done on university campuses throughout the country. Setting the tone may be more important.
Can eight years with Obama make a difference?
Maybe. We need President Obama to give us a lecture about how we have been eating the seed corn with our childish refusal to pay enough taxes to keep things taken care of. This, unfortunately, isn’t too likely because even Obama seems afraid to tell people that we will need to pay enough taxes to get rid of deficits and pay down debt when the economy is back on track. Unfortunately, the taxophobes have completely poisoned public discussion and caused this long-term harm to our country.
PZ,
I thought that was a trend.
I have recently graduated from the Minnesota University system myself with a degree in Computer Science, and that was an endless problem for the faculty: how vocational do we make this degree. They are trying to keep the material fairly abstract for the simple reason that technologies change too fast to keep up on any curriculum-designing time frame. But unfortunately, where I went, the way you learn Principles of Programming Languages is to learn one language, C++, and “absorb” the abstract information while you fight with the language syntax and tools they give you.
I would imagine the pressures are similar in other disciplines (like Biology), because some universities are trying to tap into another major source of funding: research grants. The goal in this cause would be getting students ready to work, rather than giving them a well-rounded education. And never mind that a tiny fraction of the grant money goes to fixing the problems you describe.
For what it’s worth, of the 50 people I knew on the fairly small campus, none of them are going the “academic” path with their degrees (go for a Masters/PhD in CS). All of them are going to be programmers, an industry for which the degree is a prerequisite, but little else.
At least you can be reassured I will try to change out my state legislator.
PZ,
I understand where you’re coming from at least as far as the value of geology is concerned. That said, I think this post is pretty off-base. If the financial situation at U of F is really as difficult as I’m assuming it is, the school is having to make some very difficult decisions about priorities. What’s better, grossly underfunding all departments, or cutting one department and subjecting the rest to more typical levels of underfunding?
Furthermore, at some point the cuts to a department don’t just reduce efficacy, but destroy it entirely. (As an example, what good is a chemistry department with no money for lab chemicals or a math department with no money for chalk?) At that point, it may be better to redirect those resources to other departments that, while underfunded, are still functional.
The choices that U of F has to make aren’t fun, but budgets are basically about setting priorities. Another website, written by a college dean, that I read regularly has had a few interesting posts on the mess that is Florida. Check it out:
http://suburbdad.blogspot.com/2006/09/partly-cloudy-in-sunshine-state.html
http://suburbdad.blogspot.com/2007/07/freezing-in-florida.html
JBB @ 18: I went to WSU for grad. school, and had many a fine class from the UI physics faculty. I hadn’t heard that they wanted to do away with the program, though I graduated a few years ago. Is there still a not-insignificant chance that the program might be axed?
pg,
All of my profs have to bring in their own chalk or markers if they want to write on a board instead of giving us some crappy powerpoint presentation.
Indeed. That and keeping the actual people to work to keep that technological advantage. Right now I hear from good sources that many many of them educated foreigners are returning home right now, because with their experience they can get very good high-quality jobs. The pay (in absolute dollar worth) is maybe less than what they got in the US, but what they get, say, in India, affords them a quality of life orders of magnitude higher (a driver, a cook, a nanny, the best schools, a posh home ect.).
So-called “third world” countries have changed a whole lot in the last ten years. They have a lot more to offer to qualified returning diaspora. Those people might not be back when you need them again. Having a good quality of life combined with being finally close to their family (not to forget their culture) is something they could not have before and can get now.
I suppose I shouldn’t blame them (the kids or the universtiries), they’re reacting to the market, such as it is. Though I would prefer that universities had more of a driving force in the market rather than just being a passenger. – ZK
There is a fundamental conceptual problem with treating universities as commercial businesses: who are supposed to be the customers? The students? Well, what a lot of them want is a qualification, without actually having to learn anything or do any work – and after all, the customer is always right. Employers? Then all universities will soon become trade schools – and we’ll even more quickly be rid of all that curiosity-driven research: how would a business responsible to its shareholders justify paying for that? And, after all, the customer is always right. While universities can work with both students and commercial businesses contributing some resources to them, unless they have much of their income from sources that regard an educated population and curiosity-driven scholarship as worth supporting in themselves, they will not survive as universities in the current sense.
Controlling a university to support a favorite ideological nonsense, is, of course, another mechanism for destroying it.
Many years ago, I was talking to a nursing manager who explained why she preferred RNs with college degrees to those who had the practical two-year program. Sure, in the first few months, the nurses who had the practical experience started out looking better, but a year later, the ones who had the academic background showed that they had grasped more and could make better decisions.
It’s easier to teach the practical stuff at the workplace than it is to teach the background academic work that allows an employee to be good today and tomorrow.
Regarding highly-paid coaches:
The argument I hear most often is that strong sports programs are important for alumni engagement. Yes, the coaches are paid absurd amounts of money, but they can be a net profit generator for the university if they can bring in enough alumni donations. There’s also a reputational effect – a school without a division I sports program has a hard time being taken seriously.
On the humanities:
In fact, humanities programs are already on the chopping block (or they might as well be). For several years now, universities have been slowly phasing out the full-research-professor-with-tenure model, opting instead for adjuncts who are paid much, much less and who only teach (officially). Because a humanities PhD doesn’t add much value for non-university employers, they can bid pretty low.
Partly because of this, humanities departments are much cheaper to run than science departments. The instructors are paid much less and there are no lab or equipment costs, plus the instructors spend more time teaching and less time doing research.
So while it’s tempting to think that it makes no sense to cut science when there’s so much apparent fat in the humanities, it’s important to understand that the humanities have been facing the sorts of problems outlined here for at least a decade now. Scientists and (especially) engineers have an advantage in that they can take their PhDs and go elsewhere, and that’s prevented this kind of neglect of science departments until fairly recently, but the problem isn’t new, and the humanities have been dealing with it for a long time.
UMD at College Park had to cut something like $20,000,000 out of the budget that the state said they would no longer provide. It came out of the budget through furlough days, basically a pay cut to mostly the top earning employees. We grad students and cleaning staff were spared completely.
Of course, this comes less than two years after the university sets aside $50,000,000 (yes, 50 million) for luxury seating at the basketball stadium, including wet bars, plasma TVs, and leather couches.
When times were good, this was an insulting prioritizing of school funds. Now that budgets are being cut, this sort of spending cannot be allowed.
I am somewhat amazed at the “what does Liberal Arts mean?” questions above, but that might be a result of having rewatched the first three episodes of James Burke’s The Day The Universe Changed yesterday evening, where the subject comes up repeatedly.
The Liberal Arts were originally defined by Martianus Capella over 1500 years ago and eventually became the foundation of the modern university during the Renaissance. Capella defined them as grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. Today it refers to a curriculum of general knowledge aimed at development of rational thought, and as noted above, without them you basically have a vocational school.
All areas of study at universities are important. We should be interested in developing more programs of study, not less. I am an ecologist in training, I am a musician, I am an artist with pencil and paint, I dabble in computer programming and english literature is one of my favorite areas to spend evenings indulging. No one can tell me that any of these or other areas of study deserve to be cut from universities.
I’m in Minnesota too PZ., Pawlenty needs to go! Why the hell a democratic state like ours has a repube governor I cannot fathom. MSU Mankato is feeling the pinch and my sister who works for a community college up north tells me they are dealing with a crushing budget cut this time around.
As more and more people find themselves out of work, the sensible thing to do is develop your qualifications through continued education. The problem my sister’s college is facing is how to cope with increased enrollment and decreased ability to meet the needs of the student body. Less sections, less staff, less workstudy opportunities, less graduate assistants (at the university I attend this may be the case)…. It is the exact opposite of what we should be doing during this “economic downturn” or whatever they are calling it these days. I say pump the money in, preparing people for the future is important.
the customer is always right.
One of the stupidest ideas ever to come along in management. Everyone who has ever dealt with customers knows that many of them are profoundly clueless and should never be allowed to be your customer because it will be a net loss for you for the extent that you allow them to be your customer.
pg @ #27
There’s something else to consider: the cost of rebuilding a department after you’d dismantled it. What’s it going to cost to bring in a new geology department? Aside from the individuals they’re going to lose, they’re going to lose a lot of institutional memory.
As for why programs like gender studies aren’t on the chopping block, one additional reason might be that they don’t cost much in the first place; in at least some universities those programs mostly rely on faculty from other departments, so cutting the program may not really do much to cut jobs.
Greetings!
ZK said: “I get quite cross about people going to university to study meaningless twaddle at my expense. I’ll have a few less media studies graduates and a few more scientists and engineers thank you all the same.”
Not to be overly sarcastic, but exactly what part of the word ‘University’ is confusing you?
There’s nothing wrong with a trade school education – I am a trade school grad myself – but that’s not what a university is, or should be.
This entire situation reminds me of a bumper sticker I used to see: “Think education is expensive? Try ignorance!”
It honestly never occurred to me that lawmakers might take that as a policy suggestion…
Published July 28, 2006
FLORIDA’S HIGHEST-PAID UNIVERSITY PRESIDENTS
Enrollment numbers are for fall 2005.
* Total compensation for all presidents are maximum amounts that include deferred compensation, car and housing allowances, and goal-based bonuses ranging from $50,000 to $75,000 a year.
John Hitt’s (University of Central Florida–public school) New Package
$450,000 base salary
$23,529 sabbatical
$80,000 deferred compensation
$44,400 car and housing
$100,000 incentive bonus for 2005-06 performance
$697,929 subtotal, guaranteed
$210,000 three-year goal bonus
$907,929 total compensation package
It is a long term problem all right. When I went undergraduate, there was a committment to “anyone who wants a college degree can get one.” Tuition was subsidized to 80%.
It was cheap if not all that easy to get a quality education.
Those days are over and college is too expensive. The result is obvious. I read somewhere that for the first time in forever, the percentage of US kids getting college degrees is going down. Just what we need in a competitive hi tech world.
Investing in human capital now will pay off for the life span of said human capital. And we, the people, are the USA.
Keep in mind that the problem here in Florida runs deeper than just the universities. I work for a public school system, and our budget has been slashed. The board (which is ranked 7th in the state in terms of pay) has already taken a whopping 2% pay cut, while many teachers (already ranked 56th out of 67 counties in salary) are facing a 100% pay cut.
“The United States is supposed to take some pride in its educational system — at least, we’re accustomed to hearing politicians stand up and brag about how our universities are the envy of the world. It’s a lie.”
It’s always a lie, not just when it’s the educational system, universities etc. that’s being talked about. As a non-USian who nevertheless has ties to the USA (part of my family lives there, and so do a number of my friends), I never cease to be amazed by – well, no, not by how US politicians constantly claim “we’re number one!”, but by how easily the general public swallows it, every single last time. I suppose a lie is easier to believe the more you want it to be true.
As a general rule of thumb, whenever anyone says “we’re number one!”, it’s a good idea to get suspicious. Ask for references to back up the claim, and when you get some, take a look at them, too (for instance, international studies and rankings often seem to only focus on certain nations, and politicians have a tendency to confuse “#1 among the following nations” and “#1 among all nations”).
the “Trivim”
the “Quadrivium”
Anybody for a game of “Quadrivial Pursuit”?
um…that’s Trivium
@23 ZK
“meaningless twaddle” ?
How very ignorant of you.
Charles Fowler said it better than I can:
“The arts are not pretty bulletin boards.
They are not turkeys and bunny rabbits.
They are not frivolous entertainment.
The arts are our humanity.
They are the languages of civilization through which we express our fears, our anxieties, our hungers, our struggles, our hops.
They are systems of meaning that have real and important utility, which is why schools that give students the means and encouragement to explore these realms provide a better education.”
Apologies for being slight OT, but I teach art, and I take exception to anyone calling my vocation meaningless.
How many professors in the geology dept. could Florida keep if they cut the salary of the FOOTBALL COACHES?
Matt Heath @19
Before the trickle of “They should cut those Mickey Mouse humanities programs” posts becomes a torrent, I’d like to point out that appeals to ridicule are no less fallacious against things you think are obviously silly than when used by people who think that studying fruit flies is absurd.
The “studying fruit flies is absurd” argument is and was easily demolished.
Perhaps it’s time for the Yoghurt Knitting graduates to defend their court.
Which isn’t such a bad thing really. Nothing’s sacred, is it? No Emporer’s New Clothes, eh? A Yoghurt Knitting course uses university resources and should be able to justify its existence, in just the same way as any other course.
It was fine for Sarah Palin to moan about fruit fly research in “Paris, France. I kid you not”. If nothing else it exposed her as a vacuous, know-nothing, blatherer[1]. More importantly though, the “fruit fly research is not absurd” brigade were ready, willing, and able to step to the crease and defend their wicket. Good for them!
[1] Perhaps it said more about her audience, who seemed to lap it up?
Wow, yoghurt knitting. I’d like to see the course description for that, and the curriculum it’s part of.
Kate, while it ought to be (and, I think, generally is) uncontroversial that someone pursuing the arts isn’t just wasting her time, the trickier issue that I think most critics here are getting at is whether or not people who don’t particularly care about the arts still ought to be forced to pay for them.
Justifying taxpayer-funded science is pretty easy – people obviously benefit from science even if they don’t understand it in the least, it’s historically been perhaps the most useful sphere of human knowledge, it clearly requires significant amounts of public investment in order to function effectively, and many scientific endeavors that at first seem silly prove to be the most important. It’s extremely difficult to ‘opt out’ of modern science, and almost no one does.
But it’s really not all that difficult to get by without having much at all to do with modern art, and so that’s a much harder argument to make for the arts. I do believe that, to some extent, it can be done, but it does often seem (and many people are under this impression, certainly) that the arts really only benefit the group of interested people who spend a great deal of time studying them, while those who aren’t interested don’t seem to notice anything missing.
Consider that Universities in Germany do not charge any tuition fees, and have research Institutions like the publicly funded Max Planck Institutes associated – and then ask yourself why the still economically most powerful country is not able to support the Universities at an appropriate level.
Rather a sad comment as to the value the American public – who after all are responsible for the election of their representatives – places on higher education.
Wow. Beautifully eloquent post, followed up by the most pos remarks in comments I’ve ever seen here. First groups turning on each other saying “Cut them, not us!” and then ignoramuses flouncing in saying that anything beyond being trained to work your specific assigned machine is a waste.
Universities have a purpose beyond being a trade school. They are supposed to make people learn how to survive and adapt in society, teach them to think, teach them to be critical, teach them how to learn, make sure they understand the value of the activities that humans do, give them a broader view than what they would normally see just outside their doors. One of my colleagues is fond of saying that general education is the main purpose of the university, and the major degree programs are just a little sprinkling of job training on top. God, people like ZK make me weep for humanity.
I go to the University of Florida (microbiology senior), and yes, it’s downright depressing what’s going on here, and in the rest of the nation.
ZK’s and Justin’s statements are patently ridiculous, and are mindsets characteristic of the popular derision of education that have contributed to the sorry state of our country’s school systems.
If I were in a better mood, I might be willing to discuss the value of humanities and the “liberal arts” with ZK, but his harping on “Yoghurt Knitting” shows him as an idiot, and I’ll not waste the energy. Likewise, Justin’s contradictory post, dismissive of the importance for a civilized nation to address social concerns as well as purely physical needs, indicates that there’s no point in a conversation with him either.
MAJeff! We’ve missed you around here. :)
How goes the dissertating?
Yeah!! Hi MAJeff! Blah, blah, blah. Big cyber hug!
thanks, guys. Defending Wednesday. Motherfucker is done!
Another facet, or perhaps a symptom of the intellectual poverty of our society in Science News: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/41930/title/Science_reporting_Evolving_before_our_eyes
“But we wouldn’t be a university anymore. We’d be a trade school.”
The proper role of a ‘university’ is evidently not to produce graduates with marketable skills. And people wonder why universities have the reputation of being elitist.
The proper role of a ‘university’ is evidently not to produce graduates with marketable skills.
Heaven forbid that there are sites of education that have a focus on something more than simply producing laborers!
As an evolutionary biology grad student, obviously the budget-related targeting of science programs makes me very angry. However, the lifelong Crimson Tide fan in me has to set the record straight regarding athletics. I attend Alabama, a major Div. I-A SEC school. We also have the highest paid college football coach in the US. But the Athletics Department is self-sustaining (as I would imagine it is at other major athletics universities such as Florida). Funding for athletics does not take away from academics. The monies come from completely separate sources. Example: Alabama is expanding the football stadium [again]. Naturally, many people are angry, given the severe budget cuts the academic departments are facing. But the expansion will be funded entirely by boosters and football ticket sales, private donations, and bonds. Is it a sad reflection on the state of priorities at SEC schools that the major donations tend to go toward football rather than academics? Absolutely. But as #34 above said, athletics brings in money for the rest of the university as well. And reputation is a BIG deal at these schools when it comes to recruitment.
Patricia, time to start the three day grog. I’ll order some more tankards.
Yes, Tommmm, believe it or not, the primary role of a [scarequotes sic] ‘University’ is not, in fact, to provide marketable skills to graduates. Unless by “marketable skills” you mean a working basic knowledge of all fields of human intellectual endeavor and an ability to apply patterns of rational, critical thinking to new knowledge, assertions, and situations.
But I’m pretty sure that’s not what you mean.
ZK, the grownups are trying to have a discussion. Why don’t you run along and play with your imaginary Yoghurt Knitting graduates?
CO @ 28: I believe the Physics program is safe. You never know, though. I have to agree with the minority opinion that liberal arts are critical for our civilization. We need to know more than how to design a good experiment. We need to know philosophy to understand the limits and abilities of our cognitive tools. We need literature and the arts because the things that make life worth living are in the realms of truth, goodness and beauty. We need the liberal arts so we don’t forget we are more than complex nanomachines, and even more important, that we don’t forget our neighbor is more than a nanomachine. We will all rue the day when we look on our fellow man as just grist for some scientific mill and yearn to assimilate him into some hellish borg state because he is just too dangerous to our warped and unquestioned technocrat views of perfection to be left alone as he is.
We’ll be thinking of you this week, MAJeff. Good luck and congratulations!!!
The proper role of a ‘university’ is evidently not to produce graduates with marketable skills. And people wonder why universities have the reputation of being elitist.
Define “marketable skills”. If it’s specific job training, those will be obsolete within 5 years because technology is moving so fast. However, if by marketable skills you mean the ability to relate to people from all different backgrounds, to figure out how to understand trends, to be able to express oneself accurately and well in writing and orally, to convey information in appropriate ways, to learn new techniques and systems, well then, that’s a university education for you.
Hot damn! New grog. All I gotta do is find the barrel bung, and I’ll get started on it…
Tomm’s comment also reflects the critique others have noted about the “student as customer” and integrating academia into markets. It’s the devaluation of every aspect of human existence to its market value and transforming each and every aspect of human life into an economic variable. A liberal arts education is also about citizenship. It’s about living in the world and trying to understand the world in which we live. Sure, that sometimes means a special topics course taught about the Simpsons or about having departments devoted to how humans have made art and music.
I would hope that education is about being more than being homo economicus. That’s such a degraded state.
First, bear in mind that the two republicans who “crossed over” and voted for President Obama’s “stimulus” package shook down the democrats, insisting upon changes before they would vote for cloture to prevent a filibuster by their colleagues. The demand they made (among others): cut funding for school construction and replace it with funds for prison construction. You get your construction jobs, so what are you complaining about? The republicans really do not see the difference.
The other point is about the “worth” of a given degree. I recall that at one time English majors were ridiculed on campus (as often happened when I was in college). What are you going to do with an English Lit degree, they scoffed.
J.K. Rowling is an English Lit major and a billionaire. The Harry Potter books are very derivative, drawing from classic themes and arch types found in myths, legends and literature throughout the ages. This she studied in college. Combine this knowledge together with a serviceable talent for story-telling and, voila! Billionaire. The point many miss is that if there existed a clear and unambiguous path leading from a given course of study and vast riches wouldn’t we all be rich? You can never know ahead of time exactly what path leads to what kind of success. That’s why education, in general, is enormously important.
All I gotta do is find the barrel bung,
A bong would be preferable………..
Don’t have much time to comment but greetings to MAJeff. Good luck on Wednesday! Does this mean we will see you around here again?
Correct. That wasn’t so hard, was it? Marketable skills for undergrads are a nice side effect, but it is a small part of the purpose of a university. What makes a school a university is that it is engaged in scholarship (that is to say research in the sciences, art & humanities, mathematics etc) and that it provides an introduction to scholarly work to its students (and more than an introduction to those that choose to study further).
And reputation is a BIG deal at these schools when it comes to recruitment.
Notre Dame may have become a better college because it had a very good football program for many years, but I’m hard pressed to think of any other examples of schools that got better because they emphasized sports.
” I’m hard pressed to think of any other examples of schools that got better because they emphasized sports.”
Hey, what about the University of Idaho…., hmmmm, never mind. (Go Vandals)
I suppose we could try a bong but I think the barrel would still leak. Humm.
ZK at #49:
I’ve never heard of a course, much less a degree, in Yoghurt Knitting. The popular “underwater basket weaving” meme of yesteryear is also a specific course and degree I’ve never actually seen in an academic department.
Perhaps “Yoghurt Knitting” refers, metaphorically, to courses such as music, art, history, literature, media studies, and the like, or even to specialties of those disciplines such as Classical Music Theory, Renaissance Portraiture, Feminist Perspectives on 19th Century U.S. History, Contemporary African-American Poetry, and Technology and Film Narrative. Many of these specialties and their broader category of study may not seem particularly valuable to you, ZK, and that’s fair.
Before tossing them on the pyre of the useless, however, perhaps some more time and investigation might be worthwhile. As several other posters have pointed out, it is not solely science being gutted by present day financial constraints. Indeed, the scope of the economic difficulty we have only just begun to plumb (and I suspect we are in for a sounding accounted for in years, not months) will affect more than just science departments in universities, but will affect universities as a whole, as well as primary and secondary institutions of public and private designation, not to mention businesses, government and social programs, leisure activities, the environment, travel, international commerce, and human psychology.
In other words, it may seem as though “Yoghurt Knitting,” whatever that is, lies somehow outside the bounds of budget cuts, but that is not the case. All the more reason that “Yoghurt Knitting,” whatever that is, needs to act in joint advocacy with the sciences, not only for the reciprocal defense it suggests in maintaining money for academic disciplines, but also for the importance of recognizing interdisciplinary study as a foundation for strong intellectual pursuit, integrity, and service to a larger society.
In the words of Henry Aaron, “I don’t want them to forget Ruth; I just want them to remember me.” Students of the somewhat disparaged humanities don’t want the sciences (Geology included) to be lost to Florida, or anywhere else. By the same token, students of the humanities do not want to be lost, either. ZK, you are not alone in your concern for the losses to science education: many who stand with you in concern are lettered in subjects that may not seem particularly valuable to you relative to some other subject, yet they stand with you just the same in their desire to see education preserved and distributed, not decimated and hoarded.
I humbly submit that education is not a zero-sum game. It is possible to have in education both Geology and other disciplines, and possible for both to contribute to society. Rather than ascribe one (or the other) to the block, perhaps we might look to larger issues (the economy) affecting all and sundry in an effort to ensure the survival of those academic disciplines in which we find ourselves challenged, renewed, inspired, and ultimately equipped to continue the process of striving to solve those problems that plague us now as ever.
It seems to me that what PZ has done has been to call attention to one area (the situation in Florida), and that PZ has certainly not called for other areas to suffer in that one area’s stead.
Still, after all, I have but a lowly degree, and that only a Bachelor’s, in English Literature (perhaps related to “Yoghurt Knitting?”), and am only now, at age 35, starting the pursuit of a doctorate in Educational Psychology (a social science and as such oft considered a poor pretender to the throne of “that which truly benefits humans”).
I’m not interested in thrones, which seem to me largely the province of zero-sum games. I’m interested in how diverse participants in diverse disciplines can work to further the diverse benefits of education to an increasingly broad and diverse human society. One way is not to lose the Geology department at The University of Florida. Another way is not to lose any other departments, either.
No kings,
Robert
Just a quick follow up to big MAJeff, OM bidding hearty congratulations and best wishes for the upcoming defense!
No kings,
Robert
I never said the schools were better [academically] because of athletics. I said athletics are a major part of recruitment. Alabama’s freshman class is growing by 1000s each year, which brings in money through tuition. No students – no tuition money – no academics.
Woops! Sorry, MAJeff, I didn’t mean to add the “big” adjective in front of your handle in the previous post – and I even previewed!
Apologies, and congratulations again!
No kings,
Robert
@51 Gotchaye
There are many things that “people” don’t particularly care for that still deserve funding. We live in an increasingly visual world. Internet, video games, virtual reality learning, ubiquitous advertising, GUI’s for social networking sites all provide a background for the generation some call the Millenials. Shouldn’t they and the rest of us have some working knowledge of the way visual design works?
People in my field have been denigrated for years (both teaching and the arts) because on the one hand it’s stupid, and basketweaving and “OMG you could be brain dead and do that” and on the other hand it’s elitist and stupid and “What’s the point of modern painting, I just don’t understand it.”
Art connects to everything, math (Escher), science (color theory), history, language etc. Why should I or anyone have to justify spending for the reason that the iPod is not some ugly brick? Science is great and necessary and fascinating, but who was one of the greatest scientists of the 1500’s? An artist.
To say the arts only benefit a specific group of people who spend a great deal of time studying them is to deny the majority of human interaction with our environment. And the people WOULD notice something missing if arts education and the funding for such were to vanish.
Ever seen a teen’s mySpace page? That would be the world of the internet without art education.
Sorry, MAJeff, I didn’t mean to add the “big” adjective in front of your handle in the previous post
lol….no worries…I have been feeling the need to lose a bit of weight lately. Too much beer and sedentary writing!
The urban dictionary has Knitting Yoghurt listed as male masturbation. Now I’m really confused, we need university courses for that?
You are all correct.
We have to keep the tough good courses and get rid of the easy bad courses and make students study but only what they want to study and only if it is useful but what is useful now won’t be in five years because technology moves so fast but technology is the problem because we really should teach people how to think because that will be better in the long run but in the long run we are all dead and who needs geology anyway because the only things those guys can do is look for oil or study evolution and the evolution of education says that students should be allowed to study what they want but not what they need because they will be able to pick up what they need when they need it or they will be able to hire someone who will do it for them so everyone had better get a degree in business.
OK?
The urban dictionary has Knitting Yoghurt listed as male masturbation. Now I’m really confused, we need university courses for that?
There is a recent academic study of the topic. It’s amazing what social history can teach us about how something so seemingly basic as whacking off has occupied such contradictory location in human thought in different places and times. Who’d have thunk that human history and sexual activity could be interesting.
But, of course, basic knowledge about human histories and societies has no value…..
f**k intellectuals, they contributed to this financial mess.
f**k intellectuals, they contributed to this financial mess.
blah blah blah blah blah
Matt Heath’s answer @#72 is better than mine @#63. Complementary but better.
There are many people commenting here who have really good things to say, and I appreciate your thoughtful comments, especially those from educators.
However, I’m pretty peeved about some commenters saying that things like women’s studies aren’t valid. WTF? It is valid–as valid as any history or science class. So the powers that be tell us to eat dirt because there are limited resources, and what do we do? We start infighting. Fucking typical. “My shit is more important than yours.” That’s a bunch of crap.
That is how the powers that be survive–it’s called divide and conquer. Folks, we have to wake up here. Don’t feed into the distraction of “one thing is more important than another.”
The reality is that women fought for decades for women’s studies to become a reality. The reason we had to fight for it in the first place is because our history and knowledge has always been second tier to that of men. Our contributions–in every discipline–are overlooked. And that affects women (what comes to mind immediately is women’s health). Most people, regardless of sex, know and understand this and aren’t threatened by it. They are willing to cop to the fact that certain people in our society have gotten a bum deal, and it’s up to society as a whole to fix it.
The real issue here, at least the one that I think PZ Myers is pointing out, is that our educational system sucks ass, and it sucks because we haven’t put enough resources into it. Resources are people–teachers, professors. We haven’t put enough resources into it because the wrong people (our elected officials) have made policy regarding our education system. These are the same people that don’t want the scientific method to be taught, that have launched a war against educators (basically demonizing the teachers and putting them on the defensive about earning their paltry wages–teachers are not the enemy), that don’t think the state should educate its populace, that think being smart makes you “elite.”
So thank you, PZ Myers, for pointing out what we need to keep pointing out. And please, folks, let’s keep a clear head and not backbite.
I think I’ve heard “We’ll all have to knit our own yoghurt” (and “We’ll all have to knit our own muesli”) as parodies of the proposals of the Green movement (well, the anti-technology wing thereof, but the parodists are probably not concerning themselves with such subtleties)
Time to get banned…
ZK @#23
Okay you piece of excrement, YOU are the problem.
All knowledge is important, you simpering twit.
Learning more than just the stuff you need for a job is the whole point of universities. What the hell is wrong with you?
Humanities are there to make people BETTER PEOPLE. would it help if you though of being human as a job we all have? It’s bad enough that public education pre college is becoming more and more just a prep for menial labor in a crappy job, but you and your righteous bullshit come down and actually advocate making people stupider.
Without exposure to vast ideas you end up with idiots like Egnor; a (theoretically) competent surgeon who fails at the rest of life.
The only difference between your ‘lets remove liberal arts’ and cretinist ‘lets remove science’ is that you like several more subjects than they do. A university is to allow the student to explore a lot more than how to make a proper cut, or formula.
Seriously, how many deconversion narratives are from people being exposed to other ways of thinking in college?
So, lets remove all the classes that don’t add straight to a job. I’ll sure be sad when English goes away. After all I love it when people can’t spell or organize a sentence!
If you hate people LEARNING with ‘your’ money then go somewhere else!
Godamnit people like you are fucking aggravating. I’d take a fundie from a mega church over assholes like you any day. they may be stupid, but some of them actually care about other people.
P.S. i’m very sorry for my tone. but this is something that gets waaaay under my skin. i’ll understand if i earned a banning. Sigh…
Cat of Many Faces: I love a good rant. I happen to agree with you, but even if I didn’t, I’d probably give an ovation of some sort.
The book in your link can’t truly be a worthy tome. It wasn’t reviewed by John Kwok.
*ducks flying shoes*
The book in your link can’t truly be a worthy tome. It wasn’t reviewed by John Kwok.
He was too busy knitting yogurt.
And why isn’t there a bloody uprising by the students?
The USA is probably the last country that does that in university rather than in highschool where basic education belongs.
University studies begin with general courses within the larger subject. For example, if you want to study genetics or paleobiology, you have to pass general biology courses first (botany, zoology, microbiology, evolutionary ecology, math, physics, chemistry…).
Really? How much do they even cost?
Fixed it for you. Such things as arts and sciences being together organizationally don’t happen over here.
The university budgets are still slashed, however, because they’re part of the national budget law — the governing parties are to blame…
Which is, of course, one of the US peculiarities that really should change.
WTF. University presidents are paid like they were CEOs? At public universities?!?!?
Whose bright idea was that? Did they think nobody would want to become a university president at less dough? While I am at it, do they believe in the tooth fairy?
Apologies if I’ve offended a few herein.
More delicately put:
– The idea of a university as a place where young people go to receive rounded educations and to mature seems to be a bit outdated, at least it does in my country and experience.
