"A Rescue Plan" for SLACs from IHE??

[Wahoo Redux]

Dunno if this is worth much...kinda prolix.  A bit heavy on a melodramatic call to save democracy through education.  A lot of the same old vague but impassioned calls for vague but impassioned action.  Takes some pot-shots at big schools (my own undergrad years consisted of a little bit of SLAC, a transfer and a little bit of R1, and I much preferred the R1), but who knows?  Maybe someone here will make some insightful comments about it.

[apl68]

Well...it sounds like a worthy set of goals.  But it seems kind of vague about what a different sort of liberal arts education would actually look like.  I'd be curious to know more about that.

[marshwiggle]

Dunno if this is worth much...kinda prolix. A bit heavy on a melodramatic call to save democracy through education. 

Ya think?

From the article:

Though the value of the liberal arts as a foundation for a humane worldview has never been greater, we are losing a small but potentially vital resource for the intellectual, emotional and social development of our youth -- and for the maintenance of our democracy.

It's too bad that the USA is the only democracy left; clearly if its post-secondary education system changes it will descend into the same kind of totalitarian regime as in every other country on the planet.

More young people may indeed be going to college than ever before, but this does not mean that they are being prepared to take on the tremendous challenges of our age, or of their future. STEM-based programs may support our tech economy, but they do not see the preservation of democracy and humane values as an essential part of their mission.

Screw those humane values! Let's use cheap, expendable human subjects in our research! We need a return to slavery to run our economy! A good STEM education tells it like it is; we don't need no stinkin' bleeding hearts.


Seriously, this kind of self-righteous nonsense is what makes people outside of the humanities ambivalent about the decline of those disciplines.

[mahagonny]

No insightful comments here, but a reaction. The humane values part is funny from my perspective, having watched so much backstage stuff such as faculty feuding with each other. They're got tenure, among other purposes to (1) gang up on the person who doesn't like the new direction, or (2) keep them in a department where they don't fit in. Then they've got a union to (1) protect them from each other and (2) keep the adjuncts from getting raises or benefits. But hey, democracy and free speech!!

[eigen]

It really bothers me when authors make an argument that pits liberal arts against "STEM", despite the S and M parts of STEM being core portions of the liberal arts.

I've mentioned this in other topics, but it really bothers me that when people (at LACs or elsewhere) talk about "reviving the liberal arts", they're not talking about ensuring that humanities majors take more natural science and math courses- they're generally only arguing that natural science and math majors need to take more humanities courses.

At least where I've worked, it is possible for a student in the humanities to take 2 courses, one each in a natural science and math, and be considered "broadly educated", relative to a student in a natural science or math major that needs to take multiple courses in the arts and humanities.

[hazelshade]

I'm only posting to note that it is KILLING me that I can't come up with a joke for the amazing straight line that is "the S and M parts of STEM being core portions of the liberal arts."

(But I totally agree with the irritation at folks who won't acknowledge the place of the sciences in the liberal arts!)

[dr_codex]

I'm only posting to note that it is KILLING me that I can't come up with a joke for the amazing straight line that is "the S and M parts of STEM being core portions of the liberal arts."

(But I totally agree with the irritation at folks who won't acknowledge the place of the sciences in the liberal arts!)

The hard core?

(ducks and covers)

[Caracal]

It really bothers me when authors make an argument that pits liberal arts against "STEM", despite the S and M parts of STEM being core portions of the liberal arts.

I've mentioned this in other topics, but it really bothers me that when people (at LACs or elsewhere) talk about "reviving the liberal arts", they're not talking about ensuring that humanities majors take more natural science and math courses- they're generally only arguing that natural science and math majors need to take more humanities courses.

At least where I've worked, it is possible for a student in the humanities to take 2 courses, one each in a natural science and math, and be considered "broadly educated", relative to a student in a natural science or math major that needs to take multiple courses in the arts and humanities.

