The University of Minnesota, Morris has received approval from the legislature for a $4.5 million investment in…the humanities.
We’ve also been awarded a $137,000 Mellon grant to strengthen the place and the understanding of … the humanities.
Speaking as a STEM sort of guy, and one who was recently informed in a comment that The hard or natural sciences are mostly safe. Most of the corruption is in the humanities. That’s where most of the danger lies for student radicalization
, I’m going to say “EXCELLENT!” We need more education in the humanities to correct these ninnies who think both that “hard sciences are safe” and “humanities are corrupt”. We need students to learn dangerous ideas, and that’s where the most dangerous ideas are found.
“Dangerous Ideas” like the theory of evolution?
Oh how about the germ theory of disease?
I’m sure there’s more of these “Dangerous Ideas” in STEM, those are just the first two that jump to mind.
@1 – Perhaps you might want to read the post over again and think about why your post is irrelevant to the point PZ is making. Paying particular attention to the meaning of the word “most”, perhaps.
I think this is definitely good, but I’m sure the sciences could use more funding, too. Funding for higher education is woefully limited in this day and age.
Just mention evolution or global climate change, and they’ll see the sciences as corrupt as well.
This is interesting: In my corner of Europe things are different and might getting more so — or less so, I dunno, depends on how the portents are read:
Back in the late 1970s my country was emmerging from almost 50 years of what very much amounted for a (sort of U.S.-backed) fascist dictatorship. Where did all the freshly ousted regressive academics took refuge at? Mostly in the Humanities, with some encroaching in Economics and Law. STEM was firmly in the hands of the “reds”, as it had been, in a clandestine/tolerated fashion (which is also a interesting, though unrelated story), during the dictatorship.
But the regressives’ encroaching kept growing (thank you, ›spits‹ Catholic University and private universities!) and by the late 1980s, when I was a freshman, only the “pure” sciences (M+Ph+Ch+B+G) were overwhemingly leftist in Portuguese Academia, with Engineering and Medicine being increasingly “centrist”/“apolitical”, matching Humanities’ overall apathy.
But in the early 1990s the (then very relevant) student unions’ in the Lisbon academic scene were led from the left by those of “pure” Sciences (A.E.F.C.L. — my true alma mater) and, yay!, the “new” Humanities / Social Studies (A.E.F.C.S.H.) — these two from schools (FCUL and F.C.S.H.) where the number of female students was overwhelmingly high, well above 50%.
While this may have changed somewhat since then, concerning student activism, to this day in Portugal the demographic cluster where one’s more likely to find leftist academics is exactly the M+Ph+Ch+B+G sciences. Of course that’s also where you find a majority of atheists (and most atheists), and the least likely crowd to fall for conspiracy theories and quackery (while MDs and Engineers are suckers for that stuff); in parallel this is the one intellectual group that has almost no representation neither in the Opus Dei nor in any of the several flavours of Freemasonry, and it is the least present in the cadres of those political parties that have had any cabinet presence since 1975: P.S., P.S.D., and C.D.S.-P.P.
I have though recently noticed a disquieting trend among this crowd: The emmergence of PUAs, redpillers, “ironic racists”, and assorted such characters. Maybe not more frequently or growingly than among other intellectual groups, but still more than zero and thus needing to be fought against.
(Reluking now, as I’ve been since 2004.)