I graduated in 1990, by when it was already a process “go to university, get degree, go to work”. My contemporaries had exactly the same experience, as far as I can recall. My brother-in-law is 15 years younger than me, and his university experiences were much the same.
– You might not agree with me, fair enough. I do however pay my taxes (though not in the USA) and have a vote, so you’ll forgive me for having an opinion on how my tax money is spent and who I vote for (in my country).
Cheers.
Cat of Many Faces: If you keep that standard of rantage on a regular basis it will be the Order of Molly for you rather than the Dungeon.
ZK #23
I couldn’t agree with you more. What’s with all the Ph.D.s when a trade school will do the job just as well. Which gives me an idea that’s a sure money maker. Go over to Exxon (they seem like your kind of company) and tell them that you have a scheme that will save a ton of money for them. We’re talking millions. Just replace those high-priced Ph.D.s and Masters employees with trade school graduates. You could even show ’em your degree to prove how well trade school worked for you! I’m sure they’ll hire you on the spot and get rid of all their useless, overpaid ‘talent’.
No I know you meant only some kinds of talent is useless – you know, the squishy liberal kind. So goodbye to the arts. I’m sure the PR people will get by just fine with their multi-billion dollar advertising campaigns being overseen by people with genuine associate’s degrees.
Of course there’ll be no need for economists at Exxon either. Bunch of lefties! Out to the cub. And since Exxon is a proud American country, no need for people that speak other languages – they’re probably all lefty pinkos anyway. No need for those cultural people for that matter – we’re just gonna invade ’em, so what’s the point in learning about them? Lefty tripe is what it is!
Go tell Exxon – you have a great future there. Oh, and write when you get work!
When the geologists are gone we can go back to superstition and virgin sacrifice to keep bridges, highways and dams from failing. Same for flood, earthquake and volcanic eruption preparedness. I can already hear the whining when landfills are built in poorly suited geological environments and drinking water wells are poisoned and babies are dying.
Go ahead and build the hospital on the cut-bank side of the river bend, the lard will keep it safe. Of course Florida has no problems such as neighborhoods disappearing down sinkholes, beach fronts disappearing, or saltwater incursion into freshwater reserves…oh wait, sure they do.
How can an ignorant and uninformed populace make intelligent decisions about these issues? Oh wait, ignorant fools are easier to manipulate by those looking to profit.
If only there was some kind of down-home, heartland parable to cover this kind of stupidity.
Another part of the problem is…you. Why do you keep electing cretins to your legislatures who despise the “intellectual elite”, who think being smart is a sin, who are so short-sighted that they care nothing for investing in strengthening the country in ways that take ten or more years to pay off? Stop it!
No question: rhetoric like that will definitely sway the electorate! ;-)
*****************
In the 1950s support for higher education was bipartisan. That changed during the 1960s. I don’t see how to restore the status ante given that universities are perceived as aligned with the left and given the power which religious extremists have seized in the right.
ZK, it’s really too bad that you didn’t learn how to think while you were in university.
I have a parent working for the University of Florida, and yes. The situation there is incredibly ugly. Florida does not have a state income tax – all public expenditure is funded through a sales tax – so the moment that consumer spending takes the slightest dip, the state budget goes into free-fall. It is a really, really bad plan. It is also a plan that is very popular with libertarian types in almost every state of the union, so: observe how it screws over just about everybody, please.
Bravo, Kate! I imagine that if I didn’t already think supporting education in the arts was important, that alone would convince me.
Regarding the scrapping of a geology department, this is sadly not an unusual occurance. The geology department at Washington University in St. Louis was dissolved sometime in the 60’s, IIRC. Several years later, the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences was created there. The new department has a somewhat different focus, but is able to bring in much more grant money due to its focus on planetary science (NASA funding) and geophysics. The geology department at George Washington U in DC was also recently disbanded. From what I can tell, the reason geology departments are so often cut is that they don’t bring in a lot of research money (especially when compared to Biology, Chemistry, etc.), and they often don’t have many undergraduate majors, so the department is not seen as a source of tuition money, either. At the same time, they tend to require a fair amount of space for teaching collections (and usually some research collections as well). Lots of lab space for both teaching and research, and some expensive teaching equiment, like petrographic microscopes. So administrations have a tendancy to see geology departments as budgetary black holes. That, of course, does not mean geology isn’t worth teaching: I happen to think some form of Earth Science course should be a requirement at both the high school and college level. But that’s not how administrations see things, and the cutting of a geology department is no surprise. That being said, it is still worth fighting for, and mourning over should the proposed cuts occur.
The United States is a conservative, religious, country. Religious fanatics and conservatives hate education.
You do the math.
What’s evident is that you failed to learn how logic works.
purpleshoes @ #101:
You know, I never made the connection between our lack of state income tax and the education system’s troubles. Thanks for pointing that out. It’s Texas that also has no state income tax too, yes?
It must always be remembered that UF Pres. Bernie Machen is a Bush appointee, and we all know the criteria by which those are chosen. As a Jeb! pick, he’s not obligated to be as criminally incompetent as a Shrub henchperson, but he still pursues his job with the trademark Bushevik kiss-up/kick-down mentality that works its consistent magic on staff morale throughout his domain.
The only prospect of relief comes from the Fla state legislature, the product of such thorough gerrymandering that there is absolutely zero prospect of the Spend and Steal party’s majority in both chambers being even slightly threatened. IOW: there is no prospect of relief. (FTR: it was the Democrats who abolished the independent commission which had maintained a slight degree of honesty in the redistricting process.)
Back to Bernie M: in his first years at UF, his administration allowed the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences to sink into a 7-figure budget hole, providing neither assistance nor supervision to a Dean unprepared for that level of administrative responsibility. This (the deficit, not the top-level negligence) was a major scandal at the time: some even made rude comments about priorities when an alumni benefit dinner netted a sum equal to the needed funds – for the athletic department.
As for the athletics/academics struggle: please be aware that sports, football in particular, present a hidden drain on numerous other areas never reflected in Ath. Dept budgets. Most obvious would be the demands placed on campus law enforcement, but housing & maintenance take a big hit on behalf of the jocks every year (most dramatically during the xtreme partying which is part of the recruiting process). Few areas, from the student clinic to parking, escape from providing subsidies to The Team™.
What’s that old saying about those who don’t know history?
On the other hand, since they got rid of robin hood school funding in Texas, I’ve stopped voting for millage increases
in our relatively rich school district. If the parents here hate helping poorer districts so much, they can pay for their own damn kids schooling!
Yeah, but the politicians, bankers, corporations, Hollywood entertainers and professional athletes just happen to be so much more valuable to our society that science educators so what the heck did you expect?! I mean get real who the heck needs geologists? Probably the only place they might be useful is with an oil company… oh wait!
I’m also going to have to look into donating to a school in the Rio Grande Valley. Maybe the one my cousins went to or maybe even their children are attending now
Well, sure. The physicists and engineers have death rays.
Terry #105
Right Texas is sales and property tax, no income tax. And for some reason, property tax revenue seems to have gone down about the same time as the sales tax.
Fortunately for me I’m done with my degree in a year or so, and then I have the option of looking at countries and states where Ph.D.s are in demand – India and Germany both appeal, though I’d rather be in New Zealand. Canada’s current PM moved them way down the list.
I can attest to the economic crunch from personal experience. When I was finishing my Master’s and preparing to start work on my PhD I ran into the “budget crisis” brick wall of reality. I could continue my degree with the opportunity to work as a non-tenure track lecturer because they were replacing retiring professors with lecturers in history departments across the country. $27,500 a year with no idea whether or not you’d have a job from year to year … “oh joy.” One of my mentors shared with me his experience during another “down cycle” in the economy, over 200 applicants for the one tenure track position for which he was the candidate selected.
PZ, PLEASE don’t limit your outcry to budget cuts at the university level. K-12 education has been facing the same economic pressures that the universities have and are reaching the same breaking point all over the country.
For example, the state in which I reside has just added another year of math and an economics graduation requirement (social studies). Any logical person would expect that such additional requirements would lead to an expansion of faculty. That isn’t the case, instead we were notified, before the bail out, that we would be expected to implement a 20% cut to our budget to cover the state’s budget shortfall. We’ve been so woefully underfunded (statewide) that there is literally nothing left to cut but teachers in most districts across the state (we’re fortunate in that we’re just not hiring new teachers). This is in a state that is already sitting at just 60% of the national per student funding average and they’re talking about a 20% cut.
This is also a state where the board of education recognized that four districts are in “critical need” of new high schools (other districts didn’t meet the “critical need” threshold), but unfortunately there isn’t any funding to build them. Ours happens to be one of those districts, my school is sitting at 120% capacity for next year, 125% the year after, and likely in the neighborhood of 130-135% before there is any chance of opening a new school. That means we’re looking at teachers possibly teaching 7 or 8 classes instead of the normal 5. Possibly AM and PM sessions (7 to noon, noon to 5). Critically there has also been the elimination of elective courses, the fear that we may (like many schools across the country) have to cut back in music and fine arts.
Now before anyone gets the mistaken idea that I’m talking about a low achieving, underfunded school in failing district, I’m not. I’m talking about an award winning, excelling school in an award winning district that has passed every bond override (IE tax increase) in order to provide more funding for the schools. Remember, the more we get squeezed, the fewer students you will have prepared to even try to attend the universities.
The ability to make connections between different fields is a very marketable skill. It’s a fact that many jobs simply require a bachelor’s degree of some kind.
Having studied humanities is no guarantee of that ability, but it’s a start. And its economic value? Suppose you run a company, and your advertising company shows you an ad campaign that’s total crap. Hope you can recognize it as such before checks get written. As Paul Graham says; “You have to have good taste to hire a good designer.”
Thank you PZ!
I don’t know. Is it on YouTube somewhere?
For those interested in Yoghurt Knitting degrees, one of the universities hereabouts offers a far more worthier alternative:
http://www.kingston.ac.uk/breastimaging/
Tee hee :-)
No idea why they’re axing science departments. Get rid of English Literature, Fine Arts, and all that other nonsense. It’s not like any knowledge is actually being produced in those fields. They probably even hinder knowledge, with their postmodernism, cultural relativism, “post-structuralism”, “deconstructionism”, and generally perverse obscurantism.
Florida also has the unfortunate problem that we have a rather large population of seniors, being a favorite retirement destination. And a lot of those seniors feel they’ve already paid their dues – so they don’t feel like they should be forced to pay taxes for the young’uns (to exaggerate).
Combine that with what I said waayy at the top and you might start realizing that a rather significant portion of the voters don’t support anything that doesn’t directly affect them in a ‘positive’ manner. Or, “I don’t want to pay for someone else’s kids’ education – it’s not my problem”.
—-
On another note, y’all seem to be a bit misguided about the purpose of ‘liberal arts’ in it’s modern day USian incarnation. Critical thinking? Logic?
Not really, unless, perhaps, you choose one of the disciplines that focuses on one of those parts. The ‘liberal arts’ element* is largely, these days, just a smattering of what it could/should be. It’s a means of major-shopping for the undecided; a method to make sure students can passably read, write, and do arithmetic (not well, just passably); A way to help fund the underfunded departments; and a general feel-good, ‘we do this because we should not because we care’, way to get more money out of the students and a better standing otherwise.
Most liberal arts classes are a joke, despite however competent the teacher or the department might be, because they’re watered down versions of the subject designed to cram some sort of knowledge or familiarity of the subject into the brains of students who don’t care, many of whom will forget most of what they learned – or remember it quite incorrectly – not too long after.
There are exceptions, but the problem is that they ARE exceptions.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of liberal arts education. I wish the trivium, the quadrivium, and a few other subjects were requirements, and were taught properly – but they’re not. Most classes at the general education level are attend-to-pass, and require little more than the ability to memorize a rather small amount of material. Even within majors, critical thinking and logic can be given a pass, depending on rote memorization and the ability to regurgitate the connections and processes in the textbook instead.
How many of you, who’ve been in college in the past 10 years or so, have had logic as a required class? Or rhetoric/debate? (essay classes like English I don’t count) How many of you felt like the classes was barely as challenging as a high school class, apparently designed with the sole purpose of weeding out the undedicated?
‘Liberal arts’, in the US, is becoming a rather meaningless label. Perhaps if it actually meant something (in practice) we wouldn’t have such a problem with creationism, the denialisms, and other examples of piss-poor thought processes in otherwise educated adults.
*note that I’m talking about the components tacked on as requirements to get any sort of degree at a university, not the liberal arts subjects themselves.
If that is all it took to get banned here, this blog would be a dead site. If Barb and siMon were able to come up with a post that was a tenth as insightful, they never would have been tossed out.
I no more want literature, theater and arts to be scrimped on then I do sciences. Those are all needed to maintain a high quality of life.
Besides, it is wrong to condemn entire fields just because some people in those field have bad ideas.
I think everyone has covered it already, but the answer to the question on liberal arts and the humanities is a simple one. It is not only good for humanity, for the growing base of knowledge, for information and history that prevents us from repeating oft-repeated mistakes, but it drives that most important of aspects: innovation.
A technical knowledge base is crucial for our society, yes, but without innovation, the ability to think critically and question basic assumptions, and to creatively brainstorm new pathways and projects, all that knowledge can only be used to continue to manufacture past ideas and the industry rots and stagnates.
If America wants to lead the world in the form of technical innovation, then the humanities are required. I mean how many popular scientific breakthroughs were theorized by writers, inspired by artwork? How much of “marketing” is just attempts at applying psychology and sociology? How much of the current educational collapse is due to profound failings in our political science and history education? How would you like to live in a world without music or musical innovation? Would you enjoy a lifetime of nothing but Lawrence Welk?
And for the favorite bugaboos of women studies, urban planning, queer studies, and ethnic studies. Well, like it or not, the history of these groups has been historically suppressed and expanding our knowledge base is important. Not everyone has a european male history line and ignoring the realities of these groups increases violence and discrimination against them as well as the devaluing of any educational support they provide because of their lack of support for the racist, sexist, homophobic culture at large.
They also turn out to be important for all the reasons that knowing reality is important. There have been a huge number of medical studies that have been greatly aided by looking into the breakdown of afflictions by ethnic group or sex. A number of biological mysteries were solved by expanding the base of examination. That inclusion hadn’t started until the aforementioned departments were recognized.
These same departments also put together a large amount of sociological work on the AIDS epidemic which has allowed us to start seriously treating the issue before it became a world-wide epidemic.
Rant aside, I’m forwarding it to my elected officials, but it’s an old tale. I’m currently in Denmark for my master’s and I’m having to tell all the bright-eyed bachelor’s students what the situation in America really is.
We’re holding onto a single thread here our illusion as world’s best country for education. If we continue to devalue it, we lose that edge and once we lose that edge, the game changes. If Europe becomes the place for education or China, Korea, and Japan, we lose our ability to become the central education and cultural center as well.
That is bad for American businesses. Of course, that’s a long-term issue and if we’ve learned nothing else from the financial crisis, it’s that American business have completely forgotten how to work in their long-term interests.
This is of course leaving aside the more important aspect that well-funded and listened to universities increase our general pool of knowledge and prevent people from voting for the candidate that they’d most want to have a beer with or against education funding (because they’re just ivory-tower liberal traitors). It keeps us from being a back-water third-world nation with a thirst for Jeebus and nuclear weapons.
Sorry for the long rant, but it always bothers me when people who should know better jump on the very hobby-horse that got us to the point where we’re defunding science. Especially as I know what happens when science students have no liberal arts education. They become very good, talented technicians with absolutely no ability to think for themselves or deal with a situation that wasn’t in their quickly out-dated classes.
No idea why they’re axing science departments. Get rid of English Literature, Fine Arts, and all that other nonsense.
Hey, dipshit. You like the Jon Stewart show, maybe? Ever watch tv and movies? Ever listened to music? Ever been to an opera, a stage play, or a concert?
Everything that makes those events enjoyable is something that you learn in an English literature degree, and why. And actually, to the second part of your complaint, yes, an English degree does allow you to create new knowledge. But you’re an ignorant dipshit, so you don’t recognise the value of an analytical toolset (like, say, poststructuralism or Marxism) for getting at the important parts of fields that don’t have necessarily quantifiable answers. It sort of works like this — look at a problem through the lens of three or four or ten of these different analytical frameworks, and what doesn’t change too much is probably as close to the facts or the truth as you’re going to find. Which sounds suspiciously experimental to me, but what the fuck do I know? I’m only a moron with a liberal arts degree or two.
Getting a degree in English literature makes me a better historian than I’d be if I’d taken history. If you think the study of history is useless, well, there’s no goddam help for you, and you probably ought to spare yourself the difficulty of dealing with an ahistorical view of life, and go play in traffic now. Our gracious host, for what it’s worth, thinks history is a science. (He said so at his lecture at the University of Guelph.) Thus demonstrating that unlike you, he gets it.
As a shorter, let me re-emphasize.
The reason we’re now at the point where we’re axing science educations is because a couple of decades ago, we decided that humanities education was somehow useless and thus deserving of cuts. That’s how we started defunding education and that’s at the heart of most of the anti-education cuts.
Ironically, it was the Women Studies departments that predicted this turn of events when they noted that the public had started designating science as masculine and humanities as feminine. As with all women’s work, they postulated, humanities would be devalued to the eventual detriment to both sets of disciplines.
Here again, we learn the value of the humanities. They predicted the education crisis.
Do the Amish use artificial fertilizer?
Yes, science theory should be taught more than it is. In fact, it should be taught to absolutely everyone with a measurable IQ — that means, in highschool. But there aren’t even enough university-level courses in it at present.
The rest of philosophy is mostly of historical interest… but history is itself a subject worth of study, lest we repeat it.
This, on the other hand, I don’t hesitate to call bullshit. What really makes life interesting are things like Tianyulong!
Don’t get me wrong. I think human society should be studied at universities (and indeed it is), because if we don’t understand our society, we can neither improve it nor even necessarily hold it at the level it has achieved. It’s just that blithely generalizing your own preferences on everyone is silly.
BTW, do you know what kind of art I myself like best? Paleoart. Like this and this and this and the paintings in this one and this and this (on which the link to the artist’s own page doesn’t seem to work).
Epic fail. Our neighbor is no more than a nanomachine — and that’s what makes them so interesting!
…what?
Perfection? We’re scientists, not Platonists or technocrats. Is that what you mean?
O RLY? Are Masters of Bullshit Administration automatically “intellectuals” now?
Besides… ScienceBlogs doesn’t have anything as childish as a language filter. You can spell “fuck” out.
Nope, that’s not what can get you banned. Here is the list of High Crimes and Misdemeanors, and “being angry” is not on it.
I love how people in this thread are proposing other “unnecessary” courses of learning to be eliminated from the offerings at universities. Really who are you to say what is and isn’t needed?
Also, if you get to eliminate something “stupid” like Women’s Studies, or Urban Studies, how can you argue that creationists don’t get to eliminate something “stupid” like Paleontology or Anthropology? To them they are equally meaningless and unnecessary areas of study.
Another real world example. My SO is currently single-handedly saving her company, because her bosses all have science-discipline PhDs but never valued the humanities, thus they never think about or presume the habits or purchase psychology of their customers. As such, they started making really bad corporate decisions based on a loose understanding of how big companies in other fields did things.
My SO not only managed to correct those flaws and make the changes necessary to grow the customer base, but did so while completing her actual job of fixing the woeful state of the writing on all of their market copy which was too confusing and haphazard to communicate basic information to the customers. My SO has a degree in philosophy and english literature with a minor in sociology. She’s only doing the job to save up for a poetry degree.
And she saved a small business single-handedly with her worthless base of knowledge from people with “real degrees”.
I’m a biologist through and through, but the anti-humanities crap is sexist and tired. It’s like devaluing child-raising and house-cleaning.
but isn’t mammography just the kind of technical program you were promoting over a well-rounded education in your fact-free “yoghurt knitting” rant above?
or are you just objectively pro-breast cancer?
I’m at least grateful to ZK for providing anecdotal evidence against American exceptionalism, particularly when it comes to anti-intellectualism.
congrats on getting to that point, MAJeff, and break a leg! it is so worth it, once it’s done!
Whatever. It’s not like they fucking listen to us anyway. Remember all of the pathetic “who could have possibly foreseen the levees failing” bullshit pissing and moaning after Katrina? Uh, the geologists did, fuckwads. And not to say I told you so, but we fucking told you for years it was gonna happen.
Thank you for writing this, sir. I’m a current college student, and what you’re written is very much appreciated. It’s disturbing that there are people who don’t realize that if we want our population to be educated, we have to actually put some resoures into education. It won’t be fixed magically!
Whenever I heard politicians talking about the importance of education, I always suspect that they are just saying this to get elected. Too many times, education gets its funding cut.
By the way, I read some previous comments discussing which subjects are not necessary or which ones should be thrown out. I’m a pharmacy major, but I absolutly love the humanities as well, including history and English. In fact, I wanted to do a double major or a minor in English. Unfortunately, due to how full the curriculum is, my college doesn’t let pharmacy majors have a second major or even a minor.
I think each class shoule be judged based on it’s merit.
Additionally, I think it’s important for each person to remember that just because he/she does not major in a subject does not mean that it’s useless.
(One last thing: This is my first time commenting here. I absolutley love the blog, sir!)
– Sharmin
Not even remotely close. Most of the brain dead crooks and idiots on Wall Street aren’t intellectuals. They are the children of the old establishment who went to Ivy League schools, with no flunk out policies for the rich kids, took easy courses, and got C’s. The last Moron in Chief is a good example, a Yale graduate who can’t put a coherent thought together in a sentence.
If you had gone to college, it would take you 30 seconds to figure that out. And BTW, working class is a choice not a hereditary condition. I knew a kid that lived down a gravel road in open range (cattle) country. Last I heard, he had managed to go to school and eventually won a Nobel prize.
thalarctos @126
I was taking the piss, for a bit of levity after people took up the masturbation meaning of Yoghurt Knitting. Of course the referenced course is a proper and decent one, which is why I called it “worthier”. Obviously I wasn’t clear enough in my intentions.
Also to complete the rants, for an example of what happens when you have students hostile to liberal education, I present ZK up thread. Unable to piece together basic logic for all his “education”. As further proof, I give you libertarians. If they didn’t believe that their ability to memorize basic facts in their major of choice was proof of their captain of industry status in a “marketable field” (if I was dictator, this phrase would activate the death penalty), they wouldn’t be destroying our basic infrastructure.
These are the results when you undermine “non-marketable” education. You get broken education and really really dumb “educated” people.
Hee hee! Can’t defend your academic subject and have to resort to namecalling? Yes, I like all of that except Jon Stewart, and I still don’t see how any of it requires three years of frivolity. Sorry.
Rubbish. Armies of movie directors and writers didn’t do degrees in English lit. You’re talking nonsense.
Oh, OK. I’m an ignorant dipshit for not seeing how poststructuralism and Marxism have proven themselves anything other than intellectually lightweight, mental masturbation.
And to build on Josh’s “who coulda forseen” point at #129, remember, wasn’t it Sec. Rice who moaned, “Who coulda forseen terrarists flying commercial airliners into buildings?”
Uh, a little fiction author named Tom Clancy??
———–
All this has happened before, and it will happen again. The only way to break such cycles is with broad, well-rounded educations.
Maybe a little education in rhetoric, humor, and expressive writing would have helped you.
This is all twaddle. Approximately 40 schools in the US have athletic programs that are net contributors to the school.
Just about forty.
Out of thousands which are bled by those forty-or-so parasites.
From 2005 USA Today:
Further, the whole recruitment thing is a joke. When the Ivy League de-emphasised sports, you didn’t suddenly see them becoming incapable of attracting students. Berkeley and Stanford generally suck as athletic programs (like Vanderbilt), they’re not lacking for applicants. Same with Notre Dame that’s been a crappy athletic program for quite some time — still full.
And, but for the massive-wishful-thinking-over-emphasis on the benefits a “great athletic program” is held to be on collegiate recruitment process, there’s not any really good evidence to prove a great athletic program does anything for a recruiting save for athletes. I’m sorry, but great students want a great education — they’re going Ivy League, Cal Tech, MIT, Stanford, Vanderbilt, Berkeley, etc. and not Alabama, Tennessee, or Florida because they’ve got SEC football…
It’s just complete non-sense. Very few athletic programs generate more than they spend. And the old-wives tale of “recruitment” is crap.
(I just wrote a comment with lots of links to arts websites that got held up for moderation. Well, “just”… it should end up somewhere around position 125.)
It a worldwide trend. It’s happening everywere. Democracy is a form of government that ensures that people are governed no better than they deserve.
I think we need another Sputnik. Maybe in renewable energy, I’m sure the Chinese are all ears, if you’ve got a promising project. If not weapons of mass destruction are always a good field to rock the boat with.
It’s a false connection based on wishful thinking. My alma mater brings in more students each year and its athletics program is a joke. Plus, with all the CA budget cuts since the 1980’s, the once Top-10 accounting program, which is what attracted me (not the fourth-rate WAC football team) sucks too.
So, except for the Teacher Education department, it’s pretty much a third-rate college now. And still turns away applicants by the 1000’s. Just like many of the other Universities in the CSU system, many of which don’t even have Division I programs, third-rate as it may be…
Sure, maybe a few mouth-breathers go for the football. But most everyone else goes for the education.
Oh, OK. I’m an ignorant dipshit for not seeing how poststructuralism and Marxism have proven themselves anything other than intellectually lightweight, mental masturbation.
You mean like Libertarianism?
Erasmus, are you serious? Wow–you and I see the world very differently. I’m not sure I can think of any education, in any subject, as not being beneficial overall. But then I see ignorance as the universal enemy.
This is exactly why good Earth science courses are necessary starting in secondary school. Everyone needs to understand how the planet they live on works–at least well enough that they’ll actually listen when a geologist tells them their city is going to flood, eventually. (I think it’s that ‘eventually’ part that makes people so complacent.)
Btw, Josh, you shouldn’t feel the need to hold back so much: tell us how you really feel. /sarcasm
Erasmus-
English lit specific “marketable” benefits.
Innovation, ability to construct better written press-releases, news bulletins, and market copy (unless you believe a company can communicate solely through grunts or entirely pictorial copy (another humanities discipline)).
Writers. Those who didn’t get the degree themselves are influenced by those who do. Those who innovate a genre often have done so by learning from the english literature disciplines. In comics, the most pressing example would be Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and Grant Morrisson. They’re changes heralded a brand-new era which has been responsible for the revitalized superhero movies. The rest can be seen in the best of television. Battlestar Gallactica, Firefly, Buffy, even shows like Family Guy have very obvious examples of influence from rather specifically esoteric literature analysis protocols including the ones you specifically maligned.
English lit allows continued exploration and valuing of our written cultural history, including keeping tabs on the origin of our idioms and biases. Want to know how aspects of magical thinking have almost become secularized in their ubiquity in the western world, you’ll have to turn to english lit.
On marxism in specific, I have a huge example for you. Marxism looks to the situation and reality for those on the lowest rungs of the ladder for a look at the economic and social health of a nation, including predicting whether or not an on-paper boom can be sustained by real growth of bottom-level wages.
In short, the first economists to predict the exact current financial situation were those who used marxist analytical tools. If we hadn’t dismissed those voices as “ivory-towered” elitists, we wouldn’t be stuck bailing out AIG and could have regulated the runaway markets before global collapse.
In short, you’re a deliberate idiot. And we’ve more than explained why.
thalarctos @136
“Maybe a little education in rhetoric, humor, and expressive writing would have helped you.
Touché
On the other hand, you could always learn to read and correctly interpret smileys.
This is exactly why good Earth science courses are necessary starting in secondary school.
Sorry cactusren, as I alluded to above, secondary school funding and programs are being gutted just like universities are.
*sigh*
people like ZK are what Pink Floyd was talking about in “Another Brick in the Wall”.
All the world needs is well-trained employees, right? There’s absolutely no need for a well-educated, well rounded citizenry. democracy can survive and flourish completely without people with an universal(!) education. And who needs design anyway. we can all just wear potato-sacs and live in concrete boxes. And arts? oh please. a good worker should be spending their free time thinking how to do better for their company, not going to the theater/opera/cinema, or enjoying walks in the park. pffft. so what need to we have for those things, and educations that allow people to do these things?
And a sorry to ZK for not picking up on his attempt at satire.
Call me another victim of Poe’s Law.
A disingenuous argument. Nobody would pay people to teach a course on Super Mario Brothers 3. That has no place in universities. Neither does theology or “Creation Science”. We can all agree on that. I just go a little further and think all obscurantist subjects should get the boot.
Yeah, pretty much. But why you would ask me that, I have no idea.
Yeah–sorry. That one sticks in my gullet a little bit.
@88 sav
“The real issue here, at least the one that I think PZ Myers is pointing out, is that our educational system sucks ass, and it sucks because we haven’t put enough resources into it.”
THIS.
@90 Cat of Many Faces
Nicely put. I was going to call him an asshat, but yours is better.
@102 cactusren
Thanks! And, who needs that damn “volcano monitoring,” right? Just ask Jindal.
You mean like Libertarianism?
Yeah, pretty much. But why you would ask me that, I have no idea.
Because a sizable chunk of your argument sounds very much like one a libertarian would make. You don’t see the value in something so it should be eliminated. Because you “don’t get it” it has no value.
Side note, have you actually read Marx?
Erasmus: Oh, OK. I’m an ignorant dipshit for not seeing how poststructuralism and Marxism have proven themselves anything other than intellectually lightweight, mental masturbation
Hmmm. You say that like it’s a bad thing …
Pdiff
Erasmus:
Which subjects do you consider to be obscurantist?
dogmeatrib @146: I know, I know. I guess implicit in my statement is the idea that secondary education needs to be well-funded. But regardless of the funding issues, the curricula of many school districts don’t include any form of earth science, only biology, chemistry, and physics. Maybe the reason for that is budget considerations in the first place…so this becomes something of a circular argument. Anyway, I’m in agreement with you that secondary (and primary) schools need better funding. I just hope that leads to them adopting a broader range of courses.
Oh, right. So those of us that haven’t studied English literature are crayon-eating, hopeless Neanderthals, that can only communicate through grunts.
In fact, I’m not even convinced that English lit majors can write better on average than science majors. I’m not just going to take your claims on faith; I’ll require some data, sorry. But maybe like most Eng lit majors you get all nervous and start sweating whenever graphs and figures come on the scene.
One of the problems is that universities (including my own) always find ways to hire more administrators regardless of the outlook–VP of assessment, brand identity, international exchange, etc. These are usually at 2x the salary of a starting faculty member. And just like the execs at AIG that got bonuses, these people are defined as *essential* to the mission of the university, they *have* to be paid big salaries to retain their “talent.”
oh, and someone upthread mentioned that German universities don’t charge tuition. This is incorrect in all states except Hessen, where it was declared unconstitutional to charge tuition (of course this means that students from all over Germany are flocking to Hessen uni’s, and being admitted is nearly impossible). The German education system is in a bit of a crisis now, both on the university and on the seconday education level.
Erasmus, you state…
I’m not even convinced that English lit majors can write better on average than science majors.
But then follow that up with…
But maybe like most Eng lit majors you get all nervous and start sweating whenever graphs and figures come on the scene.
A touch of hypocrisy on a Sunday afternoon… so nice.
