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(Tenured CS prof here.)
One thing that you're missing is the teaching/research split among faculty. At all of the most prestigious schools, research is the priority and teaching only secondary. I've never heard of a faculty member denied tenure for poor teaching at one of these schools; it's always about their research not being good enough.
This research emphasis means that you won't find any faculty members who want to participate in a scheme like this (of any political persuasion). Your proposed classes would require a lot of extra effort to teach, and generate no career benefits.
As an aside, I suspect you are also wildly underestimating the amount of effort such a class would be to teach. Trying to teach anthropology to an econ major won't go well because the econ major won't know how to read a 300 page book in a week (a typical anthro major at a top-tier school like Harvard will be reading >20 300 page books/semester); conversely, teaching econ to an anthro major won't go well because the anthro major won't have any intuition for calculus (and you can't reasonably teach any micro/macro econ without math). Developing material that actually is engaging for both of these audiences is hard.
I was told of a professor at UPenn who never showed up to class the year he was up for tenure review. He still got tenure.
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I just want to second this for anyone else who reads. Even at my provincial German university, this was in full effect.
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Do they actually do the reading? I went to a fairly well regarded uni and humanities students Would Not Read. A professor came from outside and was perplexed at how people would basically openly admit to not reading. He'd assume we'd be reading a book in a week or so, that was the standard expectation for him on starting the course. I would at least pretend to read the book (finding some relevant question to ask based on skimming through source material) but that was going above and beyond by the standards of my peers. I saw no need to go further than that, ordinal grading and all.
I think people who's last experience with a university system was 20 years ago or more should recalibrate, it's not what it used to be. There are all these articles talking about how Gen Z are basically illiterate retards and they're not wholly unfounded. My experience was pre-AI boom, so it's probably gotten way worse since then.
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Do econ majors have any actual intuition for calculus either?
A long running joke where I live has been that one degree program in a local technical university is ”business studies for people who know math”.
Source got an econ-minor at a no name school. Econ major will know calculus. It's the business Majors that have to take econ classes beyond macro that struggle.
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At least at my school, the econ majors absolutely would know calculus, and more. My econ friends went well beyond it: analysis, measure theory, stochastic calculus, etc. More mathematically rigorous than the average engineering or science major.
Though I suspect there's really two econ majors, one that's kind of a business for poets version and one that's intended to prepare you for a rigorous econ PhD program.
Correct. IME at a state school you could get a B.S. or B.A. in Econ. The B.S. program was more rigorous while the B.A. in Econ program wasn't especially challenging in terms of math. Cal 1 was sufficient to pass the vast majority of those classes. On that note, I was a history double-major (originally intended for econ to be a minor but the difference between minor and major was something like 18 credit hours) and I was impressed by how easy the final paper was for an otherwise difficult (I was rusty on the math so I actually had to put some work into it.) class on international trade: four pages double-spaced. I wrote one of the more boring papers I ever put together and received an A+ on it.
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The concept that area under the curve represents a useful quantity to determine is econ 101.
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The joke here is that Business students had to take Math 440 (Math 110, four times). I can't see them getting any use out of the fact that the derivative of sin(x) is cos(x), but the derivative of cos(x) is -sin(x).
That being said, they have to know how rates of change can affect the amount of something, how to add a simple and predictable series of something into a total, and so on. That is calculus, in its simplest form.
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At my alma mater they took mathematician calculus, which was regarded as being on the same level of difficulty as the engineering calculus track, so I'd assume so.
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Econ majors understand calculus to the same extent that anthro majors actually read the assigned reading...
So for good students in good schools, yes, absolutely; for bad students in bad schools, it's chatgpt all the way.
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Might depend on the program. I was next door in stats but I knew a few Econ-Math or Econ-Stats double majors and the first semester Econ class was the most notorious on all of campus.
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