I think the problem isn't really about the basic distribution but a lot of the extra requirements which really don't have to be humanities focused but often are. For example, writing isn't just a Humanities skill and it doesn't help when it is thought of that way. Some schools have done a good job of trying to get science faculty to teach required intro writing courses. That's great, because you want people to be able to pick a writing course of interest to them,  but where I teach, writing is its own separate department and that doesn't happen. Similarly "different cultures" types of requirements end up being very humanities focused.  Even worse, you get what my current school has, which is required core courses that are basically all "Intro to the Humanities for people who don't want to be here." We can all more or less do what we want in these courses, but they are still not much fun to teach.

I can see why a Scientist would dislike the imbalance, but as a humanities person, I think the message this sends to students is "None of this has anything to do with why you are in college, but you have to do it anyway. Feel free to forget all of it immediately, which should be easy since we have given you no context at all." It would be much more useful and interesting for everybody if we found ways to have course sequences that students could sign up for that were co-designed by faculty from all over the University. The new UVA core has this is an optional model in the college, but I tend to think it could work especially well for big Universities. I could imagine lots of ways you could have relevant and intellectually rigorous sequences. You could have something on issues of medicine, life and ethics designed and taught by people from Biology, Philosophy and med programs. Maybe people from English, art and Physics could put something together about science and modernism in culture. You could have something on the history of race, science and genes with a Biologist and a Historian (Okay, that's just something I want to do, but you get the idea)

The point is that I don't see a lot of curricula that are actually designed to get students to see all of the liberal arts as relevant to their interests and professional goals. The model is mostly based on the idea that if we just make people take things, they will become well rounded by osmosis.

[marshwiggle]

I think the problem isn't really about the basic distribution but a lot of the extra requirements which really don't have to be humanities focused but often are. For example, writing isn't just a Humanities skill and it doesn't help when it is thought of that way. Some schools have done a good job of trying to get science faculty to teach required intro writing courses. That's great, because you want people to be able to pick a writing course of interest to them,  but where I teach, writing is its own separate department and that doesn't happen. Similarly "different cultures" types of requirements end up being very humanities focused.  Even worse, you get what my current school has, which is required core courses that are basically all "Intro to the Humanities for people who don't want to be here." We can all more or less do what we want in these courses, but they are still not much fun to teach.

I can see why a Scientist would dislike the imbalance, but as a humanities person, I think the message this sends to students is "None of this has anything to do with why you are in college, but you have to do it anyway. Feel free to forget all of it immediately, which should be easy since we have given you no context at all."

I've heard of school teachers basically saying this about algebra.

Sadly, I think the reality is that whoever is in charge thinks that way about every other thing.

The point is that I don't see a lot of curricula that are actually designed to get students to see all of the liberal arts as relevant to their interests and professional goals. The model is mostly based on the idea that if we just make people take things, they will become well rounded by osmosis.

The number of "Rennaisance people" who are interested in a very broad range of subjects in their own right is pretty small, unfortunately. Everyone else just pushes their own discipline.

[Wahoo Redux]

In our department we see some faculty doing some innovative things with graphic novels and film studies, for instance, but most faculty are stuck trying to teach the classes they would have studied as undergrads and in graduate school.  There is some validity to the latter approach: we are not simply a "service department" (although that is debatable) and the things we teach are the classics and have intrinsic value and value as cultural artifacts.  College should not be about fads. 

On the other hand, we need to evolve with the times. But no one has any interest in teaching Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Percy Jackson, or the novels and movies of Stephen King, even though one could make all sorts of connections to myth, culture and class consciousness, and the monomyth, as some examples of ways to approach these works----and these would probably attract students from outside English who might actually enjoy the classes.

I like Caracal's ideas, but I am not sure how they would work without faculty getting paid to double teach.  Just as an example, I have taught science fiction, but I could not really teach the science----and the science of science fiction is not really science.  There are certainly all sorts of approaches (science fact vs. fiction / futurist philosophy, etc.) but we'd need a scientist in the classroom with me.  Teaching Beowulf alongside a history faculty would be awesome!  Could my uni really afford that? 