Erasmus-
Actually no. Game designers and artists could look at Super Mario Brothers and dissect the style choices and level design that made it a fun game. Cultural historians can look at how it influenced the development of children in the early 90s. Sociologists can use it as part of a larger dialogue about the role of video games in our society. Gender studies can use the problematic nature of Princess Peach as part of a dialogue about the myths of chivalry and how they dehumanize both sexes. English literature can use it to point to its resonance in the history of european fetishization that includes the influence of medieval Christian views on class and gender. Psychologists can use it as part of a dialogue on why video games produce the satisfaction that they do and as part of an examination of how the brain develops the muscle memory grown in video game playing. On the science front, there’s a look at the electronic development of the Nintendo as an application of what they’re learning as well as a look on confirmation bias in determining shapes and structures, even unfamiliar ones that can be used to look at for instance, why people first started believing in gods.
Those searching for “marketable” skills can look at it as a successful example of a product and how it’s packaging, art direction, and marketing lead it to be a well-remembered famous product. Those looking for only marketable skills will take that example and learn from it how to market the products of the companies they end up working for, aiding glorious capitalism and the GDP of our economy.
On basic knowledge, it can make people think about something they take for granted or assume arrived auto-magically, thus prompting the students not to take for granted the world they arrived in and thus value things like infrastructure that make it possible for them to view something like a household game machine with the ability to play thousands of interactive stories and puzzle simulations as just another cool thing that certainly wasn’t the product of years of independent development in a thousand different disciplines nor a prime example of a marriage between scientific applicability and the humanities.
And theology degree holders have thus far been the most damning critics of most “Christian” movements pointing out not only the historical impossibility of any of their claims to magical proof, but also pointing out how they’re wrong according to their own damn scriptures. If anything, we need to popularize the works of theology, because they’re the source of most of the best rebuts to Christian claims.
Sorry, I’m not a libertarian, and I’ve long been of the opinion that libertarianism is essentially bullshit. You shouldn’t jump to silly conclusions.
But cactusren is correct in that earth science education beginning in U.S. secondary schools would help the world in many ways.
How is it a disingenuous argument? Where did I even suggest that I was talking only about structured training within the scope of higher education? You’re putting words in my mouth. And to suggest that there is absolutely no possibility of someone getting something out of studying Super Mario Brothers 3 is kind of foolish. Which aspect of Super Mario Brothers 3? Is there absolutely no possibility of someone learning something about strategy? I’m not at all sure what the benefit would be, but the world is bigger than my imagination. And yours. That’s kind of the point. Even if, while reading the manual for the game, a person was exposed to a single word that they didn’t previously know, they’ve gained something. And guess what? That’s education. Or maybe you just see that as microeducation and don’t believe that microeducation happens? Perhaps you only believe in macroeducation?
In short, the first economists to predict the exact current financial situation were those who used marxist analytical tools. – Cerberus
I’m interested in what you say here – can you be more specific about who, when, and what analytical tools?
I do think the liberal arts have their place in universities, and I don’t object to their existence. What I object to is their scale.
I attend a university in England. The system here has students completing virtually all of their general education before they reach university; that way non-graduates get an adequate liberal arts education too. So your course (what we would call a “major” in the US) is almost all of what you study.
At my university, the most popular course is film studies.
Now, this is not film production. This is not acting or scriptwriting. This is watching and analyzing films.
Is there a place for that sort of subject at universities? Of course! The liberal arts are important. But my university is training more film critics than engineers, biologists, physicists, computer programmers, chemists, economists, writers, actors, doctors, nurses, lawyers, political scientists, accountants, theoretical mathematicians, applied mathematicians, historians, architects, photographers, journalists, anthropologists, graphic designers, psychologists, forensic scientists, sociologists, linguists, translators, schoolteachers…and anything else you can think of. Many of these jobs are in desperate need—the UK is very short on doctors and nurses, for example. But they aren’t studying those subjects; they’re studying film.
That’s kind of messed up.
Josh @150: No need to apologize–it pisses me off too. But somehow I just couldn’t respond to such an over-the-top rant without a little snarkiness.
On the subject of humanities:
I did belittle humanities a lot, and still do in some instances. For one thing, humanities are generally far easier subjects than “hard sciences”. The people I know who went from science to humanities had a very easy time. The reverse (going from humanities to science) is almost unheard of (I give private lessons to one such person, and she is having quite a hard time. I admire her courage.)
But I would never argue to remove them from a university. They do have a marketable use, perhaps not as self-evident as the technical abilities you get out of a science degree, but some, as bizarre as it may seem, are in demand. I know one (overly bright) guy with a PhD in philosophy who was offered a very attractive package to work for a software company (I’m too dumb to understand what he does, it something to do with AI) .
And even if they were not at all economically useful in any way, I’m ashamed of seeing fellow scientists and science-proponents think that way. I thought that science was the pursuit of knowledge, not just the pursuit of dollars and new hi tech gizmos.
Another point of regionalism – where I went to school, the geology professors spent most of their time trying to convince business majors of why it would be a bad idea to construct apartment complexes and resort developments on the sides of unstable slopes balanced on fault lines (seriously, our hills were more like piles of gravel. We regularly had apartment complexes condemned after their foundations slid apart and the buildings cracked). Considering that Florida is composed of large expensive developments on top of unstable limestone (sinkholes!) cutting geology entirely out of the curriculum seems like a hilarious, almost Darwin-award-ish choice. It is a shame that none of the people making these decisions are likely to live in the condos that take the actual fall for this.
Defending Wednesday. Motherfucker is done! – MAJeff, OM
Hey, hope it goes well!
As someone currently studying sociology and English Lit (double yoghurt knitting!), I feel a bit unnerved by the philistines grumbling about all that worthless twaddle like Women’s Studies and Media Studies. As has been pointed out above, humanities are a neccessary element in the education of well-rounded human beings. A lot of the stuff produced within the fields is wrongheaded, and it is susceptible to various intellectual fads, but one of the main reasons for that is the fact humans are very, very complicated and unpredictable creatures, and works of art are complicated things with many layers of meaning. I would readily agree that social science is sometimes to science what social drinking is to drinking, and that a lot more dialogue and interconnection with our colleagues – “transgressing the boundaries”, so to speak :) – in the “hard” sciences are neccessary for further progress.
However, calls for chopping off humanities and social science departments are a symptom of an ugly, anti-intellectual tendency, one far more pernicious than religious or ideological anti-intellectualism: the idea that only immediately commercially useful knowledge is valid while the rest is frivolous fluff. This is, to me, even more distasteful than the “damn pointy-headed commie liberal pinko ivory tower elitists!” variety of contempt for knowledge. I am reminded of that anecdote about Thatcher, where she asked some protesting student what her major was, and upon being told it’s history replied “My dear, that’s such a luxury.” It’s far more pernicious because this standard makes a significant portion of the hard sciences “fluff” and “not marketable”. After all, what’s the market value of a Higgs boson? Who’ll profit financially from the Large Hadron Collider? Who’ll make a buck off the study of beetle penises?
Before you trash us woolly-minded intellectual masturbators, remember that if you do go along with this philistine, narrow economism the angry Market God will give you the Invisible Finger far earlier than it will to us – those shiny spectrometers, beakers, supercomputers etc. cost far more money than a few copies of Weber or Foucault’s books for the college library.
But maybe like most Eng lit majors you get all nervous and start sweating whenever graphs and figures come on the scene.
I guess I’m an outlier, then.
I parlayed my liberal arts degree *gasp* double-major in English and Theater into a career in the cutting edge of live technical theater at some of the most prominent shows on the planet (not to name-Kwok or anything).
I dealt with pneumatics, hydraulics, electricity, electronics, computers, and, oh yeah, people from countries as disparate as Canada and Taiwan.
On more than one production I became, because of my ability to communicate clearly and concisely, the point person between “the crew” and the electrical, mechanical, and computer engineers. I was able to figure out exactly what information they needed from us and in what format in order to fix operational problems so their shit would work properly. Two of the guys would confirm with me all information they got from the other crew members because I was the most accurate and detailed.
But hey, I’m just a stoopid English major with no marketable skills….
OK, this is becoming tiresome. I’m going to retire. What’s happening is that people fear I’m right, so they stoop to cheap tricks, erecting dummies, sniping at false targets.
I wasn’t implying there’s no possibility of getting something out of Super Mario Brothers 3. On the contrary, I actually believe, strongly, that video games can be educational — just as educational as fiction literature. What I said is that I don’t think we would consider making Super Mario Brothers 3 an academic subject in its own right. I don’t see why fiction literature should get special priority. Science gets priority because (a) it actually tells us truths about the world, and (b) it has direct applications — not potential spin-off benefits. “Spin-off” arguments can be used to justify bringing into academia any number of distinct, highly specialized subjects.
For those of you who might be wondering, this is a sinkhole.
Erasmus-
Well, here’s a good applicable experiment for a fellow SCIENCE major.
Go onto PubMed and read through a random selection of science papers and judge them on the criteria of accessibility of basic concepts, ability to clearly state their intended purpose and basic findings, and ability to summarize their basic message.
You’ll find as we all have that many of those written are quite simply bad. Now, also look around one of the bigger science labs, one that’s producing the best papers, often you’ll find that there’s one student who’s a double major or has some aspect of more humanities-laden education who’s purpose is essentially to read over the papers and correct the language in them to be more understandable as well as condensed.
Further example, look at the statistics of area of study for fields like “technical writer”. Hugely dominated by humanities majors.
Also, you’re greatly ignoring how you arrived at the writing skills you do have. Unless you’re somehow telling me you didn’t have english classes in middle school and high school as well as liberal arts classes in college where one of the main courses had a big requirement in them involving the writing of essays where even if you were describing bullshit, had to do so with a logical framework and a presentation of concepts and structures.
These classes may have seemed easy and bullshit, but their point was to teach you structure of communication that made it easier to shift into writing the science paper format without having to learn the basic constructions of logical buildup ideas, communicating nuance, and communicating core ideas without letting jargon overwhelm your intended point.
Now look at famous speeches and other forms of spoken word, a whole lot of english majors and those influenced by those who were english majors.
In personal experience, I can also confirm it as I took late minor classes in english lit to supplement my major and there were papers in both. I also TA’d both late in my Bachelor’s career. The science papers were often horribly constructed, seemingly juvenile at times. The english papers may have been equally stupid in some of their subjects, but the basic writing level was far superior (though like most TAs, I would wish many of them would better use some of it).
The point of all of it, isn’t the conflict. The point is that there is no conflict. The skills intertwine, each supporting the other. They are all important disciplines because they all decrease ignorance and more importantly make us think about reality, why it is how it is, why it acts like it acts, why humans are often complete fucking morons.
And more importantly, it is the devaluing of “stupid” education that allows our enemies to attack ALL education.
I guess the long and the short of it is that there is room for everybody. We’re all, all disciplines, needed. Some of us are lucky to be able to joyously cross over into multiple disciplines.
Sorry, I’m not a libertarian, and I’ve long been of the opinion that libertarianism is essentially bullshit. You shouldn’t jump to silly conclusions.
If you don’t like my “silly conclusions,” you might want to take a closer look at how you are presenting your argument. You’ve got the narcissistic intellectual masturbation of your average libertarian down pat. Again and again, despite the evidence to the contrary that has been presented, you maintain your blinders and insist that if you don’t see the value an academic program then it has no value.
English lit- what do you even know about English lit? Did you take any courses? Were you an English lit major? Do you know what the core principles of the discipline are?
You make comments that suggest you don’t feel the need to know anything about a subject in order to consider yourself an “expert” on that subject. You remind me very much of one of those arrogant morons who lives by the adage, “those who can’t, teach.” They don’t need to know anything about education to believe themselves superior to the actual educators; you don’t need to know anything about areas of academia that you consider “obscurantism.”
Erasmus @ 156: But maybe like most Eng lit majors you get all nervous and start sweating whenever graphs and figures come on the scene.
Erasmus @ 161 You shouldn’t jump to silly conclusions.
Uh, yeah, whatever bud!
Pdiff
Ed Lazowska, the chair of the department where I did my post-doc </kwok>, made a similar point a few years ago about the situation in the US.
But I think his sentence leading into that provides a crucial insight on the source of the problem:
Nor serious pursuit of the humanities, the kind that requires detailed analysis of source material, synthesis of ideas, and concentrated development and support of an argument.
In other words, yeah, it sucks, but I think it’s a symptom, not the disease. We don’t take education seriously enough at the lower levels; we neglect it until college, and the kids who can make up the deficits on their own do so at a great cost (as I did); the others take unchallenging majors, because they don’t have the tools to do anything more challenging, and it becomes insurmountable.
As a final point, may I present Erasmus himself. Here lies someone who devalues humanities, yet repeatedly ignores all presented evidence, the ties of the disciplines, and any disagreement to the validity of their hypotheses.
Such a personality’s use to the world of science is one resistant to new ideas, more likely to become fixated on wrong courses of action, unable to change as assumptions prove inaccurate and dismissive of ideas from others deemed less valuable than their own selves.
In other words, their presence is one hostile to the fundamental purpose of scientific progress.
That is what happens when humanities is devalued. The graduation of scientists who don’t understand the basic underpinnings and philosophies of their own subjects of study.
No, I don’t think people studying Sociology or Media Studies or History of Art or whatever are “ivory tower eltist intellectuals”. You flatter yourself. What I’m saying is that I think they’re pseudo-intellectuals. I don’t think they’re the intellectual elite, I think scientists are the intellectual elite, and humanists are generally poseurs who don’t possess much in the way of real knowledge or skills. I don’t think they’re working on real knowledge, I think they’re doing the equivalent spending their lives playing video games.
And no, I’m not going to write off postmodernism, cultural relativism, etc., as down to just a few oddball, outcast humanists. It has been absolutely dominant at some universities, and I think it is a cross the whole of the humanities must carry.
Very well, I’m now done for the evening. Flame me to your heart’s content.
Josh, I think your rant about how geologists were ignored when it came to events like Hurricane Katrina was perhaps a little mean-spirited. I mean, consider those who study a similar knowledge-based field of study – theology.
These poor dudes have been saying for millennia that the earth is about to end, without anyone taking any notice – and you’re complaining about a bit of local flooding!
Tish! I say, and Pshaw!
Where would be without our brave theologians?
Geologists – geologians? – go back to telling us where to find oil and gold. I think your sanctimonious warning are way past there “scare-by” date.
k i
If you’re bothered by people sniping at “false targets,” then perhaps you shouldn’t work so hard at setting them up.
I do however pay my taxes (though not in the USA) and have a vote, so you’ll forgive me for having an opinion on how my tax money is spent and who I vote for (in my country). – ZK
You’re entitled to have an opinion. And more intelligent and civilized people are entitled to tell you it’s crap.
Anthony @180: How do you always manage to do that when I have a mouthful of coffee?!
Seriously–it’s getting a little creepy*
*No, I don’t drink too much coffee. Shut up.
this thread is prime evidence that divide and conquer works. *facepalm*
can we go back to complaining at and to the people responsible for degrading ALL education?!
Well yeah, dogmeat, of course Erasmus is doing that. Ironically, the disciplines that would tie that attitude of theirs into the larger social context that fuels all intellectual hostility and leads to people like John McCain decrying direct scientific benefit are all in the humanities.
But I guess knowing that and forming larger theories to help correct such behaviors before the loss of the value of education would be worth it to prevent an obvious hook class designed to make bored college students think more about the world and their interaction in it from ever being treated with the level of respect given to say memorizing organic chemistry (a method unneeded since the arrival of the internet as a universally accessed cheat sheet (though of course the discipline itself is quite useful)).
The point of education is to make us all think and to look at the world outside ourselves and our biases and instead see the world and humanity for what it is and what it could be.
I did belittle humanities a lot, and still do in some instances. For one thing, humanities are generally far easier subjects than “hard sciences”.
Define “humanities” as you are using them in this sense. Would you include History? Anthropology? Political Science?
I guess the long and the short of it is that there is room for everybody. We’re all, all disciplines, needed. Some of us are lucky to be able to joyously cross over into multiple disciplines.
@177 thalarctos
“In other words, yeah, it sucks, but I think it’s a symptom, not the disease. We don’t take education seriously enough at the lower levels; we neglect it until college, and the kids who can make up the deficits on their own do so at a great cost (as I did); the others take unchallenging majors, because they don’t have the tools to do anything more challenging, and it becomes insurmountable.”
In the public district in Texas where I teach, the largest problem that we have is the value of education. With the shrinking middle class, our percentage of poor kids continues to grow. Their parents don’t value education and so neither do they. High drop-out rates, high teen-pregnancy rates (Texas is 3rd in the nation, yea), and these kids feel that they’ve got it made if they can get a job at a junk yard. One of my students had a plan. He would drop out of school, pay another kid to take his GED for him and then go to work at a scrap metal yard, eventually owning one himself. How he planned to manage a business without even a high school education I don’t know, and pointing out to him the inherent boneheadedness of his plan didn’t stop him from dropping out.
Those students that are middle class seem to feel they deserve an ‘A’ simply for showing up to class. Any student that misses an assignment due to absence appears surprised when I tell them that they are still responsible for the work. “But I was absent, Miss!”
These students have seen that education is not valued and don’t value it themselves, and I don’t know how to convey anything different to them than what’s portrayed to them everywhere else.
Jadehawk-
We are. Look at the examples they always point to. The anti-intellectual movement started with the resistance to feminism and anti-racism and the attempt to brand college campuses as the training of liberals in the culture war. In short, they feel confident to fight against science and all education, because they set the ground-work in demonizing the humanities and linking the humanities to ALL education.
Everyone IS on the same side, that’s the point people are making. We’re pointing out the divide and conquer strategy used.
Hmmm, well, if you would chose one of thosee artsy fartsy subjects…geology’s not set in stone, you know.
I understand that Cerberus… I’m just frustrated at the fact that thread which was meant as a call to action to stop the degradation of education has morphed into a “don’t cut us, cut them” thread. It’s pathetic that the humanities are forced to defend themselves, even though, yes, they sometimes spawn really odd subjects. But, as the IgNobel Awards prove, so does science sometimes.
though, I suppose I’m not allowed to have an opinion, since I’m even worse than a humanities major. I’m the kind of person who collected a B.A. worth of credits without ever graduating. Damn me and my useless, omnivorous appetite for knowledge :-p
Josh @#129- “Remember all of the pathetic “who could have possibly foreseen the levees failing” bullshit pissing and moaning after Katrina? Uh, the geologists did, fuckwads. And not to say I told you so, but we fucking told you for years it was gonna happen.”
I don’t remember where I saw it, but a couple of years before Katrina I saw a weather documentary on TV examining worst case scenarios and how we as a nation weren’t prepared. One of the scenarios presented was the shotgun blast of a category 5 hurricane aimed right at New Orleans.
And (surprise surprise) it detailed- exactly what came to pass.
So all that wailing and gnashing of teeth in the political aftermath was bullshit, and even an artist who manages to watch the occasional doco on telly could figure that out.
I don’t know, either, Kate. Either this country is going to collectively figure it out and get it together somehow to value education, or else it won’t, and we’re just a bunch of dinosaurs looking at that big flash in the sky…
Does anyone else think that Erasmus never took an English course beyond a Composition class or two?
Brent Royal-Gordon @164- “At my university, the most popular course is film studies.
Now, this is not film production. This is not acting or scriptwriting. This is watching and analyzing films.
Is there a place for that sort of subject at universities? Of course! The liberal arts are important. But my university is training more film critics than engineers, biologists, physicists, computer programmers, chemists, economists, writers, actors, doctors, nurses, lawyers, political scientists, accountants, theoretical mathematicians, applied mathematicians, historians, architects, photographers, journalists, anthropologists, graphic designers, psychologists, forensic scientists, sociologists, linguists, translators, schoolteachers…and anything else you can think of. Many of these jobs are in desperate need—the UK is very short on doctors and nurses, for example. But they aren’t studying those subjects; they’re studying film.
That’s kind of messed up.”
Um, not that I’m necessarily disagreeing with you, but have you ever thought that the purpose of analysis of cinema might have a purpose beyond churning out the next generation of Roger Eberts?
I mean, going by your logic, the only purpose of reading fiction is to be a literary critic.
Well yeah, dogmeat, of course Erasmus is doing that.
Funny how those of us defending the humanities get this point, eh?
OK, this is becoming tiresome. I’m going to retire. What’s happening is that people fear I’m right, so they stoop to cheap tricks, erecting dummies, sniping at false targets. – Erasmus
Shorter Erasmus:
People are arguing with me – that proves I’m right.
“So, Justin, did you just decide to string together a bunch of complaints from both ends of the political spectrum and hope that it would make sense?”
The ability to agree with sentiments expressed by both sides of the political spectrum must be dead, too bad nobody informed me of its passing.
In your mind, it appears the everything must be reduced to a one sided respone, and that no person is complex enough to have many feelings about one issue.
Stuff yourself, kthx.
Erasmus-
I was wrong. I’m very very sorry. You’re absolutely right about the humanities and as such I join the anti-intellectuals. After all, they pointed out the same thing about postmodernism and “meaningless classes” as well as the fact that the sciences must carry on the burden of the creation of nuclear weapons, Three Mile Island and how even today some nuclear physicists push for global use of nuclear technologies dismissive of the mass creation of waste and the strictly short-term gains. Surely, that’s enough to dismiss every single discipline I ignorantly label hard science. /snark
Erasmus, you are a bad scientist, because you do not argue from knowledge and are resistant to any and all forms of input or ideas. As such, you have no input on innovation or scientific development until the day you learn to grow up.
As a funny side-note, you are also *surprise* ignorant about postmodernism. It’s origins aren’t to deny truth and remove the objective. The purpose of the philosophy is to strip away all assumptions so as to better understand what is objective truth and what is the result of cultural biases. As such, its the most potent pure thought-experiment ever created for the questioning of assumed common truths such as I don’t know, religion and religious cultural baggage.
It is certainly an important exercise in curing the deeply ignorant and dangerous by forcing them to question basic assumptions. In fact, many of the follow-up and related philosophical exercises are the basis of most of the prime atheist responses to Christian cliches. Diffused through society and culture by the graduates of the filthy humanities.
So, heh.
Seriously, knowledge isn’t compartmentalized and just because the hard sciences have more raw facts doesn’t make the thought experiments of the “psuedo-disciplines” any less valuable. I have read the poetry of those who believed that that the humanities were an easy A to pad the transcripts of science majors. They really aren’t “dominating” these field easily. They just can’t flunk the whiny children without having to spend seven hours subjectively explaining why their laziness is just as obvious as a simple “you got it wrong” is on a hard science. Thus, grade inflation and the assumption of the uselessness of the humanities.
ROTFLMAO!
Basic research has only potential spin-off benefits, you little ignoramus. I mean, wow, just, wow!
Jadehawk-
Ah.
I blame capitalism.
Seriously, the structure of our valuing system has made everyone need to look out for number one in order to successfully survive in the “real world”, thus it becomes easier to look for someone weaker to use as a scape-goat than to work collectively towards a common good. Even when the common good should be a given like education is good.
you said “collectively”!! you filthy communist!!!!!1!
dogmeat-
It’s almost like there was some shared quality of the humanities that made one more able to evaluate the human animal’s odd, seeming irrational behavior. If only we could put our finger on it…
Surely, it couldn’t be that they’re the ones studying it under years of accumulated data in the form of human history, psychology, and personal stories and creation of culture and media…
Must be all the pot and postmodernism and pot postmodernism parties with yucky Women’s Studies Majors and their icky woman parts.
Erasmus:
Not being quite as fearful of you being correct, I would point out that one of the biggest issues for science folks actually entering the workplace is a woeful inability to write.
Your attitude towards non-science majors displays an excessively narrow view of knowledge and skills. One of the more humbling experiences for my Physics students was to have them try wheel pottery for a week while I taught color theory to the art students. My students gained hands on knowledge of rotational motion and forces and an appreciation for those with skills in a a different area.
I did? Oh no, I’m turning into one of them. Save yourselves hard science majors. Never again look into the dark soul of the humanities. Save yourselves and capitalism.
Paid for by AIG.
Steven Dunlap @ #69:
Agreed, but for every J.K.Rowling saying “Potterus Badlatinus!” there are a few thousand English majors saying “Would you like fries with that?”
I know :). Now I’ve gone and done it; I’ve summoned SfO and the hordes of unique snowflakes.
I wonder what Libertarian dinosaurs would have done–maybe just take it on faith that the comet wouldn’t affect them in their gated thunder-lizard communities…
You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.
Look up how they’ll be closing schools because they can’t afford to pay teachers anymore. Today The Slantinel went on about community colleges.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/orl-edpmyword22colleges032209mar22,0,3310354.story
http://alligator.org/articles/2009/03/03/opinion/letters_to_the_editor/090303_let1.txt
http://www.floridatoday.com/article/20090123/NEWS01/901230324/1006&referrer=NEWSFRONTCAROUSEL
http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:NDXokq5ALXwJ:blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_education_edblog/2009/02/teacher-layoffs-loom-as-big-fear-in-florida.html+florida+public+school+layoffs&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&lr=lang_en
Before and during World War II, there was serious debate in the U.S. about what caused the Great Depression and what was needed to prevent it from recurring. One thing that all sides of the argument agreed upon was that education was a positive benefit in preventing another Depression. At the end of the war the U.S. Congress overwhelmingly pass the GI Bill. A major part of the Bill was educational assistance for veterans. Essentially people of my father’s age could go to college with the government picking up tuition and fees and even paying a stipend for living expenses. Other federal laws helped non-veterans in a similar way.
As a result, large numbers of American men (and smaller numbers of women) got degrees. In the 1950s and 1960s the American educated middle class grew in both numbers and per capita wealth. Widespread education was seen as a major cause for this affluence. I have no doubt that in a couple of generations historians and economists will point to the ten years or so before and after 1960 as the peak of American prosperity.
For various reasons, during the late 1960s and afterwards, college education became both denigrated and taken for granted. The denigration was often by people who were college educated themselves. Education became “elitism” and the latent American anti-intellectualism became socially acceptable.
The present economic crisis is causing everyone, even the wealthy, to become more frugal. Part of this frugality is an outspoken objection to higher taxes, higher costs, higher tuition, more money coming out of pocket. As a result, colleges, both public and private, are feeling a financial pinch (just like the rest of us). It will get worse before it gets better.
Okay, basic economics lecture over. You may go back to sniping at each other.
Benjamin-
A persistent myth. A B.A. is a B.A. and those who go into the direct workforce often find themselves with similar opportunities as those with only a B.S. these days. My SO had a B.A. and assumed she wouldn’t find employment and yet has already single-handedly saved a small business. Other B.A.s from her class have gone on to Master’s or found similarly impressive lines of work to B.S. graduate friends of mine, though in much more fun-looking careers such as working at Disney or writing for a game studio.
The myth has been popularized because of three phenomenons.
One, the myth itself makes B.A. holders less likely to value their own achievement and thus limit their search for high level employment on the assumption that they won’t get it anyways. It’s part and parcel of being told constantly that they’re B.A. isn’t applicable to the “real world” like a science degree. They often integrate into the work world within a couple of years though.
Two, humanities majors are often default majors for those told by their parents to get a college education without any idea what they are actually interested in or what they want to do with their lives. As such, more people left after college with still no idea what to do with their lives but a sinking feeling that they need to choose an unchangeable career fast. As such, they work menial while they try and figure themselves out.
Three, humanities majors who know what they want to do will accept crappy paying jobs that allow them to indulge those skills like non-profit director or camp counselor or an otherwise low-impact job that allows them to indulge their real passion on the side or attempt to find employment in the decimated ranks of humanities teachers. As such, they work in less corporate jobs and thus less-valued or seen as fundamentally equivalent to burger-flipping.
Tis Himself-
Yup, pretty much.
That’s the sociological summation as well.
thalarctos-
Actually they blamed the appearance of the comet on high marginal tax rates and claimed that more tax cuts and continued cuts in the comet prevention programs would prevent the comet from getting closer.
There was a lady who worked pretty hard shutting down the philosophy departments of British universities many years ago. What was her name? Oh yeah, Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher. Back in the late 80s-early 90s, people were wondering whether or not it would be possible for a university to exist without a philosophy department. Academics were telling Maggie that a university without academic subjects like philosophy, mathematics and physics is barely a university at all. Bugger that, let’s dramatically increase the number of people with “business studies” degrees (hint: buy low, sell high, use your imagination), because that’s what industry wants.
Fast forward fifteen years, and we are having the same debate about whether or not it’s possible for a university to exist without a chemistry department.
This year, the government decided to cut £1m from my university’s main library (which covers humanities, social science, mathematics, computer science and psychology) – one of the main research libraries in London. It’s still under threat, and is either going to have to start cutting services and making people redundant. It’s an absolute joke. One of the top research libraries in the country can’t find funding to keep one of the best research libraries open – a library that’s used by students, researchers, journalists and private researchers, and is run out of the building most commonly associated with the Ministry of Truth from 1984 (the various TV versions of 1984 used it as a backdrop, and Orwell allegedly worked there and used it as inspiration).
What’s causing this? The economy, of course, and the RAE – Research Assessment Exercise. If a department gets a 4 rather than a 5/5*, it’s under threat. Even getting a 5 doesn’t necessarily keep a department alive – Chemistry at Sussex was threatened two years ago, despite getting a 5, and despite Sussex being one of the top science research universities in the country (and, of course, home to the late, great John Maynard Smith).
What they don’t seem to get is that if you close a proper academic department, that doesn’t come back. Get rid of physics or philosophy or geology or whatever, and that’s GONE. Not coming back. All those staff you spent so much time training and recruiting – gone. All the research they produce goes elsewhere. Undergraduate teaching shrinks – the English lit student can’t do a bit of chemistry on the side, or vice versa. The government steps in and optimises it – setting up institutions for science and other institutions for humanities. You lose proper rounded education. You lose the possibility of cross-disciplinary work. You lose intellectual diversity.
As for sports in the United States, my favourite anecdote is that of a chemistry professor at the University of Colorado who won the Nobel Prize. The university had a big ceremony to celebrate this. A reporter asked the professor what the university could give him as a reward for his hard work. He responded with words to the effect: “I would like to get paid as much as the football coach”. The response from the university president? “Well, now, let’s be serious…”. The sorry madness that is the American college sports system makes me very glad to be in the UK, where sports at university are a hobby, rather than university being something to be endured before the NFL/NBA/MLB.
Cerberus @ #211:
It would appear I misstated my case; I apologize. I have nothing against holders of B.A. degrees. The point I was trying to make is this: getting a degree in English or literature and expecting to automatically become the next J.K. Rowling is much like buying a starter guitar kit and expecting to be the next Tom Morello or Pete Townshend.
‘Yoghurt Knitting’
A large number of universities in the UK offer undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in woo.
While I was doing a master’s I rented a room in my house to a guy who was doing a masters at the same university. The modules were ‘crystal healing, iridology and reflexology, colours (??), Astronomy etc etc.
I studied creative writing. Many of the other students mocked me for being ‘too serious’, as I was turning out several thousand words a week. Their point was that the course pretty much had a 100% pass rate so why make all that effort?
The university had just moved to the ‘semester’ system, ie from teaching 30 weeks a year to teaching 24 weeks a year. There were two undergraduate english degrees also running, a total of about 60 students to 12 staff. We critiqued each other’s work, with some lecturers more involved but several limiting themselves to only marking our termly assignment. And each term was ‘run’ by two lecturers, so each person only marked 6 pieces of work per year!
