Auditors Tell Cal State to Shape Up; Antioch to Stay Open

Conflating the identities of the sciences and technical applications is a consequence of a poorly informed and economically paranoid public. Everything has to have a financial justification to exist in today’s America, including the arts. That’s demoralizing and insulting to both scientists and humanists. The only solution: education.

This post seems to have bought into the very dichotomy it seeks to question. Along with 22000394, I protest excluding “physics, mathematics, biology, and chemistry” from the liberal arts. Most undergraduate degrees in these fields are, at least in the US, liberal arts degrees. Also, I have never encountered a “brilliant” student who would “freeze when faced with a series of numbers and equations” or say “I’m not good at math” for the simple reason that such students are not brilliant. They may perform well in some circumscribed area, but a brilliant student does not freeze or disengage when difficulty is encountered.

I agree that it’s highly ironic that in an article protesting the divide between the sciences and humanities, the author creates an artificial divide between the sciences and the liberal arts. Look at any of the well-known liberal arts colleges in the country. At almost all of them, students major heavily in the sciences (more so than at most research universities, as “the Oberlin 50″ study showed decades ago). What they typically cannot major in is business, nursing, education, etc.

The sciences are an integral part of the liberal arts.

I have a PhD in philosophy, but a BS (actually a BEE) in engineering; so I’m fairly familiar with science and math (as also are lots of non-engineering philosophy faculty). For many (20+) years I’ve team-taught interdisciplinary undergrad courses with a variety of (about eight) literature profs.

What Churchill says (“Brilliant students would freeze when faced with a series of numbers and equations”) about students would apply pretty well to roughly 50% of my literature co-teacher colleagues; they almost reveled in their LACK of understanding of Euclidean geometry or algebra or prime numbers (all often used by philosophers since Socrates to illustrate various concepts)! And when, about the late 90′s, we started using the web, etc. with a nice big display in the classroom, they often boasted to the students about their INABILITY to use the technology! And they turned to me – or some of the freshmen in the class – to show them how to use the web technology. This seems to accord with Churchill’s observations about the science/humanities divide. But it applies to profs as well as students.

I do find that my lit colleagues have greatly improved their grasp of science, math, and technology in the last 5 or so years. Better late than never. And my observations are all (very) small sample, anecdotal, etc. – but maybe there is some slow improvement . . .

andrew_orr asks for the basis for the claim of great age for this debate. Here’s some indication.

In 1810 the world’s first research university was founded in Berlin. It’s now called the Humboldt University of Berlin. In that century the distinguished scholar philosophers of Germany’s hallowed universities began to regard with disdain the work of their scientific colleagues, work which unfortunately often became perverted into applications in lowly technical activities like medicine and engineering. The German solution was to create technical high schools, now mostly called technical universities. There’s now one just up the street from the University of Berlin, and similar situations exist in Munich and other cities. We copied the practice here. Just down the street from Harvard University, for example, there is a something-or-other Institute of Technology. In Zurich there’s one still called a high school, the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule or Swiss Federal Technical High School. It counts among its alumni and faculty, present and former, some twenty-one Nobel Laureates, including Albert Einstein. Not bad for a high school, but not enough to deserve the esteem of true university scholars, of course.

Good to know: in German, ‘Hochschule’ does not mean ‘high school’, but something more like ‘Institute of Higher Learning,’ and is recognized by German speakers as being a university-level education in specialized areas (think M.I.T. and the like), while the word ‘Universitaet’ is used in its traditional sense for an institution offering the traditional areas of study (including among other subjects philosophy, theology, literature, mathematics, natural science). ‘Hochschule’ is also used in a generic sense to mean ‘post-secondary higher education.’ There is nothing inferior, either actual or perceived, about a ‘Hochschule’, and no surprise if it has Nobel Laureates among its graduates.

Part of the divide is the false dichotomy made when one discusses the scientific method. Experts in the liberal arts and experts in the sciences and math all do similar things to build mental models. The main difference is that in science and math there are objective mathematical standards for finding out what effects are related, and which ones are causally related.

So the “humanities” can benefit by studying how this works and plays out. Kuhn has ideas which can be appreciated by humanities faculty and by science faculty. Disdain for looking at statistical correlation will not make this evidence go away. In return, the usually false textbook scientific method needs to be put to bed. Many humanities professors are woefully ignorant of how science works, but many scientists and science educators are equally ignorant of how science actually developed, and only know the myths about its development.

After all Goethe was a poet, but also a scientist of sorts. As a result his insights into color are held onto by artists, even though they have been supplanted by newer models which allow us to accurately create color reproductions. But the physics textbooks promote the Newtonian model, which while more accurate than Goethe’s still ignore the important factor of color constancy of vision. Why can’t artist teachers promote a more physically correct color wheel, and the physics texts acknowledge the fact that the eye sees differences in color rather than absolute values.

