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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34545 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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I've never really understood the place humanities actually held in universities. The required courses that my CS degree touched seemed as pointless of busywork as they always seemed in highschool. Spirited debate over canon literature I can get behind as fulfillment. But, as college became first and foremost about the economics and the modal student in the classes, at least the ones CS students needed to take, became more and more inclined to just do whatever it takes to get a decent grade with the least time spent possible I don't really see much of a point left. I have no idea what the people who majored in the subjects got up to in the higher level classes but in my entire academic career I never had one class that demonstrated any value for the humanities. Perhaps some academy can divorce itself from the university system now pretty much exactly aligned with jobs training and have value for people who opt into it, maybe I'd even consider taking some night courses at such a place. But college is not what it once was and I feel bad for people who mistook it for something else.

The place is that universities aren’t purely vocational, they’re at least theoretically for producing well rounded intellectuals as members of the leisure class.

Of course the reality is that a very large majority of the population needs to at least pretend to be productive with their time, so if everyone goes to college it inevitably becomes about jobs training. But the kinds of people who spend their careers in academia think that’s boring and low status, so they make engineers take English classes because it makes them feel like they’re still producing well rounded intellectuals out of the leisure class.

they’re at least theoretically for producing well rounded intellectuals

In the US.

In much of the rest of the world, the place for that is high school. I keep being surprised by how extremely myopic many people are about this topic here. There's a whole vast world outside the US (much of it even western) where the entire university system doesn't revolve around "liberal arts" or even have the concept of a "liberal arts" college / program at all.

In theory, the US teaches a lot of this stuff in high school as well. Reading and discussing classic books and plays, learning about art and art history, etc. But usually it's done fairly poorly and the students care even less than in college.

If a college degree is required for most well-paying jobs, then of course that's what people are going to focus on: Graduating easily and hopefully picking up some useful skills along the way. And most of the population is going to want to go to college. If a university has no need to teach practically useful information, because it's mostly educating either future academics, priests, and scribes to continue its own existence or a small group of future elites so they have the correct status markers, then the more esoteric and useless the information, the better. And let's face it, even most of the information that STEM and social science students are taught is useless outside of continuing to study that exact subject. Earning a degree in pure math, physics, etc. just tells employers you're probably good at the more relevant aspects of math and basic problem solving. Almost nothing I learned getting a math degree is useful to anyone who isn't studying math (or a particularly math-heavy subfield of physics or CS or something along those lines) in academia.

I enjoyed most of my core requirements (art, humanities, language, etc.) but that's just because I personally liked discussing those subjects and reading those great texts.

I think it must depend a lot what you are doing now. I dropped out of a PhD in a science discipline to take an industry job and actually regularly use a lot of the knowledge I obtained in grad school (of course I’m also very good at teaching myself stuff and would have been forced to learn this material on my own)

I'm sure it depends on the exact field you're in. I use some of what I learned in college (although most it was from a handful of stats classes or the programming classes I took unrelated to my major). But if Bryan Caplan's data are correct, you're definitely in a small minority.

I was a math major, and I am very glad my university required a liberal arts education. I had a couple philosophy courses that really stretched my intellect, an anthropology class, a sociology class (we read Fussel's "Class" and it's stuck with me since) and a Brit Lit class that left me with a sincere appreciation of boring dead peoples' writing. I also enjoyed poetry for the first time in my life.

All that said, I have no problem with the decline of the humanities, as long as there is still some significant chunk people who get to dedicate their lives to it. English major became, IMO, a standard choice for middle-intelligence people who wouldn't have been in college a generation before. The development of the humanities doesn't depend on them.

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