I’m sure there are places that are better, but having talked to a number of arts students my experience is pretty common. They call it self-directed learning but apart from the certificate I was at a loss to see what I actually gained from the experience. I paid thousands of pounds to sit in a room for two hours a week discussing my writing with other students. A number of students didn’t even manage to bring any of their own writing to a large proportion of sessions (but still passed).
By contrast my science degree was lectures and practicals 9-5.30 for two years (3 term) then three years of 60-70hour weeks (with only 3 weeks holiday)
This is what gets arts courses a bad name.
It would appear I misstated my case; I apologize. I have nothing against holders of B.A. degrees. The point I was trying to make is this: getting a degree in English or literature and expecting to automatically become the next J.K. Rowling is much like buying a starter guitar kit and expecting to be the next Tom Morello or Pete Townshend.
Or getting a degree in Astronomy and expecting to become the next Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking … or a degree in physics and expecting to become the next Einstein … or a degree in Biology and expecting to become the next Richard Dawkins … or …
The list goes on and on, all areas of academia have people who complete their programs and then end up in a job rather than a career, what’s your point?
Benjamin-
Oh no apology needed. I didn’t think you were intending any malice in the joke and you’re absolutely right. Of a given writing class, maybe 5% at most have the chops to do something decent and even fewer of that will be able to push though all the rejections to even become marginally published.
Any road of dreams is harsh and far less awesome than one imagines it at first. So I thought to myself the first time I had to clean up the mice cages.
@Cerberus:
I stand corrected.
Well, more like, I sit and spit tea all over my monitor corrected, but you get my drift.
Erasmus,
You can’t read. Maybe a couple of English classes will help you out.
What I meant was that there’s two kinds of (mutually compatible) anti-intellectualisms – the ignorant resentment of the uneducated and religious bigots who are shocked, SHOCKED that someone is studying blasphemous things like the history and current issues of women and minorities, and the no less crass economism of the assholes with MBAs (and occasionally, their dupes in hard science) who find anything that doesn’t immediately lead to practical commercial implementation a waste of time and money. Republican legislators tend to exhibit both of these – fruit flies and fruity literature are both equally scorned.
I get what you’re arguing here – your argument is simplistic and crude, so it’s not hard to comprehend. What troubles me is the fact that you seem to dismiss whole swathes of human activity – literature, art in general, every single social activity but science – as completely uninteresting and unworthy of inclusion into the field of human intellectual endeavour. Literature gives us no truths about the world? Studying Shakespeare, to remain in the more comfortable canon territory, gives us no insights into the social and intellectual life of Elizabethan England? Insights into the social and intellectual life of Elizabethan England are utterly irrelevant to any field of human endeavour?
You don’t strike me as someone who finds current work in the humanities and social sciences an unsatisfactory attempt at explaining the phenomena it studies – more like a crabbed, limited person who doesn’t really understand WHY any of these things really ought to be studied at all. It’s MERELY literature, amirite? Who needs to study that? No real skills – like, say, statistical analysis, abstract reasoning about complex, multicausal elements of social life, abstract thought, testing the validity of theoretical constructs via quantitative and/or qualitative research, etc. – neccessary in the study of society. Literary translation? Psh, no skills needed there – just plug Dostoevsky into Babelfish and problem solved!
What’s more, you not only have a distorted view of social science – you have a distorted view of science in general. As has been pointed out, basic research only gives potential spin-off benefits, all the truths about the world science gives us are tentative, and a lot of research has little to no practical benefit in the sense a businessman would understand the term. Also, the idea that only science is valid is in itself an unscientific notion.
The peculiar delusion that one’s own chosen field of study is The Most Important Thing In The World Ever is something that occasionally affects people in academia. I think you’ve come down with a bad case of it, sir. Then again, you may just be a boorish troll.
In my country, that’s the role of high school. My current classmates never did any humanities in university but they’re still well rounded and critically thinking individuals.
Illusion is right. America has some of the best colleges in the world, but generally the reputation of its education system is quite poor internationally. America is seen as a pretty backward first world country, if still the most powerful.
The total number of students nationally is largely independent of how much emphasis is on sports. If a college with a large sports department draws in more students it does so by drawing them from other colleges. When you view third level education as a whole, you see massive sports funding damages it.
I think the best thing to do is to take away the massive sports funding from all these colleges and channel it into education. Even if student numbers nationally did drop off at least it would mean thatthe remaining students would be more dedicated to learning and that the colleges would be better equipped to facilitate that learning.
Are you fucking kidding me? Get rid of geology classes? What is it with Florida and all things stupid? Can’t we saw off that uncle daddy backwater state ala Bugs Bunny and send it back to Cuba? They’re welcome to it. Of course that would make the producers of “Cops” need a new base of operations. I pity all the reasonable citizens of Florida. Your voices are being drown out by intellectual cretinism. I’m so pissed I need another glass of wine.
lmao@you lot
telling stories about how anyone can be a intellectual. maybe that’s why intellectualism should mean squat, the hypocrisy is hilarious.
intellectuals are mostly “ivey league” and “old establishment”. – http://the-mouse-trap.blogspot.com/2009/03/ses-and-developing-brain.html – look at that, research instead of a made up story. i like to think of brain development as ‘academic ability’, shame it doesn’t transfer to ‘risk management’, as that’s the game.
when the fed talks about “toxic assets”, they mean financial instruments, guess who creates them. a derivatives time bomb thanks to silly maths models and mortgage securities which are so mind boggling, no one knows how to analyse them and in turn have no idea how much they’re worth.
oh and harvard, showing how it should be done – http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122832139322576023.html
funny how the few people who have lost pensions are none intellectuals and the people doing to losing are intellectuals, funny isn’t it…
#215: getting a degree in physics and expecting you’ll be the next Einstein seems pretty applicable.
I don’t agree with the premise though. Just because physics departments can potentially give us Einsteins and English literature can potentially give us best-selling novelists doesn’t mean that’s why we should fund one or t’other.
Here’s the thing: I study philosophy. Got a BA in it, just in the middle of getting an MA, and applying to start a research degree next year. Yeah, sure, I’m not going to cure cancer or invent a space rocket. Hopefully I might be able to have a few neat ideas. Should I have been prevented from studying what I studied? At 18, should I have had a letter from a government official telling me “what you chose to study is economically unproductive, so we’ve assigned you a place on something a bit more useful”? Perhaps we should do the same with, oh, astronomers. Not economically viable. Send ’em a letter and tell ’em they’ve got to do something that’ll make money for industry.
Well, fuck industry. Academia should be ruled by what’s intellectually interesting, not by profit. There’s more to life than just making money to line the pocket of some rich, pinstriped asshole. What if we send a kid off to become an astrophysicist or a philosopher or a medieval historian and he becomes awesome at it and completely revolutionises the field, gives us a ton of new ideas that work out to be quite useful, true, interesting or whatever, but doesn’t make anybody any cash? Would the world have been better off if he’d gone off to the vocational college and gotten a business studies degree learning how to make pretty pie charts in Excel? Fuck no!
The only way the university will survive is if we band together: yeah, even with the postmodernists in berets. The anti-intellectuals don’t give a shit whether your kink is eighteenth century architecture, invertebrate evolution, Romantic poetry or the Higgs Boson. In fact, the whole science-humanities thing is just a divide and conquer strategy. With few exceptions, everyone in the academy is trying to understand the world and the people inside it. I think the pomo stuff may be dying down – certainly in philosophy, a whiff of postmodernism is pretty much the kiss of death for an academic career. The anti-intellectuals have already decided: just read the Bible or Ayn Rand or Karl Marx or Dianetics, and all the answers are there. Everyone who thinks it might be a bit more complicated than that are in the same boat.
The whole sorry saga seems to have an echo in Pirzig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance under the heading of the Church of Unreason.
It saddens, horrifies and appalls me to hear of these cuts at the same instant in political time that there are so many basic problems with creationist ignorance and AIG bonuses. The contrast between the worthy poor and the undeserving rich is obscene, both in the USA and at home here in the UK.
I wish you well from the international sidelines.
Well, fuck industry. Academia should be ruled by what’s intellectually interesting, not by profit.
Just fucking so.
there is a whole other world out there ruled by profit (been there, done that, too). It’s damned important we retain at least one area of endeavor that is not.
It’s a lesson the Regents of the University of California System completely have completely forgotten, right about the time Reagan was elected Governor of the State, and they have continued to flail their puny heads against that wall ever since; gradually degrading the value of education within a system of unis that at one time was considered one of the best in the world.
*sigh*
A uni is NOT a company, regardless of whether there are good reasons to apply standard business accounting techniques to it.
The world always ends up appreciating the likes of Carl Sagan, even if they didn’t think they want to pay him to do what he did. If we forced him to be a factory worker, how much we would have lost!
one could compare it to the insane xianists’ desire to see sunday school taught 7 days a week.
Isn’t Sunday enough?
religionauts have their fucking churches aplenty already, we don’t need to convert the remaining multi-use buildings into churches as well.
this increasingly popular ideology of applying for profit business models to unis is one of the reasons I bailed on the US.
@working class:
I can imagine you’re very, very angry right now, and you have a right to be angry. I bet the recent economic clusterfuck has cost you your job. However, fuming about intellectuals isn’t going to help.
For one, the pinstripe suited cigar-chomping alpha-male Masters of the Universe that concocted this shit are not “intellectuals” – they’re not scientists, nor traditional humanist intellectuals, and in terms of values and outlook on life they’re as different from us as they are from you. We both get fucked over in different ways, and then they try to distract you from the mess they’ve caused by getting you angry at us.
As a working class kid who’s fortunate enough to attend college in a country where the state still covers expenses for the more capable students, I can understand where you’re coming from. But please, please don’t mix us up with the AIG douchebags.
Ichthyic-
(Slow clap)
Yes, a thousand times, yes. There are some things that are too precious to be ruled by a for-profit mindset. Health care and education should be the two leading examples and frankly, the rest of the first world already figured that out a long time ago.
Sorry, that should have been Tom with the slow clap. You can both share the slow clap. It’s a socialist slow clap for everyone today.
I presume you mean those who study the humanities, rather than humanists, ie , people who think human reason is sufficient for learning things about the world.
Education is a fruit of economic prosperity.
You can’t have “higher learnin'” without a solid economic trunk, unless you can convince teachers to teach for free.
As for Mr. Myers and his complaints about how hard he’s got it at the university…
How many jobs are there where one can blog about throughout the day and get paid for it?
I mean really?
Back when I worked, there wasn’t a spare minute in a ten hour work day.
Lordy lordy…
More evidence that education in this country needs to be improved. I have no idea what that sentence says, nor can I even hazard a guess as to what its writer was trying to express. Working class, if this was simply some sort of typographical error, I apologize and retract the previous statement. However, I would appreciate it if you would clarify what you were trying to say.
Geology, of course,
Realists will recognise that there isn’t much future for it in Florida with rising sea level. It’d be a good idea to keep oceanography though.
convince teachers to teach for free.
The pay-raise would be nice… ;o)
In addition to the other reasons the loss of the geology department would be horrible, in their department is the only lab that analyzes stable isotopes, which is apparently traditionally always within Geology.
So if Geology gets axed (or even the one lab that does all the analysis – a real possibility as the head of that lab is non-tenure), anyone on campus that deals with stable isotopes is SOL – and I know there are labs in Zoology as well as my unfortunate labmate in Entomology that rely on the stable isotope lab for their research.
I think the tiered approach CALS is taking to the budget cuts axes a lot of the Religion dept before it touches Geology, but I could be mistaken about the order.
As for Mr. Myers and his complaints about how hard he’s got it at the university…
How many jobs are there where one can blog about throughout the day and get paid for it?
I mean really?
Scott,
You are proving yourself to be quite clueless. Many of these blogs have automatic publication programs. I don’t know if PZ utilizes one himself, but many bloggers do. That means, if PZ does use such a program, he can write his entries at night, early in the morning, during office hours when undergrads fail to show up, etc., and publish his entries at a later date.
Back when I worked, there wasn’t a spare minute in a ten hour work day.
ROFL, methinks thou dost exaggerate. I started to whip out the “my work day is bigger than your work day” phallus, but simply decided it wasn’t worth the effort.
Tom Morris:
Jeez…they’re comparing J.K. Rowling to Einstein now? And they wonder why I consider English lit shallow, frivolous and irrelevant? This is a laugh a minute.
David Marjanović:
I was somewhat unclear, but naturally, snarky pissant that you are, you chose the most uncharitable of all possible interpretations. I missed out the word “just”. I intended to say: “[science] has direct applications — not just potential spin-off benefits”.
And this is of course a point well worth stressing. Shut down the Departments of Physics and the Department of Chemistry and the effects on already existing technology — forget future technology — will soon be seen. Shut down the Department of English literature, and Holywood will still thrive. Good television shows won’t disappear. The proof of this is that a good many important people in the entertainment industry don’t have backgrounds in the humanities. And lots of famous writers claim that creative writing isn’t really a skill that can be taught.
Morsky:
Astrophysics, fine. That’s a dynamic field and I can easily conceive of someone making important discoveries. Philosophy, not so fine. Dan Dennett, and a few other philosophers like the Churchlands, seem to be pretty much the only philosophers around that might be producing useful “philosophical knowledge”. (And many philosophers claim that these few exceptional individuals aren’t really philosophers but are scientists.) Medieval history — well, I don’t know enough about that to judge.
Not trying to wade into the digital vs dead-trees libraries issue, but I saw this with corporations and corporate libraries. Libraries are among the least-defended corporate assets and, so, their budgets and staff are easy targets for zealous and short-sighted cost-cutters. IBM did that in the 1980s before its crash, and I bet many corporations did similar. They somehow thought that engineering is that stuff which engineers do, so if they need something they ought to go do it at a library on their own time and expense.
Not surprisingly, local public libraries in IBM’s original home town followed. Who wants to spend time in a library, after all? And some parents never liked kids being able to get their hands on CATCHER IN THE RYE on their own. (I’m serious about that in this town. It was eventually pulled from the shelves.) I understand the need for universities to, as Drew Faust said in her 2008 commencement address, maintain a commitment to the deep past and far future by applying resources today.
I am pessimistic about this culture today being able to understand this. It seems, somehow, democratization became populism, and the idea that a spirit in the sky gave everybody an instinct for knowing what’s good and right without education. Therefore, what’s the need for book-learnin’, right? And populism becomes fearsome antielitism in all its forms, vicious opposition to anything which seems like aristocratic privilege. So excesses and what seem like excesses in finance are assailed. Jindal from Louisiana makes fun of geophysics research. People oppose stem cells “Because I don’t think it’s right and my neighbor doesn’t either”.
I thought the antielitism of the early 1970s, which I saw first hand, was unhealthy in many respects. But at least the left wing radicals respected learning, even if they didn’t want it helping The Establishment.
This most recent stuff might not stop of something short of book burnin’, I fear.
I don’t know WHAT to do: We can’t reeducate everybody overnight.
Does anyone else find Erasmus’s name to be ironic?
Yes, I know I do.
Does anyone else find Erasmus’s name to be ironic?
Painfully so…
Name plus this comment…
Medieval history — well, I don’t know enough about that to judge.
Blew the hell out of my irony-o-meter…
morksky,
i do actually want a degree and i’m not exactly anti-intellectual. i’m not willing to take on such ridiculous debt for a grade that won’t be that good and a qualification market that might be over bought in the job market, i know car mechanics making more than friends who have a degree. i respect that i’m not a high enough achiever to go to into higher education, circumstances simply work for some people and against others, society might as well use those in a fortunate position to do work in fields that allow the greatest impact. but this is not working well in much of the socioeconomic system and these bad segments are still supported, finance is an obvious example. someone who’s trained nuclear physicist, their role in society should be obvious.
there’s a justification of many intellects, even when it’s clearly wrong, that hinders everyone. a family friend who’s older than me, went to university after serving in the british army, falklands war, he was taking a class involving the falklands war. he wrote his own experiences in an assignment in a fitting way. the professor said that’s not how it happened, you wrote complete rubbish and failed him.
in general, it’s about the mismanagement of resources, why are economic theories and false history getting any sort of resources from institutions? what happened to the scientific method that seems to be ignored in so many fields, even in science sometimes?
i honestly hope a college goes bust during this recession, it might bring the message home. it’s unlikely though due to bailouts and ‘donations’.
then there’s corruption, but that’s a different game altogether.
cactusren,
funny how the few people who have lost pensions are non-intellectuals and the people doing the losing are intellectuals, funny isn’t it…
i wrote it in a rush, can’t you even fix that?
hypocrite.
Higher education should not be measured by any economic standard. Nor by what one deems useful to furthering the goals of a society. Scholarship has intrinsic value, it provides an enriching experience for all who pursue it.
Judging which programs deserve funding and which do not, which to cut and which to preserve, is the wrong way to be looking at the issue. None should be cut. Public and political opinion needs to be changed. We need to instill a respect for scholarship, education deserves a much larger portion of our tax dollars. Why is it ok to build weapons we will never use with your money, but not to fund programs that have a very real impact on americans?
As a veteran, I see military spending as somewhat of a necessary evil… just not at the level we see today. I know that state universities rely on money other than federal tax dollars, I’m just saying we seem to be complacent in where our money goes. Contacting representatives and demanding education be a top priority seems like a much better alternative than saying a liberal arts education is worth less than a scientific one.
The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one’s mind a pleasant place in which to spend one’s time. – T.H. Huxley.
No idea why I’m being accused of ignorance. I think I’m pretty well-versed in the humanities for a science type. There are in fact prominent academics in lit crit, like Jonathan Gottschall, who bemoan the state of their own discipline, and don’t think it is producing very much new knowledge.
People have been asking me how many courses I’ve done. That is, in my book, a surefire sign of intellectual insecurity. Noam Chomsky puts this brilliantly (Chomsky 1979, pp.6-7):
For fuck’s sake “working class” start your sentences with a capital letter – and “I” and “British”! Or did you do it all on a mobile phone?
If you don’t write properly – and you have no excuse not to – people will think you are stupid.
And don’t bleat that you were somehow not educated – you can learn it all yourself. But punctuation 101 – third book on the left, just down the corridor, Cost? $0.
No idea why I’m being accused of ignorance.
My comment wasn’t an accusation of ignorance, point in fact you stated that your knowledge of medieval history was insufficient to be able to discern whether such a program met your criteria for a valid class. That is where the irony is quite simply, over the top. Your name, Erasmus, is truly amusing and ironic when you consider your self avowed lack of knowledge of medieval history. This fact is doubly ironic when you consider that he was a medieval philosopher who, realistically, would be out of a job were you to have your way.
You put it all together and you owe me an irony-o-meter.
I rely on it. I usually get up at 5am, pound out a few things that I queue up, and get to work by 8. You may have noticed that posts tend to stop appearing for a while in the mid-afternoon at some variable point; that’s when my pile of pre-scheduled posts peter out. Then later in the evening I dabble again.
The state whose entire water supply is tied up in Karst topograpy, the state who has sink holes appear overnight and swallow homes, the state with three sides in the ocean with dwindling beaches and coastal process issues. That state decides to rid their university of the Geology Department. Geology covers all of that. Beach erosion, water supply, cave processes, contamination plumes in Karst (think Swiss cheese). All Geology. If you want to study Karst systems you go to Florida. Of all states this one needs more trained geologist in that specialty, not less.
I rely on it. I usually get up at 5am, pound out a few things that I queue up, and get to work by 8. You may have noticed that posts tend to stop appearing for a while in the mid-afternoon at some variable point; that’s when my pile of pre-scheduled posts peter out. Then later in the evening I dabble again.
I figured you probably did PZ, but couldn’t remember if you had actually mentioned doing so or not and didn’t want to make a false statement in your defense (not that you needed defending).
Working class @244: Okay, I think I see what you’re getting at. You’re saying that intellectuals are the people who caused non-intellectuals to lose their pensions, correct? I’m sorry if you see this as a personal affront (I really don’t mean it that way), but even with the typos corrected, your statement seems unclear to me. And I just find it ironic that you’re arguing against liberal arts education when it could clearly benefit you, in terms of expressing yourself more clearly. Bear in mind, I support the idea of better funding for high schools, which are badly underfunded and therefore often fall short of providing the education they should. And if education is important to you, there are student loans, community colleges which are much more affordable, etc. Bottom line is that if you want a good education, not starting off with a lot of money is no excuse.
From my last post: “Working class, if this was simply some sort of typographical error, I apologize and retract the previous statement. ”
Why, exactly, are you calling me a hypocrite?
Eh? I’m an educated guy and I have heard of Erasmus of Rotterdam. Quite a bit, actually, after reading a book by Stephen Jay Gould in which Erasmus was discussed at some length. I just like the name and chose it spontaneously, but later realized that it’s quite ironic, given my contentions. Not that ironic, though. Erasmus wasn’t anything like the humanists of today. He was a great encyclopaedist, who would try to absorb all the genuine knowledge that was possessed in his time. He could spent his entire energies fucking around with theological obscurantism, like most “intellectuals” back then — yet he didn’t do this. Nowadays humanists (with admittedly some important exceptions) don’t really concern themselves with knowledge, and are just trying to piss around while getting paid for it.
And yes, I don’t know enough about the Middle Ages to judge whether its history is an exciting and fast-expanding subject of study. In general I respect history far more than the other humanities, because the actual purpose of the subject is coherent. Very different from lit critc and philosophy and sociology. I have no idea what they’re trying to achieve there.
Yes, we must stop producing liberal arts majors.
We need productive people who can build up business and the financial sector. More advanced graduates in finance and economics. More MBAs and corporate lawyers.
For they will strengthen our economy and make us all rich.
Why are you looking at me like that…
I have to comment further based on this:
I think I’m pretty well-versed in the humanities for a science type.
Based on what you’ve posted here, you may be aware of the humanities, but most who have studied the humanities seriously question your actual skills within the disciplines. You make statements that suggest, at best, relative ignorance (yes, now I am making such a statement).
People have been asking me how many courses I’ve done. That is, in my book, a surefire sign of intellectual insecurity. Noam Chomsky puts this brilliantly
Your book is flawed again. Were I to make false, foolish, hypocritical, and at times, downright idiotic comments in your field while at the same time arrogantly acting as if I were an expert you would, understandably, ask me to present some sort of background that would at least provide some support for my statements. That is precisely what those of us who have been debating you have done. You have failed to provide any evidence, whatsoever, that you are qualified to determine which areas of the humanities are valid and which are “fluff.” The fact that you would even consider the elimination of medieval history while at the same time sporting the name Erasmus suggests to me, an historian, that you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. To make matters worse, the fact that you slammed Chomsky on the day four of Pharyngula Survivor just a few days ago and now quote him in your defense suggests that your self described skills in the humanities are, at best, grossly exaggerated.
The fact that you broadly defend the “hard sciences” while at the same time bemoaning the existence of some elements of the humanities suggests that you have absolutely no concept of the original intent and purpose of education! The original intent of education, both of higher learning and here in the US of K-12 education were founded upon the need to better understand the disciplines today referred to as the humanities. Philosophy, history, rhetoric, language arts, political science/civics, these were the core principles of education. In fact, the “hard sciences” were often added to these programs in order to augment philosophy, IE to better describe how “God” made the universe work, etc.
This general inability to make coherent arguments, while at the same time making arrogant pronouncements against the field that you increasingly appear to lack any significant knowledge, is the reason why your credentials were questioned, why your knowledge has been questioned, and why your “skills” have been questioned. Think of it this way, a creationist just came in and said that paleontology isn’t necessary because the devil just put those fossils there to test our faith. You just made the equivalent argument regarding the validity of the humanities.
Heh.
Heh, heh.*
Oh! By the way, I had posted this link a while back and Bill Dauphin later asked for a reminder, but I forgot, so here it is:
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/11/24/noam_chomsky_what_next_the_elections
*You may also wish to cite his “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship,” in American Power and the New Mandarins (1967).
David @124
I certainly don’t want anyone looking at me like I’m only a machine, to be tinkered with and manipulated as if I had no rights or interests worth considering. Sure, if I had a disease I would want someone who understood the machinery of my body to fix it, but they better also consider me as a person, not a piece of meat. Dehumanizing people has happened in the past and the fruits are ugly. Understanding that being a scientist does not somehow remove one from human interests and concerns is important, especially given the power and scope that modern biology is giving us. A great potential for good, if one really know what good means, and a great potential for evil and destroyed lives if it is just an avenue for exercising power over other people. The humanities can help those who will wield this power do so with wisdom, compassion and empathy.
Of course we’re not unique in the world – places like Australia happily ape any incredibly stupid management decisions made in the USA. I remember about 10 years ago a number of Australian universities were doing the same – getting rid of entire departments while trebling or even quintupling the salaries of those worthless maggots known as “vice chancellors”. So, while the educational system is stressed and it is especially difficult to find universities with any pride in the quality of education, the worthless gougers in management continue to rake in the money – somehow these people think they’re worth 5-20 professors (or 20-80 janitors). Society in general tolerates far too much BS.
#256:
Oh, snap!
Sorry, just had to say it.
No, it doesn’t suggest that. What an absolutely preposterous statement. Is it not possible for me to have crucial disagreements with Chomsky, while loving some of his writing and agreeing with him a lot of the time? If you can’t understand this elementary point, namely that people aren’t bound to agree 100% of the time with a given author, maybe you’re the one whose self-described stkills in the humanities are grossly exaggerated. These are cheap, partisan tactics.
@Jim Bob Cooter:
“As much as I personally dislike the style with which Pres. Bernie Machen runs UF, I’ve got to admit he’s tried very hard to keep the legislature from cutting our throats completely.”
Are you sure? The lizards like to tell you one thing while doing another (apologies to the cl. reptilia). I’ve lost a job for not tolerating such BS; I’ve always demanded that management prove the existence of the benefits they claim. Incompetent management always come up with the usual set of excuses including “you can’t measure that”, but this is all nonsense. Of course you can measure benefits; it is the air-headed fluff that robs you of your money which cannot be proven to be effective. Always demand proof or else you’re just being led by the nose.
I highly recommend “The age of American Unreason” by Susan Jacoby. There has always been an undertone of anti-intellectualism in the US. It has gotten worse with the rise of Christian fundamentalism. This is a good thought provoking read.
And at the same time we have the money to blow up Iraq and escalate the war in Afghanistan – totals this year will be about $850B while at the same time there are about 47 million in the US without health insurance. Hasn’t this eye-for-an-eye crap gone far enough?
Wasn’t it the “guns and butter” thing what is attributed to having brought the Soviet Union down?
Oh, fuck. Please ignore #263; it is garbled. Here is my intended version:
I would do no such thing. I debate science all the time on the Web, and I don’t think I have ever inquired about someone’s qualifications. Not once. What I do, when I encounter ignorance, is describe the facts, or the class of facts, that my opponent is ignorant of. You haven’t done anything of the sort. You won’t explain to me: how am I ignorant? What facts elude me? What don’t I know?
Shorter Erasmus:
I’m an egnorant windbag.
Erasmus wasn’t anything like the humanists of today.
I will do the same thing I would do with a student of mine making a similar statement. Provide evidence to support this claim. Now, to be fair, my students would have already read Machiaveli, More, Petrarch, as well as Erasmus, but you claim to know both Erasmus and modern humanists, so I’ll consider you prepared for such a task.
He was a great encyclopaedist, who would try to absorb all the genuine knowledge that was possessed in his time. He could spent his entire energies fucking around with theological obscurantism, like most “intellectuals” back then — yet he didn’t do this.
Have you actually read his work? In Praise of Folly? Julius excluded from Heaven? His lampoons and satires of both Lutheranism and the Catholic church? He wasn’t involved in the theological debates of the time? Wow… that’s really all I can say.
Nowadays humanists (with admittedly some important exceptions) don’t really concern themselves with knowledge, and are just trying to piss around while getting paid for it.
Again, you base this upon what evidence?
I’m going on second-hand characterization of Erasmus. I defer to the experts, and if they’re wrong, that’s not my fault. I said, for a reason, that he didn’t spend his “entire” energies debating theology. I didn’t say he never debate theology. He spent a lot of time absorbing and compiling real knowledge, for instance zoological knowledge, about the real world. This is why I say he was different from today’s humanists.
These are cheap, partisan tactics.
I never thought it would come to this, but:
ROFL
I attend what’s considered a small university in canada ( perhaps the selfsame one as Canuck works at), and here, there’s such an anti-intellectual bias in the newsrags. If they had their way, all the universities would be closed down, because those darn intellectuals! in their ivory tower! while the working class slaves.
Little do they realize that it’s because I don’t want to be a wage slave for life that I’m working to pay for my education, and I resent being begrudged that education by the populace of knuckledraggers that decry such things as literacy, education and academia.
Closing university programs? Impossibly stupid idea. I’ve seen the effects, here and now, and it’s not pretty. I can’t fathom what it’d be like if the cuts kept going. As it is, our facilities are in such disrepair it’s become a safety concern for staff and students.
By the way, asking me if I’ve read Erasmus is pretty miserable stuff. The equivalent would be to ask someone if he has read Einstein’s papers on relativity were he to make a general statement about Einstein. This perverse obsession with original texts is yet more indication of the intellectually lightweight status of the humanities.
“working class” I would recommend that you lose the attitude that anyone with a degree is somehow out to enrich themselves at the cost of the poor. I would guess that a significant number of posters here come from working-class families. Yes, they were probably fortunate in being offered opportunity, but they worked hard for what they achieved.
At my med school there was a minority who simply had to shove their working class credentials in your face at every opportunity, as if it somehow gave them intellectual credibility. In the same way others waved around the fact that they were from the north of England, which gave them the right to label anyone from the south as an arrogant know-nothing wanker. What used to make me smile is that I was more working class than any of them, and in five years they never even realised.
I don’t care if you’re unemployed or liberal elite. What counts is your knowledge and ideas, not the ability to lash out at anyone you label as responsible for the current economic mess.
NB: ‘liberal’ in the UK sense.
I think that the commenter above who noted that so many students are going into subjects like film studies because many are unprepared for the sciences is dead on. On the first day of ninth grade, my math teacher handed out a sheet of equations and told us to factor them. He did not explain how to factor (then or ever, and I had him for three more full courses). My elementary math classes hadn’t covered factoring. Any guesses as to how I felt about math until I got someone to teach me what I had to do?
I’m Canadian, but I think we have many of the same problems with our various education systems – Ontario certainly does – and the first step to fixing them is to support elementary and secondary education.
As for the uses of the humanities – well, I think that every one needs to have at least a basic understanding of science, but I don’t know that I believe that the scientific method is the only way to gain knowledge. I’m currently working toward a second degree in environmental studies, at a school which has attracted teachers from backgrounds that do range from women’s studies to economics to law to ecology. The kinds of questions I want to answer are concerned with how people make choices about their behaviour with regard to the environment. While there might be some experiments and observational studies I could carry out – I’m in the process of designing and proposing one now – I doubt that it will be possible to control for all the factors that are involved in those choices, at either the individual or the societal levels. I won’t be able to give an unequivocal answer. Nonetheless, I don’t think that my research area is worth less than that of the people who are working to develop more technologies that are more efficient or require less toxic materials. I just want to look at a different kind of problem.
There are people in my department who study policy and law, and there are people who study urban theory and urban planning, and there are people who study philosophy and the environment in literature. We are all working toward a better understanding of how humans relate to and interact with the environment. Some of that work is, to my mind, less likely to lead to clear facts or conclusions, but it offers new perspectives on the problems. I for one am glad that my studies have not focused only on what sort of light bulbs we ought to use, or even whether it’s better to use command and control legislation or a tax incentive to get people to switch to CFLs.