Both sides are often stuck in historical paradigms that they can’t seem to escape. One way in which science must intrude into the humanities is the problem of memory. You remember what you believe, not what you actually see. This has been proven by psychologists and by physics education researchers. So even primary written sources can be suspect because the author writes what they thought they witnessed, and not necessarily what actually happened. So historians have to look beyond the written words and be willing to look at physical evidence. In other words science and the humanities can be partners, and not always adversarial.

“I have no memories of my science and math professors telling us that reading and writing were unimportant or optional. I can’t say the same for my humanities professors.”

Personally, I have no memories of any of my professors denigrating other fields of study. Of course the university I went to had a College of Arts and Sciences. Everyone was together. My current faculty position is in a College of Liberal Arts which is separate from the College of Science and Technology. But I can give more instances of faculty in the “sciences” denigrating the “liberal arts” than vice versa.

“I have witnessed how some folks in the liberal arts have grown to resent the “hard” sciences for the higher salaries they command, the higher grant funding they receive, the stronger voice they have on campus, and the like.”

And this surprises you? We should all see our selves as equal but some of us are treated more equally than others?

“If we do not expect all students to obtain literacy in science and math, then we will not require it, and if we do not require it, then our teachers will not feel comfortable teaching it, and it will remain a “special” topic.”

And yes, I think science should be taught as a core subject in K-8 and not as a “special” subject that is cut when time pressures mount. But to say they are skimping on math, that I don’t see. I would like to see some “numbers” on K-8 schools that do not require math as an essential subject. If that is true, that math is being taught in most schools as a special subject, then yes, that definitely needs to change.

In my experience, a lot of the resentment is fueled by federal research funding priorities, whereby NIH, NSF and other science agencies receive billions of dollars which are passed along to science faculty, while the humanities and the arts must struggle for mere crumbs. If there were parity among fields of research and learning in higher education, there would probably be a lot less grumbling. As a humanities major who has worked for scientific associations, I see both sides of the coin. I am tired of organizations and individuals that focus on U.S. economic competitiveness equating STEM with progress and denigrating all other academic training and learning as having little (or no) economic value.

This quote reflects my convictions as well: “I am a strong supporter of increasing the proportion of science and mathematics in the K-16 curriculum, and I believe that neither should be optional at any stage in a person’s K-16 education. They are as fundamental to a full education as reading and writing

Thank you.

Great concepts but there must be a more palatable word than “boutique.” I find that more objectionable than “commons.” It conjures up Paris Hilton wannabes and the snooty sales associates from Pretty Woman.

I’m relieved to hear you won’t be directing anyone to the Surfing Boutique, or the Research Boutique. We’re a small rural community college and haven’t been hit with the “commons” bug yet.  We still have “labs.”

I agree with with almost everything in the post. And yet… I think we had to use something like commons to get beyond the iconic cliche of the library as the place where books are stored and librarians sit at the reference desk waiting for someone to ask a question. We had to overcome the resistance of some traditional librarians who objected to standing that concept and image on its head. Architects got it. The IT folks got it. And eventually a critical mass of librarians got it. But it took visionary librarians like Philip Tompkins and Scott Bennett to point the way. Their idea was to bridge the boundaries of print and electronic by creating a new organizing principle, a convergence based on user need, not traditional turf. Commons seemed to signal that coming together of service modes. And it is an evolutionary concept. As Tompkins told us during a consultation for our 1999 renovation: “The library builds the commons, then cedes it to the college. The commons becomes what the community needs.” 

It may be that the academic library has evolved to the point that our clients expect the library to be an “academic amusement park.” (Brian’s phrase) The open computer lab has evolved into a full spectrum academic support center. Witness the transformation of U. of Calgary’s Information Commons to Taylor Family Digital Library. Or Goucher College’s Athenaeum.There are some exciting new takes on the evolution of the library as a learning environment, even, as Brian suggests, moving the commons concept out of the library and into places like the dorms.

I’ve tried to flag some of those on my blog Infocommons and Beyond. http://bit.ly/9nMxWU

Good list!  I would say though, after organizing several graduation ceremonies for a small campus, that while you might save time by reducing down to one yearly ceremony, the cost doesn’t necessarily go down.  Generally, you need a much larger venue in that case.  Then there is the added issue of changing the ceremony into a mega-event.  The large public universities that I attended already had long, long ceremonies just to graduate two classes a year.  I was one of thousands graduating and the logistics around the event were insane.  Just some food for thought.