No, it doesn’t suggest that. What an absolutely preposterous statement. Is it not possible for me to have crucial disagreements with Chomsky, while loving some of his writing and agreeing with him a lot of the time? If you can’t understand this elementary point, namely that people aren’t bound to agree 100% of the time with a given author, maybe you’re the one whose self-described stkills in the humanities are grossly exaggerated. These are cheap, partisan tactics.
The problem is this, you made the comment that “many of his central convictions boil down to boring semantics and subjective opinion.” You also speak of “ridiculously primitive” causal models, etc. You then turn around and quote him providing no context beyond his quote supporting your position “brilliantly.”
Take a step back and look at this rationally. You slam an author for methodology, most importantly stating that his central convictions are based upon boring semantics and subjective opinion. You then, without any commentary explaining this dichotomy, quote this same author that, to an objective observer you appear to have little or no respect for their work, in an effort to support your position.
I do enjoy how you close with an assault on my qualifications and a flailing reference to ‘partisan tactics.’
Wait, you’re actually saying that reading original sources is “intellectually lightweight”? When did I step into Bizzaro blog?
Lashing out seems to be pretty much all that working class has.
@271 Erasmus
By the way, asking me if I’ve read Erasmus is pretty miserable stuff. The equivalent would be to ask someone if he has read Einstein’s papers on relativity were he to make a general statement about Einstein.
Someone might have thought you would read Erasmus to claim to know this:
I said, for a reason, that he didn’t spend his “entire” energies debating theology. I didn’t say he never debate theology. He spent a lot of time absorbing and compiling real knowledge, for instance zoological knowledge, about the real world. This is why I say he was different from today’s humanists.
And yet you qualify the above with this:
I’m going on second-hand characterization of Erasmus. I defer to the experts, and if they’re wrong, that’s not my fault.
I’m going to say that yes, it is your fault. If you want to sound like you know what you’re talking about, then KNOW what you’re talking about.
Chas.Darwin’s grandfather and brother were named Erasmus.
I suggest that . . .
Um . . .
Wow.
I can’t even formulate a cogent response to that.
There’s no contradiction, and if you think there’s a contradiction you’re — plainly and simply — a complete moron. I disagree with many of Chomsky’s central convictions, just as I said. At the same time I admire him as a writer, and sometimes agree with him. I happen to agree with the passage I quoted. Perfectly consistent. Now shut the fuck up about this and abandon this utterly stupid line of argument.
By the way, asking me if I’ve read Erasmus is pretty miserable stuff. The equivalent would be to ask someone if he has read Einstein’s papers on relativity were he to make a general statement about Einstein. This perverse obsession with original texts is yet more indication of the intellectually lightweight status of the humanities.
No, it’s nothing of the sort, which yet again shows your lack of understanding of the humanities. The whole point is to read the originals, that’s why those slacker loser professors in the humanities generally speak two or three languages. You know, the intellectual lightweight fact that to truly understand some of the history you need to read it in the original French, or Dutch, or German, or Chinese, the list goes on and on.
In my “intellectual lightweight” humanities studies I read a microfilm copy of the original Daemonologie, written in early 17th century “English,” I then, having interpreted his understanding of reality, witchcraft, the Bible, his faith; you know, late medieval mentality and mindset, incorporated that new found understanding into my “lightweight” senior thesis. Given our interaction here, had you bothered to read it, you would have declared it obscurantism which I now recognize is your code word for “I have no fucking clue as to what they mean.” Which, by the way, your reviled hero at least admits that he may simply not understand.
I will join the others who have previously recognized that you are a clueless arrogant blowhard.
There’s no contradiction, and if you think there’s a contradiction you’re — plainly and simply — a complete moron.
You’re right, it’s not a contradiction.
It’s just a really terrible method of argumentation.
And as a follow-up to 275…Erasmus, since you think it’s so perverse that humanities relies on original sources, how do you propose that we do science? I mean, experiments and observations are all well and good, but you need a starting point, as well as some form of intellectual discourse. And where does that happen, except in the primary literature? (Well, okay, conferences, but that discourse isn’t generally recorded for posterity.)
Also, while I freely admit to never having read Erasmus, it doesn’t seem like a ridiculous thing for someone to ask you, since you use it as your fucking moniker. If you don’t want to be asked about Erasmus, find yourself another fucking name.
These wretechedly lame objections, mostly from offended humanities majors, are a hilarious exhibition of their intellectual feebleness. I haven’t read Erasmus’ original texts — therefore I’m not entitled to say anything about him. Hey, guess what? I haven’t read the Principia either. Does that mean I’m not entitled to speak a word about Newton?
Again, these are pathetic partisan tactics. My throw-away comment on Erasmus has no serious bearing on any interesting point of debate. I’m not to blame because humanists apparently aren’t skilled at distinguishing between concepts worthy of debate, and pedantic little snippets of triva.
WHAT? I said I just like the name; it doesn’t have any deep significance. What the fuck? Jesus fucking Christ. You people are really grasping at straws, aren’t you?
There’s no contradiction, and if you think there’s a contradiction you’re — plainly and simply — a complete moron.
You are truly unbelievable, that you use the name of someone, anyone, dedicated to knowledge and learning only makes it worse.
That you don’t understand the simple methodology that a college bound high school student working in the humanities would accept as second nature really suggests that you aren’t a complete moron, you’re a fucking moron.
I disagree with many of Chomsky’s central convictions, just as I said. At the same time I admire him as a writer, and sometimes agree with him. I happen to agree with the passage I quoted. Perfectly consistent.
The truly sad thing is, you don’t recognize that you aren’t even qualified to be in this conversation.
Perfectly consistent. Now shut the fuck up about this and abandon this utterly stupid line of argument.
Pretty consistently stupid. I would suggest the same, but you’re too fucking clueless to recognize that your entire position is utterly stupid.
I’m just saying you shouldn’t be so surprised that people expect you to know quite a bit about Erasmus, since that’s the name you chose.
And for the record, I’m a geologist, so I have no vested interest in defending the humanities. Except that all knowledge is important, which is the simple fact you can’t seem to grasp.
Florida has always been extremely cheap with education funding at all levels, and being a product of its public schools and two of its state universities (including UF), I know whereof I speak. The state did not qualify for education stimulus funding as a result of deep state funding cuts over the past two years. Governor Crist is having to beg and plead for a waiver to get even a portion of the money to which Florida would have been entitled.
The commenter above, who cited the disinclination of its elderly transplant residents to pay taxes for *anything* that does not directly benefit them, is correct. I had that argument with my own father for years, and his children did go to public schools, schools which he thought his elderly mother shouldn’t have to subsidize. The fact that everyone in a community benefits from a good educational system was lost on him. It was odd, though, that he never had a good answer when I asked if he wanted illiterate clerks filling his prescriptions, or employers passing the county by because the residents couldn’t add.
Unfortunately, the state universities, and the poor souls in UF’s geology department, are getting caught up in this larger fight over education funding, and the generally abysmal state of the economy there. It may be instructive to note that Florida is facing a $6 billion deficit this year, and will be lucky to keep the lights on in Tallahassee at this rate, let alone pay professors — or prison guards, or state troopers, or the medical bills for its indigent children. And Florida is far from alone in this problem. Illinois’ budget deficit is $11 billion and *climbing* at last tally. This is not the last story of this kind that we’re going to hear before this is all over.
I haven’t read the Principia either. Does that mean I’m not entitled to speak a word about Newton?
Just so you know, in my “intellectually lightweight” humanities studies, I have read Newton… and Galileo, Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Ptolemy.
But really, what do I know, I just work in the humanities.
What a tool…
Erasmus posted:
Ah, Erasmus. If only you’d been there to render such a water-tight case to Professor Martin lo these many years gone when she insisted her students study Beowulf in Old English, and not in translation. And yet somehow we soldiered on, though perhaps you surmise it can’t have been any particular challenge being, as it was, a course in one of the humanities and therefore “lightweight.”
Good night, sweet Erasmus. Let not thy brow be further troubled by less than weighty things.
No kings,
Robert
Am I impressed? Nah. I learned general relativity for my senior thesis, mainly from Einstein’s original papers. (Not in German — we physicists apparently stumbled upon the knack of translating our important texts!) But hey, guess what? Your transparent, pathetic attempt at dick-measuring is of absolutely no worth, because I said, above, where you couldn’t miss it, that my comments about the humanities don’t apply to history. I said I respect the subject of history far more than the other humanities, and I do. I don’t respect you though. The irony is killing me. First you pounce upon me, out of the blue, for my temerity to make a comment on an extremely famous figure without being familiar with his original writing. Next, for no apparent reason other than to wave your dick, you brag, in some detail, about your senior thesis. And then you call me a blowhard. All very amusing.
However, if by marketable skills you mean the ability to relate to people from all different backgrounds, to figure out how to understand trends, to be able to express oneself accurately and well in writing and orally, to convey information in appropriate ways, to learn new techniques and systems, well then, that’s a university education for you.
Those aren’t actually marketable skills. Without recent experience in whatever-it-specifically-is, you can’t even get your foot in the door. It’s brutal out there.
I love the liberal arts. But as far as I can tell, nobody cares what your english thesis was. It used to be that a liberal arts education was a rare thing. Now it’s on par with a high school education, a basic requirement to move beyond entry-level to middle level posts.
I think it’s fair to ask what the economic (market) value of a liberal arts degree is when it costs $15,000 a semester.
I also think people who are CURIOUS and go to a good high school and continue reading on their own will have most of the aspects of a liberal arts education.
There’s also a huge selection bias about colleges. The reason that colleges look so great is that you have a population self-selected for being intelligent, educated, and ambitious. I’m not really sure that the effect is due to the college education, so much as the nature of the students. And I’ve sat in many, many classes where the majority of students were clearly there to get a qualification and weren’t interested in the source material.
I also apologize for not reading all the posts in this thread. Big.
I reminded of that regular Car Talk contributor, Ersamus B. Dragon.
Bragging again? Can’t help yourself, can you? Again, don’t expect me to be impressed. I’m much more interested in what scientists have to say about those men.
So wait… Erasmus (the poster) has great respect (comparatively) for the study of the mindset and mentality of the past (‘history’), but only contempt for the study of the mindset and mentality of today?
(Parentheses ahoy)
This is a riot. People have to be “qualified” to engage in a conversation now, do they? Yeah, that above quotation from Chomsky couldn’t be more appropriate. I’m glad I remembered it.
@ 292:
This may be true. I certainly have run into a lot of fellow students who are filling up space to get a qualification without putting in the effort to get something out of their studies, and I wonder what they think they’re paying for. However, while it’s certainly possible to get a lot out of reading, having a teacher to guide you and help you draw connections between texts and ideas really does help to make the most of that reading. Even better if that teacher has the backing of a university department and access to its libraries and resources to expand on those texts and ideas. And this is leaving aside the fact that liberal arts education usually includes the natural sciences, which I think demand more than just reading to understand fully.
I don’t think that you are necessarily arguing for cutting liberal arts education because it can be duplicated by reading, but some certainly might assume that if you can read about it on your own there’s no need for anyone to teach it or to study it in an institutional setting.
Chas.Darwin’s grandfather and brother were named Erasmus.
Sven,
I figured that one out as well. I didn’t have the heart to inform him that his great namesake is simply named after one of the greatest minds of history … and that he didn’t apparently even know who he was. I figured he would then present his great understanding of political science by talking about that great political genius, Franklin Roosevelt, you know, that brilliant mayor of dogpatch Utah?
Geology? In Florida? “Here’s some sand. And some more sand over there. Oh an some really old coral rock sticking up over that a’ way. If you dig deep enough into the sand, you’ll find some wet coral rock. And the sand is eroded coral rock.”
I can see why they cut it!
It isn’t only UF. I know an administrator at one of the local community colleges and they’ve received the same 10% decree.
The lottery was able to be passed because they promised the proceeds would all go towards education AND would only be used to enhance education not pay for basics. Now, all of it goes towards basics and nobody wants to pay school taxes anymore because they think the lottery money pays for it all.
We got only the best morons here in FL.
Oops, my snark-off tag got swallowed by html. The first bit was “just kidding”.
Oh and Hi MAJeff.
What on earth are you trying to say? Not everyone can be an “intellectual”. You need to have some sort of normal or greater intelligence, go to school usually, and most importantly, want to be an “intellectual.” The requirements are not that stringent but will be beyond many people. Still leaving 10’s of millions of potential “intellectuals”.
Quite a few “intellectuals”, scientists, professionals, teachers, professors, knowledge workers etc. had their 401k plans and/or their jobs massacred in the current economic disaster. Being an “intellectual” is no guarantee that one can dodge bullets or manage money better than the average American. Some did, many did not.
You are confused about what intellectuals are anyway. The clowns on Wall Street are bankers, traders, MBAs, business people, executives, stock brokers and so on. They may have BA and MBA degrees but that doesn’t make them geniuses. Or intellectuals. IMO, a lot of them are just plain conmen, conwomen, incompetents, and a variety of crooks.
The idea that the faculties of American universities are worked to the bone is just ridiculous. A depression is a great opportunity to make long-needed changes, so let’s start reforming American higher education by abolishing tenure and force the bloated ranks of professors to work like the rest of us–produce or else! And no more sabbaticals or paid summers off work, either.
Bragging again? Can’t help yourself, can you? Again, don’t expect me to be impressed. I’m much more interested in what scientists have to say about those men.
No, I’m pointing out that you don’t have a fucking clue as to what you’re talking about. You don’t know anything about how the humanities work yet you feel qualified to determine which are and are not valid areas of study. Sad really…
This is a riot. People have to be “qualified” to engage in a conversation now, do they? Yeah, that above quotation from Chomsky couldn’t be more appropriate. I’m glad I remembered it.
Yeah, you do have to be qualified to engage in a conversation with any chance of success. Your lack of intellectual curiosity is what disqualifies you. The fact that you think reading original sources beneath you provides ample evidence for that. The fact that you think people who learn multiple languages in order to develop their understanding of their field are “intellectual lightweights” provides proof positive that you don’t have any fucking clue as to what you are talking about.
But PZ, think of the poor starving orphaned AIG executives who can barely afford servants for their mansions! You know they need the money SO much more than frivolous causes such as education.
Posted at #302:
Don’t know what academic institutions you’re familiar with, but at the one’s I’m familiar with, the professors don’t have “summers off work.” Granted, they’re not in the classroom (except when they are, teaching summer courses. Of course, during the summer, the students aren’t in the classroom, either. Except when they are, trying to get closer to dissertation. Hmmm. Coincidence, or some other unexplained phenomenon?), but they’re doing research, writing journal articles, attending conferences, writing books, reading up on the latest relevant literature, planning for Fall classes, serving on faculty and administrative committees, designing new studies, and so forth.
No kings,
Robert
I feel the need to say that though I violently disagreed with one particular thing that Erasmus said, far up in this thread, I don’t think many of the attacks on him have been justified whatsoever. It seems very much as though a few people are picking a fight.
[And I’m not trying to do so with this posting; rather, I’m stepping in with a bit of cold water and a rolled-up newspaper, not that it’ll do any good.]
Me@302 said:
Evidence for this assertion please?
The American Association of University Professors has this to say:
Still, you won’t say what I’m ignorant of and what I don’t know what I’m talking about.
No, I didn’t say original sources are beneath me. I said, for instance, that I have read Einstein. Yet another one of your straw-clutching tricks is exposed. What I think is that fields with high intellectual content tend to preserve ideas and are not perpetually referring people back to the originals. Citing original sources is an easy dodge if you don’t know what you’re talking about. I could do it easily, if I wanted. If you were to utter a word about modern physics, I could pretend that having read Einstein’s papers is a prerequesite for meaningful conversation, and I could scoff and hoot at anyone who hasn’t read these papers. But I would never do that, because I’m not a disingenuous wanker.
No, I don’t think that, sorry. You aside, I happen to respect historians and the discipline of history.
Me @ 302: The idea that the faculties of American universities are worked to the bone is just ridiculous.
Whoa! Look everyone, Joe the Troll is here!
Damn lazy faculty. I’ll remember that the next time I see three guys leaning on a shovel staring at a pot hole in the road.
And no more sabbaticals or paid summers off work, either.
Ha! Ha! Absolutely! And all those damn “regular” workers should ditch the vacation time and benefits too. Such a waste of time when they could be “producing” something.
BTW: Anyone here know of faculty that get “paid summers off”? 30 years in academia and I can’t seem to think of any …
Erasmus wrote:
That seems a little odd, as was pointed out in colloquium’s post #295:
I guess what colloquium was implying, and what I’m trying to say, is that what you think of as ‘history’ today was not ‘history’ when it was written; it was sociology and politics – humanities, in other words.
my state is dying, twitching: california. how sad.
private universities are going to have to fill the bill; sorry. we had too much giving in-state tuition and other breaks to hundreds upon thousands of non-state citizens. now our largess has caught up with us in all areas, not just education.
the private sector is going to have to fill the bill, and the stupid among us are going to have to give up the pipe-dream of *giving away* higher education(s) to people who are only doing it because they have no idea what else to do with their lives.
i was one of those people, once. I shoulda waited until i had a job for a few years; i’d have wasted a lot less of my years and money and the taxpayers’ money and my parents’ money.
Just imagine how badly the fight against Al Quaeda would have gone in the late 1990s and early 2000s if post-secondary institutions hadn’t turned out enough Arabists, Arabic-speaking linguists, South Asian (Afghanistan) area specialists, terrorism specialists with political science, psychology and sociology backgrounds, and similar people. If this hadn’t happened, it’s quite likely the NSA and CIA would have been unable to decode Al Quaeda communications intercepts within hours of receipt and made sense of them in the broader Saudi cultural context. If the NSA hadn’t been able to do this, bin Laden and his band of thugs might not be in prison today and might have pulled off their daring plan to fly hijacked airliners into office buildings.
Oh, wait a minute….
No one knows what obscure discipline just might save all our necks one day.
(Film studies, fine art, theater, and acting excepted.)
We get paid summers off work? I missed that! I’ve got 16 summers worth of back pay coming to me then!
Oh, and somebody probably thinks “sabbatical” is another word for “vacation”. They really don’t get it.
So, a few things have not been mentioned yet that I think are worth saying.
(1) The main function of an university is not the education of students — and certainly not undergraduate students. I know that that sounds like blasphemy, especially to the ears of undergrads or their (paying) parents. I do have some sympathy for their outrage. Still, the fact is that universities are fundamentally repositories of knowledge and expertise. They exist so as to conduct research and to push back the limits of human ignorance. This is the same in any discipline where knowledge is to be had: physics, math, biology, geology, history, philosophy, economics, sociology, literature, etc. (I’m less sure about the po-mo departments that claim there is no such thing as knowledge. Perhaps they should vanish.) If undergraduates manage to learn something by spending a few years near people who do research for a living, so much the better.
I am in my mid-30s and it’s only now that I see the tremendous advantage that my 68-year-old father (a habilitated professor of geology, as it happens) necessarily has over *any* academic my age. With 50 years of uninterrupted experience in his field comes an intuitive know-how that no young professor could possibly match (and undergrads literally cannot imagine). He has simply read more, done more and seen more than my generation. Universities are places where society allows that sort of expertise to slowly accumulate. You literally cannot replace expert academics, except perhaps over 3 or 4 generations. If you were to fire him and replace him with 2 or 4 visiting instructors so as to save money, you’d do the equivalent of cutting down an ancient oak to plant a few of sunflowers.
(2) Regarding the whole humanities/sciences thing: it’s a bad classification. Plenty of high-level work requires a good grounding in both. My reading list for this week includes some set theory, some linguistics, a bit of cognitive neuroscience, and a paper by the philosopher Fred Dretske. It’s impossible to proscribe in advance where useful ideas will come from.
(3) Finally, @working class: the people who defrauded the US were not intellectuals. They were bankers. Plenty of academics have working class roots and conduct research aimed at protecting the working class, one way or another, from various kinds of harm or exploitation. Here’s one concrete example: a good friend of mine is an economist who studies pig farms. One of the explicit goals of her research is to offer farming and working class families scientific data about the negative effects of pork mega-farms on small rural towns. That data is essential if working folk want to organize to do something about the mega-corporations muscling in on their communities. There surely are academics who are snooty unpleasant but you find that in any profession. Don’t forget that there are working class intellectuals too.
(4) re: ZK’s remarks. I’ve now spent a number of years both at UK and US universities. It’s worth pointing out that the funding model in the two cases is very different. The argument that ZK pays taxes and so has a right to tell universities what to teach cuts no ice for reasons discussed in (1). But even ignoring that, it cuts even less ice in the US since so many universities here are private.
Ahem, are you forgetting the plot of Team America?
I don’t think that you are necessarily arguing for cutting liberal arts education because it can be duplicated by reading, but some certainly might assume that if you can read about it on your own there’s no need for anyone to teach it or to study it in an institutional setting.
When I was going to college, I was thinking I was spending an awful lot of money to primarily read and talk things over with other students — some of whom we’re not worth talking to — and the professors — who likewise were hit-and-miss. I was thinking, “Holy shit. My parents are paying $20,000 a year for this?” I did some math. I figured I could live in Costa Rica for about 5 years for 20,000. Hang out on the beach with a bunch of books and read. For an extra 10,000/year I could probably pay for 2-3 tutors, who would give me individual attention every day instead of throwing me in a class with 5-50 other students twice a week. I began to think that a lot of the humanities was an institutional boondoggle; the main thing it was manufacturing was a credential, that MAYBE would be backed by some education.
I love reading, writing, thinking, learning, conceptualizing and all that, but I’m a bit peeved that college seems to have such an exclusive cultural lock on those things; as well as that a lot of college courses — even of “hard” subjects like math and social research — are shams designed to make sure they still have students at the end of the semester.
Delurking for a min. Amazing we’re over 300 responses. I don’t have time to read them all, so apologies if I’m repeating something.
The same thing is happening in High School. Not only are we not replacing teachers who quit/retire, the programs are getting hit. Belay that, not all programs. If it’s a special education program, it doesn’t get touched. If you are an advanced placedment student, you are screwed.
Okay, anyone wanna bet on whether or not our two new trolls du jour are really half-literate creationists or (in the case of the Brit) half-literate antivaxers who have been lurking for ages just waiting to get a chance to enjoy seeing scientists wail?
The Brit in particular sounds like an antivaxer lurker troll; I can’t imagine any other reason for him to be hanging around a site he so patently hates. Razzie, on the other hand, may just be some fifteen-year-old kid who picked his handle because he vaguely remembered the name from somewhere as having belonged to some dude who was, like, famous for being smart, man.
Let me just add one point of clarification so that I’m not misunderstood. When I say that the function of universities is to serve as repositories of knowledge, I am by no means suggesting that undergraduates should be footing the bill. And, in fact, they are now *not* paying for this. They are paying for something entirely different. If universities abandoned trying to offer undergraduates campus-wide wi-fi, Olympic swimming facilities, super-special sports coaches, and other country-club frills, undergrads in the USA could pay what Canadian students still pay: 3 to 6 thousand dollars per year. (Google McGill undergraduate tuition if you don’t believe me.) American university administrators would, of course, hate this idea. But profs, books, and beakers are not nearly as expensive as you might imagine.
ZK – you are an embarrasment to the engineering profession. I am glad this narrow minded attitude isn’t prevalent in the City of Calgary trasportation department. Some civil engineers there actually thought it might be a idea to have a little art in the fomr of reliefs on the piers of overpasses and the retaining walls of underpasses – doesn’t move any more cars per hour, but it does improve the quality of life and helps to humanize the city.
I discovered the book “How to Lie with Statistics” (a vital component in any skeptics bullshit detection toolkit because it was a text in a philosophy course that some of my Mechanical Engineering classmates were taking as an elective. The biggest deficiency in the education we recieved was insufficent emphasis on critical thinking and questioning the assumptions in the equations we were using.
Also, by your definition 75% of the engineering, math and science courses I took were a waste of time because I don’t use that knowledge specifically in my job.
Cutting the Geology program in a state that must have all kinds of erosion and groundwater problems – WTF. We had one geology course in second year engineering (the first 2 years were common for all disciplines) and the Civil Engineers took a second Geology course. Do they have an engineering school at that university?
Bah, post got cut off. I’m a noob.
Anyway, we have one shining star on the school board actually say “does a library really contribute to the educational experience?”
This person will be un-elected I’m sure.
So programs will continue to be cut, unless it involves wearing a helmet. FSM forbid we touch sports.
So I like to extend a good luck to the colleges out there. We tried. Us library ladies have been pointing the kids toward books, research, correcting papers, and getting kids excited about learning. The school libraries may be gone soon.
I’m sure the football team will still do well!
My husband earned his masters degree in geology at University of Florida in 1984. What that has led to is a career in petroleum exploration. His salary has allowed us to travel world-wide, send our child to private school, college,and university, and to purchase a vacation home. I am shocked at the notion that U of F would close their geology department when so many of their graduates have gone on to distinguished careers. We will absolutely contact the members of the FL legislature/administration who are considering this assinine closure.
Here in Texas, they will be more likely to keep the Geology Dept, and throw the rest of the University away.
Except the football team.
Without good education and scientific research wellfunded, our civilisation will be doomed. It sounds like I am exaggerating, but I really don’t think I am.
Seriously, the attitude I hear from people in a couple of the above post is part of the reason I applied outside of the United States for my PhD studies. So, many people have an utter disrespect for the pursuit of knowledge in this country. I am surprised to see this on a science forum. Humanities are just as integral to human knowledge as the hard sciences.
Delurking. Just wondering what the average tuition fees are in the states? We don’t have fees in Ireland thank FSM, as the government currently pays them(though not for much longer). No universities are facing large cutbacks at the moment but there are voices getting ever louder about how the return on investment should be much quicker than it is. Our government intends to bring tuition fees back while continually bailing bank executives out with massive pensions. This short term kind of thinking is rife and will not serve any of us well. Our economy is currently the weakest in the European Union and the government intends to take several thousand euro more out of our pockets for fees (I know we’re lucky we have no fees)along with raising taxes to near 50%. Doesn’t sound like the greatest time to be starting to work, think I’ll finish my degree (Microbiology) then do a post grad.
Hope anyone affected by those cuts lands on their feet.
@326: Tuition at a top-notch, private American college runs over 43 thousand dollars per year. Not all students pay the full fees though. Some get scholarships or other exemptions.
A significantly less prestigious private university in the same geographical area costs 36K per year.
A mediocre public community college costs 6K per year.
All right, so you’re more interested in the ideas themselves than in the process of how those ideas came to be. And for an introductory level college course in certain subjects, that’s might be okay. But if you’re going to do research in any field (and this includes science) you have to look to primary sources.
But even in the case of intro courses, I think that’s a short-sighted view to take, because the process by which we come to an idea is sometimes just as important as the idea itself. For example, in my Historical Geology class, I teach modern Plate Tectonic Theory. Lithospheric plates moving on top of the Asthenosphere, convergent and divergent boundaries, etc. But before I get to all that, I talk about Alfred Wegener and the hypothesis of continental drift. I talk about the fact that while Wegener had a lot of evidence for the continents once being connected, he didn’t have a good mechanism to explain how continents moved. Then after studying the topography of the ocean floor, Harry Hess hypothesized seafloor spreading. Matthews and Vine (1963) provided further evidence for seafloor spreading and the creation of new crust at mid-ocean ridges through the magnetic reversals preserved in oceanic crust. It’s a great example of the scientific method at work, and a demonstration that science is a process. Now, this is an intro level class, and I don’t make my students read relevant primary literature. But I think it’s dangerous to think that we can simply compile data and come up with anything as useful as if we take that data in context. Take away all the history of Plate Tectonic Theory and it remains a solid and useful scientific theory, but we lose a valuable teaching tool.
This may be a little tangential to the point you’re trying to make, Erasmus, but my point is that distilling knowledge down to discreet facts, and forgetting what the original sources of those facts are sets a bad precedent. It might lead students to believe that facts are facts and they never change. We need to remind them (or rather, we need to teach them) that new discoveries lead to new ideas, and what we “know” about the world is always changing. Science is a process.
While I’m no humanities scholar, I would guess that these basic premises–context matters and what we “know” about the world changes–apply to those subjects as well.
@ Liberal Atheist regarding #324
I don’t think you are exaggerating. We have bred beyond the capability of our planet to sustain us. I can only hope the scientists among us will understand the disintegrating picture and form a survival network to avoid/circumvent the obvious.
What the fuck?!? I’m so glad that Australia as a social tertiary education system, even if I am left with a 20K debt to the government at the end of it.
You “respect the subject”? Profoundly stupid. When evaluating works in any subject, you should be concerned with the methods and quality of the research.
Yes, because there’s an impenetrable wall between history and, say, sociology. That’s why there will never be conferences and journals for social-science history or historical sociology. And why I’m never allowed into archives to do research.
Oh, wait…
If you think there’s any meaningful distinction between history and sociology or anthropology other than their broad disciplinary emphases (generally speaking – this often doesn’t hold true at the individual level), you are ignorant of current practice in these fields.
Erasmus, poor sweetie, stepped on his dick when he chose his moniker and has spent this entire thread tripping and stumbling.
If you think humanities is a breeze, barely a step up from basketweaving, you might be interested in the goal I set for myself when I was an undergraduate English lit major:
Name and understand all major events in human history, especially advances in scientific knowledge, but also including politics and conflicts, religion, disasters and ecological shifts, and sea-change periods in history such as the fall of Rome, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. Learn and be able to intelligently discuss something about each academic discipline on campus.
My aim was to be someone who could synthesize knowledge across a wide variety of disciplines. In other words, I wanted to be classically educated. The English lit part? A pleasant way to hone my writing skills before entering law school.
I didn’t go to law school after all; I fell in love with computers and took an M.S. in computer science instead. That provided me with the trade-school part of my education so that I could get a job.
And yes, I easily got a job, in an academic library, where my wide range of background knowledge led to one of the earliest implementations of the library without walls in the country. Oh, and by the way, since I had worked hard at learning all manner of things as an undergrad, I found it trivial to teach myself mainframe systems programming, PC operating systems, networking, HTML, Apache server, LINUX, and that new-fangled world wide web thing on the job — all while I was designing the largest academic computing lab on campus (the equipment, of course, but also the user interface carefully targeted to people who had never used a computer before, the staffing model . . . and the furniture). Apparently I’d also mastered multi-tasking while I was taking such a heavy academic load as an undergraduate.
Later on in my career, I ran IT departments in factories, while also heading up project management and work process improvement for the company. Odd, isn’t it, how all the writing and honing of my critical thinking skills made it trivial to elicit project deliverables from the stakeholders, manage communications, run meetings, keep the documentation, and drive projects forward.
Well, I guess Erasmus would say that all that “fluff” I studied as an undergraduate was a waste of time. To me and my employers, however, it was the critical edge of farsightedness that I provided beyond the average code monkey that kept new non-IT projects moving under my management as time went by.
I will admit, however, that I loathed postmodernism. Fortunately, the faculty at my university were far too busy demanding real work from us undergraduates, so that we didn’t have time to dabble in irrelevancy.
But I see I forgot to mention that all those persuasive essays I wrote in Composition and Rhetoric translated into an unparalleled ability to market and sell my projects to get them funded? That part worked out very well indeed.
So, ironically-named Erasmus, you’d better hope you don’t come up against somebody like me as a rival in your field. The mopping of the floor with your head will commence when that unhappy day arrives, because no trained monkey technician is going to have a chance against a really, truly, deeply educated person who knows how to get things done.
#332
Remind me never to get into an argument with you, Leigh
How the fuck do you guys manage to get to university when it costs that much? Everyone must be in ridiculous debt!
some of us don’t manage. i finally gave up and decided i need to make money first, THEN go studying.
others here, i’m sure, were so blilliant and lucky that they got scholarships. others still seem to require no sleep or food, and work 2 jobs while doing college. i’m neither, so i’m just a college dropout :-p
and Leigh is making me feel very very inferior :-p
#334
That is, if you’re lucky enough to be granted a loan to cover the costs…
I only took a loan to cover for living expenses and books and such, and the tuition itself was entirely for free.
All this talk of ‘fluff’ and sticking to facts reminds me of something I heard from the head of a bio lab – “The man who knows ‘how’ will always be able to get a job, but the man who knows ‘why’ will be the boss.”
I’ll wager that the ignorant fuckhead who wrote this hasn’t spent a single day teaching at a university (and I mean teaching, not doing the pathetic shit that most TAs do). Put this asshole in pre-tenure and they’ll come out the other side under a desk in a little fetal ball, drooling on their pants and reciting Chaucer to their cat.
It doesn’t change your point, but that’s every state in the union, period*.
Unless you go to an inexpensive school, are wealthy, are really bright, throw a ball real well, or spend a few years crawling under machine gun fire, then yep, rather often people are in ridiculous debt.
And a nod of agreement at what cactusren wrote in #328, with an additional +10 for referring to it as the hypothesis of continental drift**.
*Nature hates cities.
**I have a colleague that teaches plate tectonics without any historical context, and insists on referring to it instead as the theory of continental drift. Besides being simply wrong, he misses both the excellent illustration of Science as ProcessTM that the studying the history of this theory provides, and the excellent example of how scientific theories (in this case plate tectonics) often serve to unite various related hypotheses (in this case continental drift and seafloor spreading, among others).
So yeah, wow. I went to sleep and Erasmus pretends I never substantively answered his questions with the facts and is still repeating their one note. Quelle surprise.
To answer one of his questions. Modern research by the humanities includes Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine which has revealed a global plot by Free Market enthusiasts to undermine economies and social structures in multiple countries including our own thus explaining why we’re here now. That’s a pretty applicable one. I also worked for a sociologist who did a lot of work in mortality rates and suicide rates that allowed the increasing of suicide aid and prevention and hospital staff to prevent seemingly random patterns of being swamped and over-crowded. Then there’s all the historians who have been beating back the Republicans attempt to rewrite the history of FDR and the New Deal. And there’s many more including as I pointed out earlier, preventing AIDS from becoming a global pandemic affecting the likes of white people and straight men unlike those dirty Africans and filthy homos. Something I’m sure white straight men like Erasmus can easily appreciate I’m sure (because there is no way he’s not a bag of privilege).
I am certainly not the first to point out that the reverse is a bigger problem. Scientists generally esteem the humanities—but often the respect is not mutual. I am sure all the scientists here have had a similar experience at faculty parties: a humanities professor commenting on his science and math ignorance, not with shame but rather with a sort of bravado and boasting: I barely made it through algebra. Imagine if you witnessed a science professor state, with a smile, that he barely made it through Reading, or that he knew nothing about Shakespeare or history. You’d be appalled.
Also—the trade school v. university is a false dichotomy. There is a fair question: has the national trend toward a reduction in the number of hours devoted to the major field of study, traded for more hours allocated to liberal learning, been beneficial or detrimental? I don’t pretend to know the answer—but it is a legitimate question that deserves more than a simpleminded “are we a university or trade-school?” There are some exceptional universities that are not Liberal Arts schools.
it seems to me that none of the departments of universities should have to have their funding cut to make up for a shrinking budget. Why are the different departments and their defenders fighting on who or what is more important? Why as a people and a society do we permit the greedy and self centered high jack the debate because they do not want to pay for anything that they themselves do not personally benefit from? “No New Taxes”
no new spending on anything not directly about “economic recovery”
we are not growing much of anything as a culture , hell we are not even maintaining what we have. We are depending on outsourcing and importing and that is becoming difficult when it comes to important kinds of talented people.
we are slowly and deliberately destroying ourselves because it is too expensive and too difficult to succeed.
It is a choice we are making it is not some law of nature that we should be the “first among Nations” it is a “gift” of our history. IF we are to remain so we will have to do the work make the choices. If we decide not to continue to advance, grow and prosper we will not lead we will be forced to follow. We can not lead or prosper without supporting education (all of it) to the fullest it is the future. To not support education is to live on and in the past .
Leigh #332 FTW!
On the general front, how we got to this stage is actually both interesting and tragic and a lot has to do with the sudden importance of “marketable” skills. We can see it in the thread, people ostensibly for higher education, still yet decrying it for any discipline that’s not marketable or creates raw usable products.
With the rise of Reagan in the 80s and the attempt to “undo” the changes of the 60s and the 70s, universities became target point for “culture warriors” to try and attack what they say as the hippie menace that deprived them of glorious things like Vietnam and gave them civil rights and women’s rights instead. As such, the humanities once seen as the place rich white men went to get “cultured” suddenly were attacked as being brown and feminine and overly invested in imparting “useless” liberal culture to the masses. Aka, the birth of the indoctrination line of attack on universities. “Fiscal conservatives” jumped on the no product line of attack on the humanities and the humanities were ill-prepared to defend themselves because their products were entirely theoretical, in the land of ideas, and even their most scholarly works produced theories and methodologies towards looking at the world and interpreting events. They couldn’t just point to a pacemaker and say STFU.
The fiscal conservatives loved the attack because it was key for the anti-tax line of attack. They wanted government to have been seen as failed, as producing nothing. But programs like social security and education were universally beloved. In this manner they were able to undermine the value of education and similar discussions of how “social security will fail” are used to try and undermine the other most popular social program.
With massive cutbacks in funding and respect and demands that the schools produce more economic viable materials, the schools found themselves underfunded for infrastructure and increasing tuition and running their schools more like businesses. This was wonderful for conservatives as it placed education out of bounds for most of the lower classes and made it an expensive debt-inducing privilege for the middle class thus necessitating that middle class graduates would be forced into being wage slaves in corporations just out of college rather than feeling free to actually use their degrees to change shit.
This massive need for students to get a job right out of college to pay off the debt incurred was also great for the anti-university types because they could continue to use this as evidence that all a University should deliver is “marketable” skills and thus prioritize fields they liked such as MBAs and Economics over all others and get young radical minded people to close off their minds to all of the humanities and the potential to really think about the social structures that affect them. If they could control the young, they believe, then there would never again be the type of push-back against the status quo they saw in the 60s and 70s.
And that’s the story of why we’re now cutting essential hard science programs in the districts that most desperately need the exact disciplines they’re cutting. Because this war never stopped, but young minds no longer know of the history that got them to this point and so accept the bum deal without a second thought because “is there really any other way?”
In further point, universities shouldn’t bankrupt anyone, it should be free to join if you qualify and we should pump investment into the education system like there’s no tomorrow. It’s the heart of innovation, but it also makes us better people. If we were to tax the wealthy at real tax rates, reduce our bloated military spending, and stop our incredibly failed war on drugs, we’d have more than enough money for both free well-funded education and nationalized health care. In the long run, it’d save costs for business and the ptoo market. In the short term, we’d be better people with the stability and the base of knowledge to actually progress rather than standing stagnant, losing more and more minds to a repetitive unproductive grind.
One Word: Gerrymander!
341-
Really? I’ve heard way more scientists denigrate science than the other way. As far as that comment, I’ve always seen it as self-deprecating when used as in “Well, everyone is ignorant about something, I’m ignorant about math, and yet look at what I was able to do despite that, just goes to show”.
On the liberal arts, yes it’s an important question, but you ignore what the important question is. The question is not trade school or not, but what it means to be a trade school. A trade school produces technicians, those with highly brilliant ability to do their function but limited ability to creatively think about their function and innovate it. It will not produce scientists without students willing to make up humanities studies on their own with outside reading and intellectual curiosity in foreign subjects.
The creation of total professionals is vitally important, both in the work world and the academic world as ideas need to be created, communicated, and often times (Especially in business) the idea you’re implementing is stupid and needs to be changed to actually be a good idea.
And one of the more frightening things I saw in my school were the number of pre-meds getting a solely technical basic education. That’s frightening. I don’t want my doctor to quote Proust, but if I have a drug allergy to a standard procedure, I want them to be able to think on their feet to respond to it rather than freezing like many of those undergrads did when the tests asked them to implement and analyze their base of knowledge.
It’s also about them valuing more than just money. Another thing I don’t want my doctor to do. Even if they are jaded, misanthropes, I want them to view me as a human being instead of a potential income source.
We have the same short sighted leaders in Australia. Our current PM is a closet creationist and was partly elected on an “education revolution” but one of the first things he did was cut funding to CSIRO (our premier research organisational ) and he has neglected (and even reduced) university research funding.
They just cant see the wood for the trees … its very depressing … I bet you China is not cutting is University funding ?
:-(
337-
Yes.
I want to defend the use of original sources in the humanities by pointing to an edge case – my own discipline, philosophy. There’s an excellent, but rather long, statement about the discipline by Sir Anthony Kenny (in a brilliant little book called “Philosophers” by Steve Pyke).
Philosophy, he said, is both an art and a science. Like a science, there are discoveries in philosophy. There are solid things that people doing philosophy today know that previous generations of philosophers didn’t know. Kripke pointing out the existence of a posteriori necessities; Gettier’s proof of the limits of justified-true-belief accounts of knowledge; maybe Stoutian tropes as a theoretical alternative in the properties debate. Some of these advances come from within the field itself, some track the advances in natural science.
Philosophy being like an art, though, is due to the fact that, with a pure science, one goes back to read the works of the ancients just out of curiosity – there’s no requirements for doctors to read Galen or physicists to read Newton or even biologists to read Darwin – but with philosophy, we still read the ancients to see how they thought: what process they went through in order to think what they thought. As Kenny put it: “Unlike works of science, classic works of philosophy do not date… We read Plato and Aristotle not simply in a spirit of antiquarian curiosity, but because we want to share their philosophical insights.”
I do find the amount of anti-philosophy rhetoric from among some free-thinkers and skeptics to be rather depressing. I mean, it’s not like a bunch of philosophers didn’t do their part in the fight against creationism – Ruse, Pennock, Barbara Forrest etc. Nor are contemporary philosophers particularly anti-science: read Quine, Armstrong, Popper, Russell – these people aren’t anti-scientific, they’re strongly supportive of science. You go into any (secular) English-speaking department of philosophy and take a poll on their attitude to science, and you’ll find that philosophers are pretty well informed about science and mathematics, interested in scientific advances and not very anti-scientific at all. Obviously, the folks working on, say, logic or philosophy of mind will rate higher than ethicists or aestheticians, but so what?
@ Kel,330,
and jadehawk @ 335,
I grew up and went to public school/high school in Germany at no cost,and while in Australia only 3-5% of students in public schools make it to Uni,over there its up to 50%,which constitutes a big problem for Unis obviously(there is differences in the systems to be fair,Germany splits its students up after year 4 into 3 different “high school” entities,depending on performance).
As to Uni,I studied for 7 years,at no cost other than having to pay my own living,which I managed to do by working during semester holidays(used to build those cars with a star),and did not end up with any debt at all when I finished.
There now are student fees in Germany also,but they are miniscule(say,800.-US per semester or something),and their introduction almost caused a revolution.
Universities there are under immense budget pressures as well,and students suffer from high class numbers,old equipment etc,but all in all your University education remains affordable and on a fairly good level compared to the rest of the world,and most importantly,doesnt normally exclude kids from getting a Uni degree by means of inaffordability.
PZ wrote:
It’s [the government] been the domain of fools and thieves for far too long.
PZ apparently wrote the preceding without intentional irony.
Alas, if we only elected smarter thieves to steal even more of our money, then the problem of government-run boondoggles would be solved.
This is the standard response to the inevitable failure of all government programs, they are “chronically underfunded”, they never have enough reources to do a good job, etc. This is endemic; it is symptomatic of the systemic flaw in the government model.
Maybe that model itself needs to be changed?
(To borrow from Sven:)
THREADJACK ALERT
Yeah,and even worse !
LIBERTARIAN THREADJACK ALERT
Inevitable failure of all government programs?
Sounds a lot like the private sector, frankly. The main difference is that government programs are created by fiat by legislators who then don’t bother to allocate funds for them. So, while government programs won’t technically vanish when the money dries up, like a private business would, the result is effectively the same.
Yeah, but what’s the alternative? The private sector is no better. Stockholders are even more short-sighted and flighty than legislators, so no help there. And businesses are no more efficient at providing services than the government. Customer service departments are seen as a necessary evil, at best, while the focus is on sales and marketing.
Maybe there’s another model, but I’m not an economist. Any ideas?
*Sigh*
here we go….
*Grabs his Peter Robinson book and goes to bed*
Yeah, I don’t think I want to be around when this thread goes, as Homer Simpson (or GWB) would say, nucular. So I’m off to revisit the genius that is Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.
Does Florida have ballot initiatives?
Does Florida have ballot initiatives?
Yup. The “good citizens” of Florida just barred recognition of same-sex marriages, civil unions, or domestic partnerships in November.
I was able to go to uni purely out of the virtue of having a public education system, there was no way my parents would have been able to afford it if it were a privatised system. Thanks to that, I’m now in a position where I’m trained, qualified and able to repay back the system through taxes for supporting me in my time of need. Having education open to everyone in my books is a vital part of a healthy open and free society.
This is a little bit misleading.
UF has told every unit to prepare a suggestion for a 10% cut. So, while I agree that gutting geology seems crazy, if you are going to write and protest, consider that the proposed cut will have to come from other liberal arts and sciences then.
What? I was just asking a question. I didn’t flame anyone.
If BB is an economic libertarian, then he won’t be able to answer my question. End of discussion. *shrugs*
Inkadu:
My feelings might be different because I’m coming from the Canadian university system, which as has been noted is heavily subsidized and tuition payments are much lower than those in the US. I certainly was never wasting 40K/year!
However, I’m also speaking as someone who completed a degree and then spent a couple of years trying to further my education on my own. I did a lot of reading in that time, and I think that definitely helped me to refine my interests and to know what I wanted to study in a way that I hadn’t while I was completing my first degree. But although that reading is helping me now, I don’t think it could make up for the classes I’m taking. My profs have given me a lot of guidance as to where to look for connections between those readings and what’s going on in the real world, and some tools for analyzing and identifying those connections. At any rate, I really do think that I’m getting much more out of my classes than I got from reading alone.
Of course, there are plenty of people in my program who do not take it seriously. They’re here because they finished high school and university was the expected thing to do next. Some of them might well be better off studying on their own until they figure out where they want to go.
Does anyone here think maybe too many people go to college? Expectations are a bit too high? As this attitude has prevailed for decades, a Bachelors degree has become the new H.S. diploma, and as such depreciated.
I have a liberal arts degree, and enjoyed getting it. Most trades, though, pay more than my salary, and need the labor. Some days I wonder. Not everyone should go to college, not everyone needs to study science, not everyone needs to sound like a polymath to impress a cocktail party, not everyone (sorry Obama) needs to speak a second language. Its time we understood that.
@ZK “I graduated in 1990, by when it was already a process “go to university, get degree, go to work”. My contemporaries had exactly the same experience, as far as I can recall. My brother-in-law is 15 years younger than me, and his university experiences were much the same.”
Quite so and this is part of the problem. I want my staff to have more than abilities: I want them to understand why their discipline teaches them certain things, its historical context, how it relates to other subjects etc. An example of where my field (computer science) goes wrong in having such a generally narrow focus is the knee-jerk reaction of our government to solve every problem by building a database that can’t possibly work anyway.
As clueless as ZK is, he does raise some important points. There is a proliferation of ‘mickey mouse degrees’ (which ZK characterises as ‘yoghurt knitting’) in the UK, but by no means to the extent that the tabloid press will have us believe. The idea of mickey mouse degrees is more of a tabloid witch hunt than a reality, but there are examples of degrees that seem genuinely quite worthless: this is more to do with the shallowness of the content than the subject area.
This all seems to be a symptom of a more general dumbing down that is related to government targets (as ZK says) that imply quantity of education is more important than quality. It seems inevitable that this will result in easier degrees and there’s evidence to suggest that this is happening.
This is the real crisis we face in UK education today. We also have departments closing down. My university reacently closed its physics department, which didn’t even raise much of a public outcry.
The focus on what *use* science (or humanities or art or whatever) might be is a familiar and dangerous one which even ZK ought to recoil at.
As for the debt:
It’s getting so high even at public universities (which are by and large NOT the shithole of horrible education some like to think) because the states keep cutting their contribution. It used to be that the whole point of public universities was to provide an education for those who couldn’t afford private school tuition, but now the states aren’t putting in, so they are public in name only.
And if you consider state tuition – ok, someone comes out of it with debt. Take into consideration the meager aid they do receive (thanks, federal government for cutting Pell grants, too), if they’re working at the time what they can pay along with it, they’re likely to come out with an average of 20-30k. You know what that is? That’s a really nice car. College degree, which will increase lifetime salary and give more options for different careers, for the cost of a car. Is that really such a terrible burden? I agree that college is too expensive, although it’s not because of the programs offered, but people also in general seem to have an unrealistically low notion of how much it’s worth.
Erasmus,
You misattributed a quote by someone else to me, and conveniently ignored my own (how exactly does one miss a five paragraph ramble?). Now, it’s only common courtesy to reply to a comment someone aimed directly at you, even if you think it’s utter bullshit. I try to engage you in a conversation, despite your apparent unwillingness to even consider the possibility that maybe, just possibly, you might be wrong in your assessment of a field you know [b]absolutely nothing about[/b].
The problem, however, is that you’re not making an argument – you’re [b]asserting[/b] a personal, ill-formed opinion of social science and the humanities based on some third-rate stereotype of a turtlenecked Pomo poseur hauling at a Gaulois, and are holding on to this bare assertion despite all attempts to make you question it. You have, a priori, decided that an entire category of human intellectual activity is worthless, and aren’t really interested in deepening your understanding of it. Let me ask you one more time – do you believe social processes and works of art are a valid object of study or not? If you do, please provide arguments as to why you think current work in the fields studying these areas is subpar – and no, not assertions based probably on a misreading of Sokal, [b]arguments[/b]. If not, I’m afraid I have nothing left to say. Anyone who believes the vast complexity of human culture and society doesn’t really demand all that much observation and theoretical analysis is utterly clueless.
You’ll note one of the reasons the methodologies of social sciences and humanities differ from physics and assorted hard sciences is the fact that [i]we’re studying something that is not nature[/i]. In fact, sociology was originally named “social physics”, but they dropped the idea of a physics of nature when it turned out society is not an immutable entity governed by immutable laws. We study things that exist in a particular environment, change over time, and interact in complex and variable ways – any biologist can understand exactly what the issues are, and why going back to original texts is often a source of much valuable insight. When it comes to literature, I’d remind you that language is a lot more ambiguous than mathemathics, so it’s impossible to produce a definitive interpretation of a literary work. We English grads don’t like charts and graphs because in our line of work they’re next to useless, understand?
Your problem is that you’re pontificating in a very ignorant and clueless manner about theories and ideas you do not begin to understand. Knowing general relativity doesn’t make you an expert on cultural relativism – vice versa applies, of course. Bottom line is, if you want to discuss the relative value of work done in social sciences and humanities, it helps to take the effort to learn what it is we poseurs actually do for a living. You don’t find me dismissing physics as “hey, shit falls down, nothing more to it”, do you?
Regarding easier degrees @364: when my father went to school is was routine for even very good students to fail a few classes. I know that he failed several. It didn’t prevent him from eventually getting his habilitation though. At the time, it was normal for students to re-take hard material until they achieved the desired level of competence. An earlier F was either ignored or replaced by a new grade when that new grade was merited.
These days, that’s impossible. Students pay too much to allow them to fail or ask them to repeat courses. Also, since universities have been assigned the task of (in effect) vetting candidates for non-academic jobs, an F no longer merely indicates that the student has an inadequate grasp of the available knowledge in some narrow sub-field. A student who has failed a class is — as far as I know — seen as either high-risk or unemployable by many businesses. Such students don’t get summer internships. And failed classes put an end to their hopes of attending grad school.
It’s too bad we have allowed this model to take root. I can tell you now that each student in one of my 2nd year courses this term will receive a grade of B- or above. I depend on their good evaluations of me and my teaching skills to keep my job. (I don’t have tenure.) If I were to fail even 15% of them, I’d be gently shunted off to the side at the next review hurdle and someone who understands how the game is played would take my place. So instead, I will make the material easier and let them re-take tests. I need to pay rent and those are the existing economic realities.
One of the biggest factors causing the ease of class and grade inflation is the reliance on adjunct teaching. Again, it’s a matter of the business people cutting costs and the university suffering for it. Adjuncts can’t spend a lot of time on classes, because they get paid peanuts for it and have to cobble together insane loads to be able to survive. At the same time, they can’t be too harsh or they’ll get low evaluations and not get rehired. At my tiny state school, almost 70% of English, Math, and Science classes are taught by adjuncts. Everything suffers; not because adjuncts are bad teachers or don’t know their subjects, but because we work them to death. The state won’t let us afford to do otherwise. (We had a 20% across the board budget cut this year, but were at least lucky enough that it was all in non-personnel services. No printer cartridges for us, and go easy on the chalk.)
I’ll throw my hat into the ring and delurk. The value of an English degree, according to my academic advisers, is that it shows a prospective employer that you can be trained, that you can analyze abstract and concrete ideas and take in large amounts of information. I’m a history major myself. Most of the graduates from my program have not gone on to be historians, but work in business. They sold themselves on a similar ability, read, analyze and remember large amounts of information very quickly. My history classes all averaged one book of reading per week, in addition to term papers. Some of the graduates who specialized in East Asia found jobs working for companies that do business in East Asia, despite not speaking the languages when they started. One of my contacts in my job search (i’m still an undergrad) became interested in Japan because he took a Japanese literature course (Japanese literature classes in the west spend half their time with the tale of Genji, unless the class is modern lit). He went to Japan, taught English, learned Japanese, is now a big wheel at General Electric, working their Japanese contacts. It really is an asset to go to Japan and show them that you read The Tale of Genji.
a-fucking-men
Wow, yoghurt knitting. I’d like to see the course description for that, and the curriculum it’s part of.
I’ll bet the faculty members milk it for all they can. Personally I would rather study cheddar embroidery, although some would say that’s pretty cheesy.
#367:
Your point about intolerance of failure is very apt. However, you’re vastly understating the problem: as far as many institutions are concerned, B+ is the new F. An undergrad who gets more than one B+ in either 3rd or 4th year has pretty much lost all chances of getting into graduate school. This in most cases amounts to a lifetime rejection from further studies because few institutions allow students to repeat what are technically passing grades.
There is no scope in the postsecondary system for students to take the kind of risks and experimentation necessary to either get a full education or to find out what they really want to do in academics or in life. Undergraduates only get one chance to grasp the ring; if they miss, they don’t get a second chance. Ever.
Teaching staff who think students have unrealistic expectations of A grades for mediocre work really need to look in the mirror some time and realize that they are the ones who have created a system where the only meaningful division is between A students and ditch diggers.
Man, I’m glad I live in Wisconsin. Sure, we have the same sorts of things going on here, I’m sure, but last I’ve heard we get more funding than many other states.
The misattribution was totally an accident, and I only just now learned about it. My apologies for that.
As for ignoring your post: I’ve been wasting enough time in this thread already. There’s no law of courtesy dictating that people have to respond to every single post directed at them. If you want to reliably get a reply, try not to sermonize. This time, though, a few of your points are worth answering.
I don’t believe I am stereotyping, aside from a few ill-tempered comments. I have far more experience with the humanities than people are implying. For instance, my enthusiasm for philosophy (construed in the broad sense, as in “deep questions”) was what got me into science in the first place. Creative writing was one of my main hobbies when I was a teenager. And so on. The idea that someone needs to possess academic qualifications in a discipline before reaching opinions about it, is just outrageous. Again may I direct your attention to the excellent Chomsky quotation in post #247.
That doesn’t justify English literature, only sociology. English literature doesn’t try to give a scientific “theoretical analysis” of human culture, and people studying the subject often have conflicting interpretations about what they’re setting out to achieve. Some think it is for pure entertainment, and believe the central purpose of the subject is to enrich our culture (not analyze it), by giving us better theatre, movies, literature, etc. Others have a more ambitious notion of Eng lit’s prime directive, and argue as you do.
If they were really trying to understand human culture, here are the questions they would ask. To what extent did misogyny diminish throughout the 19th century? To find out, do a statistical analysis of misogynistic passages in 19th century literature. Of course they don’t do that. Rather than doing the hard work required for proper statistical analyses, they prefer to sit around hyperanalyzing every word written by a famous author. I don’t think that’s productive. I don’t think it’s helpful at creating new knowledge.
Sociology is more respectable than lit crit, and in theory it could be a very worthy subject indeed. In theory. We both know, however, that as things stand, the field contains an unhealthy amount of mental masturbation, deliberately polysyllabic words, and general overcomplication of trite ideas.
One point I forgot to make concerns the emphasis they lay on the validity of multiple different interpretations. You CANNOT get to the truth of ANYTHING if you’re going to allow different interpretations of something and not ask the necessary follow-up question, namely, “Which interpretation is most accurate?”
Erasmus says, “You CANNOT get to the truth of ANYTHING if you’re going to allow different interpretations of something and not ask the necessary follow-up question, namely, ‘Which interpretation is most accurate?'”
OK, Erasmus, which is the more “accurate” interpretation of quantum mechanics–the many-worlds interpretation or that of the Copenhagen school? Which is the most accurate interpretation of classical mechanics–the Newtonian, Lagrangian or the Hamiltonian? Which is the more accurate interpretation of probability theory–frequentist or Bayesian/subjectivist? Discuss.
How would you do a statistical analysis of misogynistic passages without first defining your terms? How would you do that without comparing the works of different writers to understand the language they used to convey their ideas?
I agree that “which is the most accurate?” is a necessary follow-up question. In my experience with the humanities, that is an ongoing question, and it’s why there are multiple modes of analysis.
A while ago, a friend of mine sent me an email in which he laughed at some of the abstracts from talks in the humanities departments of his university. I’ll paste in some of it:
(I like the “therefore”, as if the statement follows trivially.)
(While this might be a reasonable idea, does it really need so many syllables?)
Last but not least:
It wouldn’t be impossible, by any stretch, to do a statistical analysis along the lines of the one I suggested. Similar analyses are done all the time (not by people in lit crit, though).
This is getting dumber and dumber. Nobody thinks the different interpretations of quantum mechanics are all mutually compatible. It’s a question of being right or wrong, and physicists have been pulling their hair out over it for decades. And the only “interpretation”, as far as classical mechanics is concerned, regards what’s most “useful”. Frequentist versus Bayesian in probability theory is notorious for its controversy and continued debate. My point was that in the humanities, multiplicity of interpretation seems to be positively ENCOURAGED. Authors even write novels, and directors even direct movies, with it explicitly in mind that there is no single valid interpretation. To say the least, I think that mentality is unhelpful.
Ok, I’m going to skip over all the trolls (and those who feed them), and make a different point. State spending on education saves money in other areas. It is an investment, especially for K-12 schools and pre-schools. Money that the government spends on education will be saved in the costs of police, prisons, the entire justice system, welfare, unemployment, and even health care costs. Having an educated society benefits everyone in that society.
My point was that in the humanities, multiplicity of interpretation seems to be positively ENCOURAGED. Authors even write novels, and directors even direct movies, with it explicitly in mind that there is no single valid interpretation. To say the least, I think that mentality is unhelpful.
I can’t stop laughing at this.
Delicious! I like to think that I (and we) are engaged in such a program..
Incidentally, I am currently seeking out a list a friend had of the official list of idiocy used by such luminaries as the Commissioner of Lunacy (I think that was his title) up until the 1930s(?) – cretin, moron, half-wit, and so on, together with their “clinical Presentation” as it were. If I find it, I shall certainly pass it on. Anyone have any info? I asked the internet but it didn’t seem to know.
(So how on earth did it know about the size of my penis? Mysteries…mysteries…;o)
All I can see after reading this is the education factory from “The Wall”.
One of the distressing trends in college over the past twenty or so years is the rise of General Education requirements. Back when I was an undergraduate, the requirements were two courses in the same foreign language, two science courses in the same science, two math courses, and two courses in the same branch of the humanities. In addition, we were required to take two semesters of “Freshman Seminar”, which involved a great deal of writing. If you tested poorly on the entrance evaluation, you took basic composition courses, if you tested well, there were a variety of subjects you could take. I took a course on “Love in the Middle Ages”, and one that looked at the history of philosophical writings on abortion. That second course got me hooked on philosophy. I intended to be a physics major, but by Sophomore year I decided to go into Computer Science (with a Math concentration) and Mathematics (with a Computer Science concentration.) There were sufficiently many free elective slots left open that I ended up taking five philosophy courses (one of them was actually audited by the head of the Philosophy department), and four history courses. I appreciated the chance to take a somewhat deeper dive into several subjects than are presented in the typical freshman courses.
The history courses gave me a way of thinking about history, and texts, and politics, which have influenced me to this day. I’ve always since been interested in Philosophy, and have found certain philosophical ways of thinking helpful technically.
Today, students (at least at the two schools my wife has taught at) are expected to know their majors when they enter. They have much stronger general education requirements, with the result that, though they are expected to take a broader range of classes, they have no opportunity to dig deeper. (IIRC, they have to take two courses in each of about eight areas, and because of the way various classes have different numbers of credits, there isn’t a wide variety of courses which are taken.) Because the general education courses are so tied to specific departments, it becomes almost impossible to remove any of them due to vested interests.
Vagrant: Teaching staff who think students have unrealistic expectations of A grades for mediocre work really need to look in the mirror some time and realize that they are the ones who have created a system where the only meaningful division is between A students and ditch diggers.
Sorry. Can’t buy that. Do you really think teaching staff are determining admissions and retention standards? Those are primarily the domain of the Admin who are simply concerned with “warm body” policies (as in: get as many as we can). That equation is maximized with club med rec facilities, sports teams, and lower standards.
There is plenty of blame to go around. Yes, grade inflation does occur, and yes, some teaching staff buy into the “everyone’s a winner” BS, but that’s hardly surprising when their jobs are dependent on class performance, student evaluations and course popularity (not everyone teaching enjoys the protection of tenure, BTW).
And what of the responsibilities of the students?
A large percentage of students I’ve encountered come straight from HS expecting to walk through college level classes with an A average. And when they don’t get it because they are off chasing skirts, partying, texting in class, or simply couldn’t get out of bed, they whine, beg, and bribe. And when you refuse, their damn parents start calling to whine for them!
Or how about employers? If you were hiring someone and had the choice between a transcript with A’s and one with C’s and D’s, which would you give more consideration to? Many programs are evaluated on their post graduation employment rates. If your program turns out mediocre looking grads, then the pressure is on from admin and industry.
I don’t argue that the whole situation sucks, but blaming teaching staff is hardly accurate. And for the record, yes I do work at a Uni, but I have no teaching responsibilities. I just deal with the outcomes :-)
Pdiff
That comment about multiple interpretations of art is the single stupidest piece of idiocy I have seen here, and I read all of simon’s crap.
My point was that even in the physical sciences, sometimes multiplicity of interpretation can sometimes be advantageous. A Bayesian anaalysis can accomplish things that a frequentist analysis could not, but I wouldn’t want to rely on Bayesian analysis for all applications. Some problems will yield to a Hamiltonian more esily than a Newtonian approach.
“Subjective” does not necessarily equate to “wrong”. Multiplicity of interpretation may be messy, but doesn’t mean only one interpretation is correct. This is true even in science.
All I can say is: You’re not married, are you?
Authors even write novels, and directors even direct movies, with it explicitly in mind that there is no single valid interpretation. To say the least, I think that mentality is unhelpful. – Erasmus
Erasmus, have you ever been assessed for Asperger’s syndrome? This is a serious question, not a snark. Intolerance of ambiguity is a recognised aspect of the condition. If you are not a neurotypical, it could explain why – as is obvious to practically everyone here apart from yourself – you just don’t “get” the social sciences and humanities.
“The idea that the faculties of American universities are worked to the bone is just ridiculous. A depression is a great opportunity to make long-needed changes, so let’s start reforming American higher education by abolishing tenure and force the bloated ranks of professors to work like the rest of us–produce or else! And no more sabbaticals or paid summers off work, either.”
I hope you are joking.
First, the whole point of the tenure system (as it stands now, as opposed to the days when it was designed to promote academic freedom) is to work junior faculty to the bone as they try to get the brass ring. Because they want tenure, you are virtually assured that they aren’t going to leave for the five or six years until you deny or grant it to them. This means that they will get used to teaching the same classes, that the senior faculty will be able to get them to help with research, and they will be pathetically willing to do things like committee and curriculum work that the senior faculty don’t want to do. If they do turn out to be productive, and publish research, and produce grants, the university can give them tenure. Sure, some professors who get tenure immediately turn into potatoes, but most don’t. And, having given them tenure, the university then, though it can’t fire them without cause, generally doesn’t have to worry about them leaving, since unless they are very, very good, they won’t be able to get a better university job (at, say, a more prestigious school) and still keep tenure. Most untenured faculty work much more than forty hours a week. It is typical that they spend several hours a night grading and preparing class notes, and several hours on at least one day on the weekend. Typically, they work 50-60 hours a week.*
Another point to the tenure system is that it is like guaranteed contracts in baseball. It is a way for the university to save money on salary. (Just like health benefits etc.) Most faculty would rather make 75% of the salary in a tenure position than be on constant one or two year contracts.
Third, sabbaticals are part of the carrot used to get junior faculty to work their butts off. Most professors who get a sabbatical use it to write a book, perform field research, or perform research with colleagues from another (typically more prestigious) University.
Fourth, professors don’t get paid summers. Sometimes they can get payment as part of a research grant, but typically grants these days won’t pay for summer salary, nor release time (paying the school to hire an adjunct to cover one of the professor’s courses so he/she can spend more time on the research.) Some professors get paychecks during the summer because they’ve arranged for their (nine-month based) salary to be paid out over twelve months. A non-tenured professor’s summer is typically spent trying to get tenure by performing research (often the only time of year where he or she can spend more than a few hours a week on it), preparing for new classes to be taught in the fall (very common for new professors, since they get the courses the senior faculty don’t want, this also includes any programming courses when the department changes languages), working on more service activities (some committee’s meet over the summer, guess who gets assigned to these), catching up on technical reading, and taking a short vacation. They probably work about 30-40 hours a week during the summer. They usually don’t teach summer courses, because typically summer courses only pay adjunct wages and eat up all the time that the professor needs to spend conducting research – essentially academic suicide. The same thing happens (albeit over a shorter period) during winter break.
*Let’s not get into a pissing contest about how some jobs work more. I know, there are people who work more, and are less paid etc. However, it just isn’t the fact that professors have it terribly easy. You also have to factor in graduate school, which typically takes about six years and pays about $20,000 for what is ostensibly a half-time job (research or teaching assistant), but typically takes 30 hours per week.
There’s no controversy at all regarding classical mechanics. We can describe very precisely how Newton’s laws plus a few simple ideas about virtual work yield the Lagrange equations, and how the Lagrange equations are equivalent to Hamilton’s principle. In terms of describing the physical world, there’s no “interpretation”.
In sceince, if two “interpretations” aren’t equivalent or essentially equivalent ways of viewing phenomena, the word interpretation is being used only to reflect our ignorance (e.g. in the case of quantum mechanics). In the humanities, there’s a climate in which multiplicity of incompatible interpretations is respected, and even rejoiced in. This fosters intellectual sloppiness. They’re quite happy for you to have your opinion, for me to have mine; end of discussion. This hyper-respect of “opinion”, I believe, impedes the creation of new knowledge.
Erasmus, any time you do a scientific experiment, or hold onto a scientific idea, you should always ask yourself, “If this conclusion were the wrong one, how would I know it?” That’s what science is. If we have absolute truth with no room for re-considering it from a different viewpoint, that’s not science; it’s dogma.
No, have you?
I know lots of people (who don’t have Asperger’s, autism, or whatever) who agree with me, 100%. It’s quite normal in my country, among science types, to pour scorn on “softie subjects” or “Mickey Mouse subjects”. (I didn’t invent those terms.) People of this opinion usually keep quiet about it in public, because they don’t want to offend anyone, and they don’t want to “rock the boat”. But, you know, this is Pharyngula. This is the place where regulars delight in calling a spade a spade, regardless of whose toes get stepped on. So I’ll not “don kid gloves”.
“What I think is that fields with high intellectual content tend to preserve ideas and are not perpetually referring people back to the originals. Citing original sources is an easy dodge if you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
It depends on the field. In historical and literary studies, primary sources are very important. In Art History, for example, the lazy thing to do is to use secondary sources. Which tends to perpetuate errors. A good historian will go back to primary sources, such as newspaper reports, to determine the ground truth. As a great example of this, Christopher Page (founder of the Gothic Voices) revolutionised (IMO) the performance of 11th-15th century vocal music by looking at contemporary written accounts.
Just going to respond to part of post #332 above.
So those of us who haven’t done courses in the humanities are mere trained monkeys, and by necessity have inferior aptitude, in any technical skill. Thanks for that.
American academics lack the gonads to do what it takes.
Even in Canada the faculties have learned how to strike. See http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2009/01/20/york-university-strike-continues/
Jadehawk: “and Leigh is making me feel very very inferior :-p”
No, no, no! That was the opposite of my intention!
First of all, remember that I’m old. My parents paid for the first two years of college, and helped me with the rest. I worked in various jobs at the university for the last two years. I put myself through graduate school with help from my husband. We lived on a shoestring, but college was MUCH cheaper back then.
I come from a working-class background. My parents were the first, and for a long time the only, college graduates in our family; they went to the small college in my home town. So my goal was to be something other than a small-minded country girl from behind the Pine Curtain in East Texas.
My point with that self-aggrandizing rant was simply this: There is a value to a classical education far beyond beyond “the market”, but still applicable to the real world. A good humanities department isn’t in the business of studying any one discipline; it’s in the business of studying civilization and equipping its students with the rhetorical, knowledge acquisition, and critical thinking skills to be citizens of a democracy.
Look what happens in our world when knowledge is siloed. We get a citizenry that doesn’t understand the principles of scientific investigation; scientists who can’t communicate what they do to the citizenry; journalists who ignore the important to entertain with the trivial; religion run amok because its practitioners can’t evaluate their beliefs in the context of the modern world. Engineers can do valuable work, but they don’t know enough geology to keep from constructing buildings on fault lines, or enough basic science to keep them from creationism. The populace is so credulous that buffoons like Rush Limbaugh are hailed as intellectual giants. People are so ignorant that THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY DON’T KNOW. The Gell-Mann and Dunning-Kruger effects rule the world.
And amidst the cacophony, almost no one can construct a coherent and persuasive argument based on evidence, because no one knows how to evaluate evidence or argue coherently.
We have no PERSPECTIVE, damn it!
I have no idea why you think the humanities is any better at teaching “critical thinking” than science. It’s just arrogant. Science undoubtedly has the better track-record when it comes to solving important problems.
Erasmus, Yes there a lot of pudknockers in liberal arts–folks who foster controversy to achieve notoriety. There are also a lot of technical folks who can’t communicate. I once edited a manuscript in which the author referred to ocean currents “…caressing the ocean’s bottom…” and had to actually explain to him why this might not be the best phrasing. Here’s a hint: If the majority of people around you are getting something out of a novel/idea/discipline and you are not, maybe it’s you who isn’t getting the joke.
#386:
In the case of graduate admissions, yes, faculty (i.e. senior teaching staff) do in large part determine admission standards via their roles on admission committees.
This isn’t about students with C and D averages. Anyone who gets an average that low either has issues or is in the wrong field. This is about employers and teaching faculty setting the bar to land a well paying career at nothing short of a perfect A average. 38 A grades and 2 Bs shouldn’t be a dead-end transcript for an undergraduate. As long as faculty, institutions and employers consider anything less than 40 A/A+ grades–perfection–to be inadequate then the educational system has no business claiming to offer a safe environment for students to get a well rounded education nor do educators have any right to berate today’s youth as lazy, undisciplined, slobs.
(I’m not speaking from personal experience in any of this but I’ve seen more than enough to be severely embittered.)
stew@396: It sounds to me like you don’t know what you’re talking about. Canadian sanctimoniousness gets pretty tedious sometimes (and I’m Canadian).
In the USA many universities do not have unionized faculties. Besides, unlike in Canada, the free-market competition between universities is so cutthroat that by striking we’d be cutting the very branch we’re sitting on. Our students would transfer and we’d be left with nothing much to show for our ‘so-so-so-solidarité.’ You can’t strike effectively against the realities of a free market any more than you can usefully shake a stick at inclement weather. The university where I teach is a private businesses; its failure would be met with an indifferent shrug from the local public and government. There are 50 others in town (literally). The sort of tactics you allude to only work in a semi-socialized system where big Daddy can be compelled to give you what you want.
If there are solutions to be had in the USA, they will require broad cross-university, cross-state discussion and cooperation. Perhaps they will eventually require legislation too. In the meantime, taking universities back from administrators and increasing faculty governance is not a bad initial step.
and the “unclear on the concept” Award goes to matt for the above statement. at minimum, a basic knowledge of all the above is required for a educated, responsible citizenry (as opposed to a mob). the reason the B.A. has been degraded to the “new H.S. Diploma” doesn’t have to do with expecting too many people to know/understand too much; it has to do with the fact that what once was taught in H.S. (and still is, in many countries), is now taught in college.
I still get odd looks when I tell people here that I missed Organic Chemistry in 11th grade because I spent that year in Canada, because what H.S. teaches organic chemistry?! Not to mention that starting from 5th grade (in some cases 3rd grade even) we had to study a foreign language (continuously until graduation), with a new language added every 2-3 years, for a total of 3 languages at least touched upon. The same goes for biology, chemistry and physics and earth sciences; I dropped physics after 10th grade because I was having a hard enough time with electricity, and didn’t think I would be abloe to wrap my head around nuclear physics. add to that native language classes, philosophy/ethics/religion classes, art/music classes, politics/civics classes, and P.E., and you’ll have an overview of my High-School education. the only way American high-schoolers can get that kind of depth is with lots of AP or even taking college courses during their last 2 years of high-school
there was a paragraph break in there, i swear! :-p
A person who has a C average is average. That’s what C is supposed to mean. If every person is getting consistently higher or lower than that, the evaluation method needs to be re-adjusted to bring the average back to C. If everyone gets and A or B, those grades become meaningless. A person who gets straight Cs in a properly designed curriculum will still be qualified in their field. We should accept Cs as adequate, and use As to give credit to people who do especially well.
Th whole comparative rundown on State funding of higher ed: http://www.sheeo.org/finance/shef-home.htm
@ #334
Some of us don’t live in the US. In Canada, university isn’t that expensive. For comparison, most med students here have an average of 40 000$ (CAD) debt at the start of their practice here. For other degrees it runs at 20 – 30 000$, which includes costs for tuition (1000 to 2000$ per semester), staying, food and books. If you manage to live at your parents’ place while studying, working over the summer allows you to finish with no debt whatsoever.
In many other countries, university is basically free.
>>>has to do with the fact that what once was taught in H.S. (and still is, in many countries), is now taught in college.
And why do we have to go longer in school for less? I’ll stipulate American H.S. isnt as rigourous as much of the world. But much of the world also weeds out students and gets them tracked towards a career much earlier than H.S. In America we take the Gestalt approach, and combine that with an unreasonable expectation that everyone, and I mean everyone, should have a B.A. level liberal arts education.
Academic goals set against reality, not unlike the homeownership goals HUD set for Fannie and Freddie Mae, result in making victims of many its supposed to help, while depreciating the products value. So High school aint worth much, and now a B.A. is barely better. And we have to dilute the content in order to accommodate (and not fail, see above discussion on grade inflation, kinda like credit scores and liar loans, eh Jadehawk?) those who perhaps shouldn’t be there (but should, should, everyone should go to college, its unquestionably good!)
Its a wonder America doesnt suffer more from all this. I expect its largely because education for most business is gained at the office, not in the classroom. And H.S. serves other real and useful functions, like babysitting and an arbitrary age barrier of entry into the workforce. Nonetheless alot of wasted time and resources go into maintaining this theater. Some of my favorite people in the world are borderline H.S. students who dont get caught up in the college cult, take responsibility for themselves and strike out into the world. Many of them go back later in life for focused vocational training, many go into well paying trades.
*sigh*
Erasmus, if you are indeed not someone with Asperger’s, you are, to put it bluntly, an idiot. Not a moron, an idiot in the classical, Greek sense of the term – what the Germans would refer to as a Fach-Idiot. Someone utterly incapable of engaging with any discipline outside his specialty.
It’s sad, because I’d love to have the chance to debate with a hard-nosed physicist with a genuine interest in engaging the “other side”. Now, as for your points…
Nice dodge, grasshopper. I love the way you just casually shrugged off anything I may have tried to make in my original post there. Believe me, I feel as though I’m wasting my time on a thick-skulled troll, blithely ignorant of what he’s shitting upon, but I still try to get something productive out of this altercation.
Re: English Lit
How to break this to you… Thinking about “deep questions” and writing a couple of stories in high school DO NOT MEAN EXPERIENCE WITH THE HUMANITIES. Do tell, have you read much literary criticism? Can you give a brief summary of Goethe’s views on Weltliteratur? Heard of Matthew Arnold’s concept of culture? How about Leavisian cultural criticism? T.S. Elliot’s critical work? Early British cultural studies? Did much close reading of anything? Familiar with structuralism? Define post-structuralism? That’s just a handful of BASIC, INTRODUCTORY ideas, theories and techniques which – I’ll hazard a guess – you are as clueless of as I am of quantum physics.
So yeah, you don’t really have much – any, even – experience with the “humanities”, despite what you may think. You don’t realise you don’t have much experience with the humanities, or that the humanities and social science require much more than just reading and writing, and that’s your problem. You don’t need a PhD in English Lit to meaningfully discuss issues in the humanities or social sciences. You do, however, need at least a complete-idiots-guide level familiarity with the field you’re pouring scorn on. How would you feel if I shat upon your area of study and the theories you use in your work without having even an elementary school level of knowledge about physics?
See, there’s plenty of interesting questions about scientificity, about the validity of theorising that isn’t strictly scientific in nature, about what exactly makes something scientific, about the proper relationship between natural and social sciences, etc. etc. I’d love to discuss that with a natural scientist, who could provide some unique perspective on these issues. Alas, I’m stuck with you.
There’s a lot of possible approaches to literature, and your summary is a very crude and incomplete overview of some of them. You know how in physics some people focus study on particles, others study the cosmos, and still others study quantum phenomena, and they all often have something useful to tell each other? This is kind of like that.
Re: Idiotic Research Idea
*introductory facepalm* Where to begin? I wish I wasn’t a mere beginner in the field, so I could perhaps explain to you why this sort of bean-counting statistical analysis would yield an impoverished and grossly inaccurate view. I’ll try nonetheless. Ask for clarification if you don’t get it.
The problem with measuring misogyny in the way you suggest is simple – you can’t treat texts the way you treat natural phenomena. You do realise it’s one of the reasons science sticks to mathemathical modelling, right? Because LANGUAGES ARE AMBIGUOUS AND COMPLEX SYSTEMS. That’s where most of the differences in method that perplex and confuse you so much come from – the fact that we’re not studying the same thing you are, and consequently use a different tool set. Savvy? Open up an introductory linguistics textbook and read the bits on semantics, pragmatics, and structural ambiguity, and maybe crack open some of the “famous authors” who’ve written some stuff on interpretation of texts. Perhaps you’ll finally grasp why it is that soft sciences are soft – because we’re dealing with squishy stuff, where there are no immutable laws, only probabilities, conflicting interpretations of polysemic texts and more or less useful theoretical frameworks.
Re: Sociology
If I believed the field was perfect and no problems remained, I wouldn’t intend to spend 8 years of my life and lots of money on getting a PhD in it. There’s a difference between saying some poor research is produced in the social sciences and humanities, arguing what the errors are, and suggesting possible alternatives – which is what a responsible, sensible person would have done – and smugly shitting on a collection of disciplines you know next to nothing about, which is what you’re doing.
Re: Conflicting Interpretations
Here’s something that might shock you a bit – hold on to your pocket protector! – several interpretations of the same text/cultural artefact/social process may all be correct, different ways of looking at something, each perspective revealing a little more about the studied text/cultural artefact/social process. There’s not yet a theory (or paradigm, to be more precise) with the power to account for everything in, say, sociology or literary criticism, the way evolution does for biology, and there may not be one. It’s one of my megalomaniacal ambitions to one day develop something similar. In addition, some theories once dominant tend to die out – see positivism, and now increasingly what you’d term “postmodernism”, whose heyday has passed.
Re: Abstracts
Appeal. To. Ridicule.
Re: Movies with multiple interpretations, oh noez
EVERY SINGLE MOVIE AND NOVEL HAS MORE THAN ONE VALID INTERPRETATION. X_X Of course, I’ll readily grant the mentality that there’s more than one valid interpretation of a given phenomenon is not very helpful IN PHYSICS, but in social sciences and humanities it is exceedingly so.
we had the discussion about the two-track system in another thread a while back. it was a good idea, but couldn’t maintain itself because the non-academic track was treated like refuse. with equal standing, a two-track system would be best. STILL, i stand by what i said: a basic understanding of the world is a necessary requirement for a functional citizenry, and American H.S. education does NOT provide that.
the anti-academic attitude prevailing in the U.S. is the reason it’s so hard to educate everyone to that level: there’s no support for education, not from the state, not from private corporations, not from parents (that last one reminds me a bit of “my child doesn’t like veggies”, in that parents train their kids to be that way, and then don’t like the results), from the media, etc. other countries, especially East Asian ones, worship education to the point where their standards are so high kids sometimes suffer burnout. somewhere between those extremes lies the solution to educating everyone to a decent level. but weeding “inadequates” out and leaving them out of the general education is a recipe for disaster.
Erasmus: “I have no idea why you think the humanities is any better at teaching “critical thinking” than science. It’s just arrogant. Science undoubtedly has the better track-record when it comes to solving important problems.”
That’s not what I said, so I reject the charge of arrogance. Thanks for continuing to illustrate my point, since your critical skills seem to be stunted.
Anybody who reads my posts here knows how much I love science, the scientific method, and reasoning from evidence. But I’m not ignorant enough to think that science solves every problem.
So what kinds of things constitute “important problems” to you? Does setting up a new form of government count (see Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Franklin)? That wasn’t a scientific problem.
How about freeing an entire subcontinent from colonial rule? Gandhi was a lawyer and philosopher.
For that matter, how about establishing the rule of law? Scientists didn’t do that, you know.
Equal rights? Nope, still not a scientific problem. Dr. King was a preacher. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were classically-educated activists. Frederick Douglass was a self-educated writer and orator.
Erasmus, you need to get out more, intellectually speaking. You don’t seem to know anything about the history of civilization. “The Prince of Humanists” is turning over in his grave at your appropriation of his name.
Ultimately the whole problem is that Americans don’t get that you have to pay for civilization. This isn’t surprising as the whole country was founded on stealing land and labor (slavery). There have been brief periods of lucidity and civic mindedness like the period in the mid 20th century that led to the creation of the research universities. Eventually, though the something-for-nothing attitude reasserts itself and Americans go back to their “roots” as philistines who won’t pay for anything that might actually help their fellow man or enrich culture. Basically, we’re doomed, Obama or Nobama.
@411: Precisely so. It’s perhaps a survival of old-school pioneering/land-stealin’/Injun-killin’ values and social mores, where one didn’t really need much civilisation and could more or less rely on one’s own strengths to survive, well into a post-industrial era where they have become not only obsolete but downright dangerous to continuing social survival.
Still, as long as this crisis is going on, Americans might pull together – if not all of them, at least enough of them to prevent deepening the crisis. The assholes of the Santelli variety are decidedly in the minority and not very popular, from what I gather.
See?
That’s why studying at a university is free where I come from. And that’s “free” as in “beer”, not just as in “speech”.
Socialism. You should try it a little.
“The closer you get to humans, the worse the science gets.”
— Proverb
That doesn’t mean politology can’t be done as a science, though. It just means it isn’t done so as often as it should be.
Nope — just too lazy to learn how to touch-type.
(Which is somewhat ironic, though, because touch-typing saves lots of time and effort.)
How does any of this follow from being “only a machine”? Really, how? I just don’t get it.
I mean, haven’t you got any innate empathy?
Tripling :-)
I don’t think it’s fair for any education to cost such a batshit crazy amount of money, period.
%lt;sigh> Blockquote fail.
Actually… it was, and still is. After all, there’s an ongoing experiment on whether it works, and the whole science of politology studies basically just this question.
Josh @ 339: Thanks! But 10 points for that? You’ve gotten generous lately.
Morsky:
Maybe you’re the one with Asperger’s. You can’t seem to grasp the concept that I simply don’t have the time to respond to your monster, jumbo-sized posts. There have been a lot of posts aimed at me, and I can’t answer them all. I have to pick and choose passages I deem relevant. Your last post is too long for me to read, let alone respond to, and I will inevitably miss stuff out.
No, I’m not familiar with any of that, because I don’t see how it’s interesting. I know people with degrees in the humanities who think “post-stucturalism”, whatever it is, is pure nonsense. In fact, I recall that exactly this opinion was recently expressed by a few disgruntled humanities majors over in the Richard Dawkins forum.
Interesting that you compare lit crit with quantum mechanics. If quantum mechanics didn’t have mountains of experimental support speaking in its favour, and indispensible technological applications to boot…if technology derived from quantum mechanics didn’t account for 25% of the GDP of the USA…well, maybe you’d have a right to be skeptical of the worth of that subject.
And frankly, quantum mechanics is intrinsically far more difficult. The objects it studies behave in a totally counter-intuitive way and can only be described using advanced mathematics. There’s no similar justification for lit crit. If I see a passage like the following, there’s good reason for my eyes to glaze over:
It’s laughable BS — written by a so-called intellectual who was, and still is, widely studied and respected within humanities departments.
People also get doctorates in Theology. They also attempt to argue from authority — as amply exemplified by PZ’s famous satire, the Courtier’s Reply.
Sure, I noted that above. There are endless examples of compatible “interpretations” in science. Someone already raised the different formalisms of classical mechanics; to give an example from biology, the selfish gene perspective itself can be thought of as an “interpretation”, and Dawkins likes to talk about Necker Cubes.
That’s why I deliberately chose to talk about “incompatible” and “conflicting” interpertations. I was talking about genuinely, essentially different interpretations. Throughout my high school English lit this was the done thing: we would come up with our own interpretations, and it didn’t enter their minds to ask which interpretation is true. Sometimes the author designed the ambiguity. I don’t believe a “truth-seeking” mentality is being fostered. Some people I argued with even denied flat-out that there is truth to be had in lit crit.
I think the point was made in the bit you quoted: we read the ancient philosophers not because their attempts to reason about nature are current today – we know the brain is not used to cool the blood, for example, and recent research in neuroscience shows Cartesian dualism is wrong. But it’s interesting to read them as historical documents, providing unique insight into the ways people in these respective eras thought about life, explore the issues they faced, and chart their influence on social and cultural development throughout the ages. Zeno’s philosophy may be obsolete, but I prefer to think of it as fossilized – still a very rich source of potential knowledge about the Ancient world, despite no longer being viable as a set of ideas to hold.
>>>I don’t think it’s fair for any education to cost such a batshit crazy amount of money, period.
No one cares what you think is fair. To receive the service of teaching you must pay the cost. You may, or may not, choose to pay it.
That’s an interesting take on this. Yet I don’t think you’re being quite fair on the Zeno paradoxes. There are a number of arguments to be had. Some physicists believe space is discrete and that’s the way to beat Zeno. Others say that according to quantum mechanics, you can’t be infinitely certain of the position of a physical particle anyway, so the “paradox” becomes meaningless.
I’m somewhat skeptical of the claim that the paradox can be worked around just through mathematical analysis. According to the formalism in analysis, you would define a process to have a limit a point at X if it goes arbitrarily close to X. But this seems like it’s just defining the problem away.
Anyway, what do I know, I’m just a trained monkey. Deep-minded questions like this are for humanities majors, naturally.
@284 & 419 Erasmus:
Douche.
Don’t worry. It’s probably just a temporary fluctuation in the system. Maybe a fragment of underdone potato or something…
matt@v18:
What you’re complaining about is the use of jargon. Sure, many people in the humanities overuse jargon, occasionally calling a spade a “manually operated terrain restructuring implement.” However, just because someone uses jargon that you don’t understand is no reason to dismiss him.
I’m an economist. If I wanted to, I can throw jargon with the best of them. I don’t when addressing laymen, but I certainly do when discussing economics with other economists or people familiar with economic jargon.
AND THERE’S THE FUCKING PROBLEM! HOW DO YOU NOT SEE THIS?!
Look, you’re criticising as useless a set of disciplines you don’t know anything about and don’t find interesting. See how this is a problematic thing? If you had just said “I don’t find the humanities particularly interesting” and left it at that, nobody would bother you.
For the record, I’d largely agree post-structuralism is nonsense best discarded as a theoretical tool, even in lit crit, and that book from the post on the Dawkins forums sounds like pure, unadulterated rubbish. But you can’t just piss on something without providing reasons why you’re doing it. Sokal wrote two fucking books on what he thought was bullshit in “postmodern” works, and his view of social science is far more nuanced and complex than your ignorant sneering.
Also, you misread me again – I didn’t compare English Lit to quantum physics. Read that again, when you have the time. And no, I a) don’t have a PhD in Sociology, I’m just a lowly undergrad, and b) I wasn’t making an argument from authority, you dolt, merely saying I’m not blindly defending everything in social science or the humanities as useful. Also, humanities =/= Theology, and Dawkins’ Leprechaunology retort doesn’t really apply. Society exists, as does literature, whereas the existence of a personal deity that dictated a holy book to Levantine goatherders can be disproven without reference to the tomes of the Courtiers.
As for your high school English Lit experience, there’s a reason for that, like I’ve been trying to get you to understand above: ARTISTIC TEXTS ARE DIFFERENT FROM NATURE. THERE IS NO SINGLE CORRECT INTERPRETATION OF A LITERARY TEXT. Literary criticism =/= physics, and the methods appropriate for one are woefully out of place in the other. Is that hard to grasp?
As a current University of Florida Geology undergrad, I cant thank you enough for bringing this to people’s attention. I was halfway through composing a plea to you an Mr Plait of BadAstronomy to enlighten people regarding this situation when I saw your post. We are facing 100% cuts to all administrative staff, all technical staff, assistant and associate-in positions and all untenured faculty, nearly 50% of the department’s budget.
So far, they powers that be have promised to “try to ensure” that all undergrads in the effected programs will be able to finish their degree. How they plan to do this with only tenured professors is beyond me, and what will happen to those great profs once the few remaining geo students graduate worries me greatly.
Up until last week, I was planning to apply to gradschool at UF to study Planetary Science within the geology department. I can still change my plans, but there are plenty of current grad students who will be losing their faculty sponsor/advisor if this proposed cut is implemented.
I said: “So what kinds of things constitute “important problems” to you? Does setting up a new form of government count (see Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Franklin)? That wasn’t a scientific problem.”
And David Marjanović said: “Actually… it was, and still is. After all, there’s an ongoing experiment on whether it works, and the whole science of politology studies basically just this question.”
Ah, political science. Is it a science? And when we speak of the “American experiment”, does the word experiment mean what it does in, say, physics?
I would argue that it doesn’t. And just because some work in the humanities is done using statistics doesn’t make it science, either. Textual analysis on the letters of Paul, for example, can tell us which were penned by the same hand with a fair degree of precision.
Math is a swiss army knife with many blades. It can open a can or cut a string. That doesn’t mean cans and string are the same thing or even the same kind of thing.
I happen to believe that all kinds of human knowing are best if they’re evidence-based. But not evidence-based knowledge is science.
“Erasmus would never have said things like this!”
“Uh, he did say things like that, in fact it is what he is most famous for, and anyone who knows anything about Erasmus would know that.”
“Well, my point stands!”
== CURTAIN ==
this has already happened. marietta college (a small formerly liberal arts school in ohio) threw out several departments (like philosophy) so they could trim the budget. and add hires to other departments. result: place is a shithole and no longer qualifies to be a liberal arts school.
How many jobs are there where one can blog about throughout the day and get paid for it?
thousands, Scott, you FUCKING MORON.
or did you think, for some stupid reason, that the Uni pays for him to blog here?
In fact, you too, you FUCKING MORON can indeed get a job blogging all day long.
All you have to have is some interesting content to put up for discussion.
oh wait…
maybe YOU can’t blog and get paid for it after all.
As should go without saying, that is an idiotic, fraudulent travesty. All I said is that Erasmus, unlike most present-day humanists, was interested in absorbing to the best of his ability all the real knowledge that was possessed in his time.
PZ, you’re on the money as usual, but I’m afraid you’re preaching to the converted on this one. Most of those reading your blog aren’t the ones who voted for the cretins and ignoramuses.
Really? Funny, that, because many of the opinions you see in my posts are essentially inherited from Sokal. His first book, co-authored with Bricmont, has given me great joy over the years — mainly through the fairly comprehensive series of quotations of wretched humanists, caught red-handed abusing scientific terminology in a despicable attempt to baffle and intimidate their students and colleagues. You’re bullshitting when you say I don’t provide reasons. That is in fact exactly what I’ve been doing in over a dozen posts. For your convenience, though:
(1) I cannot see, for the life of me, what lit crit is trying to achieve. I cannot discern any coherent goal. Some say the intention is to give us better theatre, television, etc, whereas you claimed earlier, somewhat pretentiously, that it is a “theoretical analysis” of human culture. Patently this is bollocks, or lit critics would do painstaking statistical analyses such as the one I suggested, as opposed to sitting around nodding and smiling, agreeing with any interpretation of their supposedly profound texts.
(2) Even if lit critics did obtain knowledge about their texts, the importance of their discipline would still be questionable. You may be fascinated by Dostoyevsky, but others are fascinated by cars or computer games. These have virtually no chance of winning a place in academia as subjects in their own right.
(3) Clearly though lit crit is even worse than that, because typically it doesn’t afford any knowledge at all. If you can keep inventing new interpretations of texts, and none have any special preference, then you are not actually learning anything.
(4) The game is up, because, by happy virtue of the spellbinding wonders of modern technology (not modern literary criticism), there is this handy little gadget around these days called Wikipedia. You cannot any longer pretend there’s a huge body of technical stuff I don’t understand related to literary criticism, when I in a few minutes take a trip to Wikipedia and confirm that this is not so. There’s no reason why a layman should be able to come away with something from a Wiki article on epigenetics or superstring theory, but not post-structuralism. Seems likely to me that literary criticism doesn’t really have meaningful technical knowledge.
when I in a few minutes take a trip to Wikipedia and confirm that this is not so
Your idea of a valid source is Wikipedia … wow.
Any professor who claims to be stretched too thin while microblogging daily and chasing across the country on a worthless, anti-thisorthat mission is either lying about the current state of science or isn’t taking his actual responsibilities seriously.
I bet things really are as bad as PZ says they are out there and that real scientists don’t have so much extra time on their hands.
wretched humanists
LOL
funny, I’ve never considered myself wretched.
any other humanists out there consider themselves wretched?
no?
hmm, must be projection then on the part of Erasmus.
Erasmus, why do you feel yourself such a wretch?
any other humanists out there consider themselves wretched?
I had the flu a few weeks ago, felt pretty wretched then, now? Not so much.
I bet things really are as bad as PZ says they are out there and that real scientists don’t have so much extra time on their hands.
I don’t think that’s what you meant to say, but it’s actually more accurate.
Things really are that bad out there, and PZ mostly IS a science communicator, and no, some people doing active research really don’t have a lot of time on their hands, but some do (depends on the research, and how many grad students you have in the lab :) ).
funny, though, how you seem to consider science communication a “waste of time”.
I guess learning about science and efforts to derail it isn’t for you.
I suggest you might not want to waste your time posting here.
bye.
So, I lurk Pharyngula, but I feel I have to de-lurk at this time in response to some points made by Erasmus.
A little background: I am a graduate student in physics in a very good though not great graduate department. I spend a lot of time studying things that are relevant to my research; these things are obviously difficult, sometimes extremely so.
But when the day is done and I go home, I like to think about other things too. I realize some might think this makes me a bad physicist, and I don’t care enough to dispute it, but on my time off from physics, I like to think about other topics. I enjoy reading history of various sorts, philosophy, and yes, literary criticism. To give one brief example: I recently picked up a copy of Herman Melville’s “The Confidence Man,” (appropriate, given our current economic fiasco). The book comes with an appendix containing various critical interpretations of the book. According to your arguments, Erasmus, the efforts of those critics are useless, but that is clearly not so. In fact, reading those essays helps me understand Melville’s work better and often casts it in a light that I had not previously considered. Does this involve the “creation of new knowledge?” I honestly don’t know, but I’m not sure why it matters. What I do know is that I my understanding of “The Confidence Man” is improved through reading those works, and that makes me think that the effort that went into writing that criticism is worthwhile.
To say, as you do, Erasmus, that:
is to miss the point entirely. You seem intent on forcing criticism into a model in which some goals are somehow met, via methods you find acceptable, but I believe you are making a category mistake. The world in which I study the cosmic microwave background and the world (or worlds) which exist in the novels of Melville are different things. We should not expect them to run according to the same rules; demanding that literary critics become statisticians is unreasonable for precisely the same reason that literary critics talking about sexed equations is unreasonable.
I think this is very unfortunate, Erasmus, because I get the feeling that we (by which I mean you and I and really all academics) should really be natural allies. We have a lot more in common than we have differences, and instead of infighting and throwing our colleagues under the bus we should be thinking about how we can all work together to build a stronger and more meaningful academic community. I would like to convince you that this is the case, and so I would like to ask you this question: what kind of evidence would you need to see to be convinced that the humanities are a worthwhile human pursuit? I may not be able to provide that kind of evidence, but if I can, I will do my best to provide it. I hope you will respond to this question.
Yes, I can understand why a snivelling pedant like you wouldn’t see the undeniable usefulness of Wikipedia. I’m not saying Wikipedia is 100% reliable, so its status as a “valid source” is of absolutely no relevance. The point is that generally, laymen can come away with something from Wiki articles describing a major scientific subdiscipline, like superstring theory or epigenetics. If the same doesn’t apply to Wiki articles on humanities subjects, expect me to smell a rat.
Ichthyic #435 wrote:
There are several different meanings for the word “humanist.” Usually, in this forum, it means someone who approaches the world through methods of reason and science, and grounds a human-based ethics on respect for the rights of the individual and human flourishing (secular humanist would be nontheistic.) Council for Secular Humanism, American Humanist Association, etc.
Erasmus, in this case, appears to be using one of the old academic versions of the term, which conflicts with the modern usage we’re more familiar with. A “humanist” in this definition is someone who follows the humanities of art, music, and literature, as opposed to math and science. He also seems to be narrowing it down to those actively opposing math and science.
PLEASE DON’T FEED THE TROLLS.
Such as Erasmus.
My mom used call my sisters and I wretched when she was really pissed at us, but I never felt wretched. Still don’t, but since I work at a public school that could change any day now, depending on the prevailing illness and how horrible my classes act.
At 437
I haven’t learned too much about science in the time I’ve spent reading this blog. PZs posts boil down to:
1) The latest creationist attacks “threatening” science
1.5) Calling these people and those with faith idiots
2) Look-who-hates-me comments
3)Pictures of invertebrates
No, can’t say I’ve learned a lot about science from here. Based on PZs posts and the comments of those here constantly on his jock, I have learned, however, that science is pervaded by dicks.
And that isn’t cool. People tend to paint with a broad brush, and I don’t want to be lumped in with you fools.
Luckily this blog has fewer readers than a class of preschoolers, so I think I’m safe.
Ah, Sirloin, Pharyngula is a very popular blog and with your post, you are now on Google. The average number of views per day is 75,000+. We don’t treat the stupid nicely, and that appears to include you. The only dick here is you.
Jerry:
Sorry, that doesn’t wash. Psychologists are discovering interesting new details about humans and human culture every day. So your “different worlds” argument doesn’t convince me. Psychologists use the methods of science, to great effect, and that’s probably why their disicpline seems much more productive (and useful) than lit crit. It’s why the police use psychologists, not literary critics.
All right, I’ll give you some examples of the kind of evidence I’d require to change my mind. First and foremost, I’d like to see objective evidence that the humanities aren’t “Mickey Mouse subjects” or “easy A’s”. I’d like to see some data indicating that degrees in the humanities aren’t merely excuses for students to attend university while sleeping around and partying. Because that’s what happened at my university: science types worked hard, humanities types frivolously pissed around.
Second, I think some of the humanities people need to prove that their subjects aren’t composed of mainly nonsense, or fancy dressing up of utterly trite ideas. Science gives us technology, and does experiments to test its predictions, so it’s not really tenable to believe scientists are obscurantists. But lit crit furnishes no technology and makes no predictions. How am I supposed to know (and how is Joe Taxpayer supposed to know?) that it’s not all BS, like theology?
Third, they have to show why their subject is important to society. What do physicists say? Well, apart from its indispensible everyday role in technology, and apart from the fact that it has brought about myriad revolutionary technological advances, there’s the human impulse toward curiosity, which drives us to understand the Universe. Is there a human impulse toward deconstructing literature, or whatever it is lit critics do? Or is lit crit important in making good movies, and other things valued by society (as opposed to a tiny minority of intellectuals)?
I skimmed the Wikipedia article on Post Structuralism. It made sense to me. Apparently the main ideas behind post structuralism are that different readers will come away with different experiences of a text due to their various backgrounds, and so to understand a text, a critic should try to understand how their own background and personal aspects influence what the text means to them, and try to think about the text from differing points of view to gain a greater understanding of it.
WHOAAAA! Deep.
Sirloin, a pissant, wrote:
Even if the other things you’d written in your post didn’t lead us to the conlcusion that you’re an idiot, this final line did. Pharyngula gets many thousands of hits a day, and is one of the most-read science blogs (in the voice of Jeremy Clarkson) in the WORLD.
So, take your clueless, concern-troll ass somewhere else before it gets a serious kicking.
Could someone who understands business explain this? I just checked the UF annual financial reports for the past 9 years (http://fa.ufl.edu/). Since the fiscal year ending 6/30/2002, state appropriations have increased every year, by 56% overall, while enrollment has increased by only 12%.
I’m not sure what numbers I should be looking at, but it doesn’t seem to me that the state legislature has been starving UF.
There is some truth in what politicians say “–our universities are the envy of the world–“. There are at least 6 reasons : 1.Our curruculum is flexible – i.e. as long as you satisfy the basic requirements, you graduate with a najor. 2. Flexibility in schedule – i.e. each student can schedule his own courses for his convenience. I never took any 8AM classes. For example, all biology majors at University of Beijing and most European universities must take the same courses at the same time. Not here. 3. Examinations are a lot more lax, some have none. 4. There is literally no admission exams, i.e. open admission. 5. There are no exit-examinations. 6. There is no time limit or age limit. One word : easy.
Yes, I can understand why a snivelling pedant like you wouldn’t see the undeniable usefulness of Wikipedia.
Sniveling? Someone of your ilk couldn’t possibly invoke sniveling. You truly seem to be full of yourself, pity your actual knowledge and ability fail to measure a 10th of a teaspoon of your ego.
You’ve shown yourself to be utterly incapable of a reasoned evaluation of materials, void of even a basic understanding of the humanities, and lacking in awareness (both of self and the world around you). You’ve blathered on and on defending your indefensible position that, due to your unsubstantiated abilities in the “hard sciences,” you are somehow an authority on what constitute valid and invalid fields of learning in the humanities. You admit that you have no interest in the field, have proven that you have no aptitude, why not simply admit you don’t know what the hell you are talking about and let it go?
A parallel you might finally fathom. You are playing the role of the science illiterate creationist who, admitting they have no interest in biology and related fields, but have read some books about it, then insist that the “controversy” should be taught and that “both sides” of the debate should be equally covered. For those of us who have studied the humanities, you sound just as wonky and full of woo.
I will explain this another way. You consider yourself above reproach, beyond question superior in cognitive ability to us lowly “soft science” people. What you don’t realize is, quite honestly, I have high school students from my college prep classes that could, and would, tear you apart for your faulty logic, poorly or completely unsupported arguments, and your lack of understanding of basic principles of historiography.
Good post, Jerry. For some reason this has got rather bad-natured, but I’m not interested in fanning that.
I have a passion for science, and a degree in chemistry, but I love art, music, literature, architecture, and so on. I would say that I couldn’t have got a proper insight into science, and what it is (I flatter myself here!) without a proper, practical degree-level education in it. That is not true of the other arts, into which you can educate yourself to the level of knowledgeable enthusiast.
However, that does require wide reading and, yes, lit crit. Why? Because although it doesn’t deal in measurable certainties as science often does, it deals with explanation, interpretation, history, and biography, and attempts to elucidate that marvellous feature of humans – our love of art.
And I’m damn glad that we educate people to do just this. It’s still learning, it’s still thinking, it’s still analysis – whether the subject is the energy levels of Mercury atom, or an artistic vision of Dublin on 16 June 1904.
So what if they don’t all mine money with it? I’m not a chemist, but I do use the insights I gained all the time. Why deny to others the opportunity to learn about their passions?
I mean, without the humanities, what on earth would you do with
this masterpiece?
Learning – it’s not if, it’s what!
Erasmus,
Just an observation as I don’t think I have anything overly convincing to add to your arguments with so many on this thread.
Regardless of “proof of worth”, areas of study have intrinsic value. Just because you, whose judgement is apparently so important, don’t see value in a field of study does not mean it is of less worth than your own. You just come off sounding self involved and self important.
You said something about not putting on kiddie gloves? I immediately thought that was fitting, as you seem to have donned the asshat quite thoroughly here.
Third, they have to show why their subject is important to society. What do physicists say? Well, apart from its indispensible everyday role in technology, and apart from the fact that it has brought about myriad revolutionary technological advances, there’s the human impulse toward curiosity, which drives us to understand the Universe.
Did you know that people are part of the Universe?
Nerd-
Very popular blog, eh? 75,000+ views? Look, there are about 500 solid readers of Pharyngula, and each hits Pharyngula about 150 times per day to see if someone has replied to his/her comment in a thread. You’ll probably shoot back that the users are unique based on IP address or some other nonsense, but I don’t care. The blog’s readership means little to me.
I’ve read Pharyngula quite a bit, and you are all self-described dicks. You’re pretty proud of it, actually… until someone calls you a dick? Then you call that guy a dick, without reading his comment? I only said that you guys are dicks (which you are and have claimed to be), and that PZs posts are predominantly the things I listed (which they are), and you call me a stupid dick?
Juvenile.
In the end, my true views are as such:
1)Science funding sucks, which sucks.
2)America is getting dumber, and is astonishingly proud of it.
3)Actions speak louder than words, so hit the lab, hypothesize, prove creationists and religious zealots wrong with results and stop giving them what they so desperately need: recognition
Oh, I don’t think Erasmus is a troll. He’s just the worst kind of ignorant; he’s the kind of ignorant who likes being ignorant and is proud of it.
So what if they don’t all mine money with it? I’m not a chemist, but I do use the insights I gained all the time. Why deny to others the opportunity to learn about their passions?I mean, without the humanities, what on earth would you do with
this masterpiece?
Learning – it’s not if, it’s what!
Truly a noble sentiment AnthonyK, I couldn’t agree more.
“Science” wishes your mother had been less so.
Ah, Sirloin, With your present attitude, you will be dogpiled. And as I said, the only dick here is you. If you don’t like us go away. Nobody has a gun to your head requiring you to post at a place you don’t like.
I truly have a hard time understanding how Sirloin got the idea he would be learning about science on a website that bills itself as…
“Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal”
Sirloin, if you want to learn about biology and related subjects, try reading a few of the books out there, Coyne’s “Why Evolution is True,” or Prothero’s “What the Fossils Say,” or Carroll’s “Making of the Fittest,” or Shubin’s “Your Inner Fish.”
I’ve read all of them in the last six months or so and found them all quite interesting.
Sirloin bleated:
but then wrote:
Good to see you’re consistent there, asshat.
Projection.
If you actually read for comprehension you’d realise that a lot of posters here aren’t scientists – therefore they don’t have labs to ‘hit’. And if you knew anything about science you’d know that scientists don’t ‘prove’ anything – logicians, philosophers and mathematicians do.
So how about you fuck off until you know what you’re talking about?
I was going to respond to that, but then i got distracted by matt’s libertarian inanities…
anyway: I’m from germany as well, and would love to be able to study there, but the specific kind of archaeology that I wanted to study does not exist in Germany, or (to my knowledge) anywhere in Europe. should I fail at ever earning enough money to study here in the States, I’ll have to either give up on a university education altogether, or switch subjects. I’d probably end up going into a art conservation/restoration program in Poland in that case…
For those who’d like a brief summary of Lord Loin’s latest essay, it kind of went:
shoot…dick…dick…dick…dick…dick…dick…dick…dick…suck.
dick…suck.
I think that makes the meaning clearer.
the specific kind of archaeology that I wanted to study does not exist in Germany
C’mon Jadehawk, archaeology doesn’t produce any “real” knowledge, just stupid interpretation and rehashing of old arguments, just ask Erasmus, it should be eliminated along with all of those other “soft sciences.” /end snark
Anthony-
Unlike you, at least I wasn’t born parthenogenically via assfucking… not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Nerd-
I used to stop by Pharyngula to learn something new. But it’s been the same, boring story lately and I was somewhat frustrated.
Otherwise, you are right. I’m sorry I stopped by. I will leave. I was merely drawing attention to the seeming hypocrisy posed by PZ. I’m an idiot. Goodbye.
born parthenogenically via assfucking…?
dude, even your insults are incorrect. stop embarrassing yourself
Well really! What a rude fellow! I do hope it wasn’t anything I said…
Erasmus @445: I’m curious how you would classify what I do. I’m a paleontologist, and as such, I spend a lot of my time analyzing (partial) skeletons of dinosaurs, determining whether particular specimens belong to the same species, and if not, how their different species are related. We determine this based on variations in the structures of the skeletons–it’s really arcane minutiae.
I ask you this because it seems that many of the things you dislike about the humanities would appear to apply to my field as well. It’s arcane, full of jargon and minutiae, and there are many possible interpretations of the data. So do you think paleontology is a worthy pursuit, and if so, what is the difference between it and the humanities that makes the one acceptable and the other not?
We can agree on that.
dogmeatib:
And naturally, you once again refuse to tell us exactly what are facts or class of facts of which I am ignorant. No doubt, that’s because you can’t.
Not for the first time, you shamelessly misrepresent me. I did not make anything remotely like this argument you attribute to me. On this blog I have not presumed any authority at all. If either of us have been arguing from authority, it is you. You told me that I am not “qualified to be in this conversation” — something I would never dream of saying. You know very little about me, other than that I have a low opinion of some of the humanities, and yet you bullyingly, and disingenuously, profess you are certain of my ignorance.
Time and time again, you show yourself incapable of arguing in good faith. Your intellectual dishonesty seems to know no bounds. Almost always when you attribute a position to me, you have distorted it beyond recognition. It is too tiresome to confront this low-grade bullshit, taking your words out of my mouth at every turn, before I can even get at the important concepts. Don’t expect me to answer you again.
*snortle*
actually i suspect the amount and variety of humanistic courses I’ve taken in college (and the fact that I went to a humanistic high-school (with latin! and ancient greek! and a sister-school with a focus on music-theory!!)) would give Erasmus an aneurism, heheh
Science agrees on that.
Where the fuck’s a Eugenecist when you really need one?
He is a pathological liar, apparently. He really can’t help himself.
I did not say anything about archaeology. I said I respect the discipline of history, which should suggest I respect archaeology too. As so happens, I do.
*snortle*
actually i suspect the amount and variety of humanistic courses I’ve taken in college (and the fact that I went to a humanistic high-school (with latin! and ancient greek! and a sister-school with a focus on music-theory!!)) would give Erasmus an aneurism, heheh
*chuckle*
I’ve had a similar suspicion for some time now.
Erasmus@470
Time and time again, you show yourself incapable of arguing in good faith. Your intellectual dishonesty seems to know no bounds. Almost always when you attribute a position to me, you have distorted it beyond recognition. It is too tiresome to confront this low-grade bullshit, taking your words out of my mouth at every turn, before I can even get at the important concepts.
… I don’t think anyone here has anything to add to that.
Well, I’m not stupid. My opinion on the humanities isn’t a discontinuous function. It doesn’t jump from “Seething Hatred” to “Respect” as you go from social history to history. I’m aware the boundaries are blurred much of the time, and I overstated some of my claims — partly for the sake of argument, and partly out of anger.
Yes, I like paleontology. I’m an avid fan of S.J. Gould, and have always been a dinosaur nut.
Erasmus is operating under the fallacy, just like Pete Rook and Facilis, that we actually give a shit what he thinks. Maybe if he stopped hijacking the thread a cool off for a day or two…
He is a pathological liar, apparently. He really can’t help himself.
It was a joke you douche. Really, you shouldn’t take yourself so seriously, none of us do.
My opinion on the humanities isn’t a discontinuous function.
Disjointed perhaps? Disturbing? Disordered? Disconnected?
Disdainful?
Erasmus @477: But you didn’t answer my main question: why, in your opinion, is paleontology a worthy area of study, while the humanities are not?
It doesn’t jump from “Seething Hatred” to “Respect” as you go from social history to history.
Social history is history. Again, just because you don’t “get it” or have an interest in it, you don’t get to define what is valid or not in another field.
Erasmus @477: But you didn’t answer my main question: why, in your opinion, is paleontology a worthy area of study, while the humanities are not?
sure he did:
I’m an avid fan of S.J. Gould, and have always been a dinosaur nut.
see?
*snort*
Yes, apparently the only way for the rest of the world to determine the validity of a given area of study is to ask the great and powerful Erasmus whether he thinks it’s interesting.
Good thing for me he likes paleontology.
Good thing for me he likes paleontology.
Well he said he respected history, but not me, I keep checking for the pink slip, but it hasn’t arrived yet.
Erasmus:
But again, the thing that psychologists do is not the same thing that literary critics do. I think you are using an incorrect measuring stick to judge something that was never intended to be judged by that stick. It shows up in your use of the term “productive” when to talk about “productivity” in literary criticism in the same way that we talk about productivity in physics is a mistake. I don’t know what it means for, say, Harold Bloom to be productive as a critic; I just know that having his perspective on Shakespeare is an enriching experience for me.
You’re talking about the way some people treat humanities degrees and extrapolating that to everything. Is it easier to skate by doing nothing as a lit major than as a physics major? Yeah, it is. But that’s not the same thing as condemning an entire discipline based on its worst exemplars. Before we were talking about the worth of literary criticism and now we’re talking about undergraduate lit majors. I would agree that many of them screw around (although I’ve met plenty engineers and business majors who screwed around too, but whatever) but that’s a separate problem than the question of whether the discipline itself is worthwhile.
There are certainly some people in the humanities who engage in nonsense; in my experience, which comes mostly from interacting with other grad students, those people are few and far between. Most people in the humanities that I’ve met are serious scholars, who are legitimately trying to add to the store of human knowledge about literature, history, and so on. Sometimes that takes the form of coming up with new interpretations of previous works; sometimes it involves digging up information that no one knew before.
But I am afraid that what you are asking for, I cannot give you. I don’t know how I can persuade you that literary criticism has value other than suggesting that you read the critics. Some of them you’re going to hate (I know I did) and others maybe you will like, but there’s no objective measurement that’s going to tell you how much Helen Vendler’s writings on poetry are worth. I strongly believe that we should support these things because they enrich our lives in ways that science doesn’t. In the final analysis, we’re talking about relatively minuscule amounts of money compared to other structural problems we face.
I would say that there surely is a human impulse towards understanding the stories we tell. If literary criticism wasn’t important, why would thinkers from Plato up through the present day engage in it? I think the fact that it’s persisted as a discipline for so long, and the fact that so many great writers have also been great critics is evidence of that.
The way that the utility of science is judged is different from the way that the utility of literature is judged. Most people don’t know how a PN junction works, but they use transistors every day anyway. But in order to know something useful about a method of criticism or a particular aspect of philosophy, you usually have to sit down and read some works on the subject. Since most people aren’t going to do it (just like they’re not going to pick up a textbook on solid state physics either) I don’t know how I can justify the benefits of literary criticism in some direct way. I can’t just point to a thing and say that we wouldn’t have this particular creation if we didn’t have some criticism, but I think that our literature and our art would be a lot poorer if we didn’t have people that were willing to devote their lives to studying those things.
#449 Tualha
The state of Florida offers 75% and 100% scholarships to all Florida students with GPA’s higher than 2.75 and 3.0 respectively. The minimum GPA to be admitted to UF is substantially higher than this. Essentially, every Florida resident who gets accepted, gets free tuition (unless the screw up) courtesy of the state. Since the state foots the bill, they force all the public universities to lower the cost of tuition (only about $120/credit-hour). So while state appropriations are up, tuition is way down.
Thanks, Sarafan. I’m glad someone saw my little post in the middle of all that yelling. I swear, this place is worse than Usenet sometimes. I’ll take a look at the tuition numbers.
Flamebait:
Science : most of humanities :: Medicine : Alternative Medicine
Seriously, the most perceptive statement out of the 487 odd above is the one at 486 by Sarafan. Scholarships should be given at higher GPA levels, say 3.5 and 3.75 and be means tested. Not everybody deserves to go to college for free.
Thanks also to Tualha for asking the question which led to the answer.
Quick question, is Erasmus even on the other threads?
Second quick question, what is with the high amount of physicists and comp sci types that are complete dicks? It always seems like half the the libertarians come from that background and there just seems to be an abnormal amount of sexist, racist, or egotistical my way or nothing shit in general. Is it just that those majors attract those with the least social skills and thus get the loudest dicks or is it something to do with the need to “overcome” the geekiness of the field to regain masculinity? I don’t mean to denigrate as I spent some time over in that area myself (yay bioinformatics training), but seriously, it just seems weird.
On Erasmus, I’d simply ask him if he enjoyed Watchmen. Because that seminal work of comics was radically based in the concepts of deconstruction and postmodernism. If Erasmus likes modern comics, he has gained direct benefit from postmodernism in his life. Similarly if he liked the Matrix (heavily influenced by Grant Morrison, an avid postmodernist writer), the works of Charlie Kaufman (very postmodernist and deconstructionist), or the books of Neil Gaiman (more lax postmodernist, but the ideas really permeate all of his works), then he has benefitted from one of the UNPOPULAR and OUT-OF-FAVOR movements in the humanities, one he sees no use in.
But yeah, I agree with the masses. Textbook troll and despite his protestations, heavily influenced by libertarian ideology. Not everything has to produce commercial ventures, some ideas are there to advance art, evolve meaning, and question what we take for granted. This has real world effects as we’ve tirelessly pointed out, but then again, Erasmus is to busy to read things that might disagree with him and after all raw physics is so directly tied to the Great Wheel of Industry these days.
And snark disclaimer, all knowledge is important, grows us and we are enriched by it. I have pointed out why we devalue education in this country and how we got to the point where even the hard science is affected. Erasmus points out the most fervent tool, strike at the “soft” to discredit the whole, defend the “masculine” against the “overreach” of the “feminine”. Dismiss any earnest deep look at human endeavors in favor of not but technical proficiency. Never question, never evolve. And get back to work, lazy bones.
This is America.
For the tl;dr trolls.
Education is infrastructure investment. It should be free because it is investment in a strong middle class that does things like drive our demand-based economy. You can try and drive an economy by undermining the middle class, but it only leads to our exact economic situation. Also, by making education prohibitively expensive, you prevent class mobility thus removing the whole incentive point of free-market capitalism.
In short: Man, are you “capitalists” stupid.
#488: Yeah… No. (regarding the flamebait, not the scholarships thing)
Alternative medicine claims to be as effective or better than medicine in what medicine does. The humanities don’t bill themselves as an alternative to natural science. Am I getting through here?
*sigh* I give up.
Ok, distracting myself from my gerontology homework for a bit, I figure we should at least get something of genuine use from our troll friends.
Gender and hard science vs soft science.
The terms used to try and create the hierarchy are both new (back in the 1950s the humanities were considered the peak of sophisticated male achievement and in culture and media, being a sophisticated gentleman was demonstrated in one’s knowledge in the humanities. It was the chief means by which a white man would prove his superiority over the women and the black man.
However, things changed in the 60s as I already posted and the designation shifted and as such the terminology hard science and soft science arrived. These terms are not neutral, but rather betray an inherent meaning. First of all, is the assumed primacy of science. Both are judged in relation to a default (science) which will be inherently won by one side (the one with science in it). It is similar to the neutrality of male experience in our culture, where everything is seen through the assumed experience of a male life. Those aspects that fall outside of male life are dismissed as tangental or meaningless.
We also see it in the use of the words hard and soft. If these words were neutral, in this sense free from gendered interpretation, what would they mean? How would one be seen as better than the other? Heck, without gender, hard seems less valuable in a scientific context considering that it would more evoke “rigid, inflexible” than a strict “good” “to be sought out” interpretation.
However, these are obviously gendered insults. The feminine is always described as soft. A female body defined by where it is softest, a female’s validity in how she is nurturing, flexible, and of course in this interpretation, weak, unable to defend herself without a tough, masculine…
Of course male, whose hardness defines his body in the exact same ways and whose validity is seen in his toughness, his stubborness, and his ability to fight. There’s also the other aspect in the penis in the whole hard good, soft bad framework, which again asserts the primacy of male experience and specifically the role sexual arousal holds in policing gender.
As such, we value science (currently) because it is seen as masculine in comparison to the humanities. But for all the trolls out there, masculinity is also being shifted towards proud ignorance in general and knowledge itself is being deemed feminine. That’s what the whole Pelosi’s mice and French fruit flies attacks are all about. They’re using your anxiety about masculinity to prevent you from fighting against the War on Knowledge.
Ok, back to genetic differences in male and female hormone levels and its potential affect on aging.
No one cares what you think is fair. – Matt
No Matt, you don’t care. You are not entitled to speak for everyone.
Tuition doesn’t seem to be down. $133 million in FYE 2002, $193 million in 2008. That’s after subtracting scholarship allowances, and I’m not sure what that means, or which number I should be looking at.
Is there an accountant in the house? One who likes tutoring the
uninitiatedclueless? I’d like to know what numbers to look at in a public university’s balance sheet to tell if it’s in good shape and if its state legislature is starving it.>>>Education is infrastructure investment. It should be free because it is investment in a strong middle class that does things like drive our demand-based economy.
Fuck you’re dumb, Cerebus. Ask PZ if he’d work for free.
No, PZ and other great professors work for wages. Good things cost money. Who pays is another question, but there is no ‘free’. This is the problem with stupid socialists like yourself, you think because the government pays for it, its free.
Im sure you do something well in life, but it is not economic blogging. Stick to it.
Then we can ask him to build a man out of straw and kick it down…
Are you sure? The 3-5% figure took me by surprise, I had thought the figure more like 35% rather than 3-5%. I googled around a bit, and found a 2004 article that says this:
Matt-
Please look up the phrase “infrastructure investment”.
It means paying money, sometimes a shit ton of money in order to prop up the systems needed for an economy to function. Transportation, education, functioning law and order, functioning ports, healthcare. These are infrastructure and none of it is free. It is a necessary investment, one to be given highest priority, because without these one doesn’t have a functioning economy or government.
Who it should be free for is students, just as you aren’t charged every time you call the police or fire department or drive on public highways or roads. It should be free for students, because their education is a necessary expenditure for class mobility and a strong middle class, which keeps the economy functional.
In short, your straw man burns nicely to the ground, but luckily “free” fire departments can put it out.
On a separate issue, teachers should be paid obscenely more. We have devalued teaching as women’s work and the wages and prestige have followed. There is no reason why hedge fund managers and sports stars should be receiving so much more compensation than teachers nor why corporate welfare and military should receive so much more tax money than education.
So WE the taxpayers SHOULD be taking it in the shorts on education, cause it’s a necessary investment in a functional society and economy, one the graduates themselves will pay into later, when they can afford to. Just as corporations should pay more to live in a country where they aren’t burned to the ground for things like losing everyone’s 401Ks.
Perhaps it is you who are fuzzy on the concept of free.
496-
I am insulted.
Why kick, when you’ve got matches and are just enough of a pyro to know better than to be a chemistry major?
Man, bunsen burner flames are so pretty.
Also I’m rather amused that that was supposed to trip me up. Oh noes, things cost money, I must embrace libertarianism immediately and expect things like a civil police force and military will spontaneously arrive auto-magically. As a socialist, I only supported higher taxes because I hated wealth, but now that I know infrastructure costs money, I guess I have no choice but to support lower taxes.
I mean, was that the basic idea of the attack, or is this more of the shifting the goalposts, stall the debate tactics of the general libertarian trolls to disguise the fact that their ideology was proven dismally unsuccessful whereas here in the Denmarkian hellscape, the institutions are weathering the global collapse just fine?