The only thing I would say about non-English departments teaching writing is, do they know how to teach writing?  My experience as a teacher and writing center director was that writing pedagogy flummoxes non-English faculty, just as teaching art history or music, things I have a handle on personally, would really flummox me in the classroom.  And these folks have their own subjects to teach.  I suppose business and engineering could hire business and technical writers as STEM faculty, but then English is already diving into PTW programs.

I just see conundrums whenever the topic of lib arts or humanities comes up unless people see us as valued for what we do, which does not seem all that hard to comprehend. 

[Caracal]

I like Caracal's ideas, but I am not sure how they would work without faculty getting paid to double teach.  Just as an example, I have taught science fiction, but I could not really teach the science----and the science of science fiction is not really science.  There are certainly all sorts of approaches (science fact vs. fiction / futurist philosophy, etc.) but we'd need a scientist in the classroom with me.  Teaching Beowulf alongside a history faculty would be awesome!  Could my uni really afford that? 

Yeah, I agree on all of the roadblocks. Among other problems, I can't imagine this sort of thing actually working with giant classes, nor is it going to work really well if you rely heavily on large numbers of contingent faculty members. You don't need tenure track people to teach course sequences, but you can't really do it with people who are hired semester to semester. And you're absolutely right that all of this would basically rely on a commitment to the humanities as valuable.

[eigen]

I like Caracal's ideas, but I am not sure how they would work without faculty getting paid to double teach.  Just as an example, I have taught science fiction, but I could not really teach the science----and the science of science fiction is not really science.  There are certainly all sorts of approaches (science fact vs. fiction / futurist philosophy, etc.) but we'd need a scientist in the classroom with me.  Teaching Beowulf alongside a history faculty would be awesome!  Could my uni really afford that? 

Yeah, I agree on all of the roadblocks. Among other problems, I can't imagine this sort of thing actually working with giant classes, nor is it going to work really well if you rely heavily on large numbers of contingent faculty members. You don't need tenure track people to teach course sequences, but you can't really do it with people who are hired semester to semester. And you're absolutely right that all of this would basically rely on a commitment to the humanities as valuable.

See, again, this goes back to the assumption that the root of the issue is that people outside the humanities don't see them as valuable.

At the institutions I've worked at, I've found the opposite. Humanities faculty are perfectly willing to collaborate on courses with other humanities faculty, but aren't really willing to work out truly cross-disciplinary collaborations, even when STEM faculty try to initiate them.

And even if not explicit, students get the message strongly that STEM is "bad", and that their faculty will support them if they try to avoid as much if the hard, boring science and math classes as possible.

So rather than looking at (for example) how you can do really cool things with quantitative analysis of texts if your students take more math and statistics courses, they rather lobby to decrease the number of math and statistics classes their students need to take because they argue that those fields aren't "important" for their majors.

At least from my side of things in STEM, I see most of my fellow advisors pushing our students to take at least 50% of their courses in disciplines that will expand them. Personally, I want to see my students take at least one class a semester in each of the humanities and social sciences to supplement what they're learning in the major and ancillary required classes. But it's really rare that I hear my colleagues in the humanities advocate for students taking general chemistry or introductory biology- they focus on those classes being difficult, and not needed for students who want to go on in English, or history, or other areas.

Similarly, there's been a huge push back against STEM faculty offering disciplinary writing courses- we're told that since we are not suited to properly teach writing.

[spork]

[. . . ]

Similarly, there's been a huge push back against STEM faculty offering disciplinary writing courses- we're told that since we are not suited to properly teach writing.

I'm going to guess that this is just the usual attempt at turf protection/job security. At my institution over the last few decades: in the absence of minimally effective academic leadership, programs like business added courses like "business math" and "business writing" solely for the purpose of increasing the major's credit hour requirements to capture more butts in seats. So now the "common business core" is more than a third of the 120 credits needed to graduate, with another set of required "specialized" courses required on top of that for each of the different majors run by the business department. Same for education majors. Now the faculty in departments like history or English absolutely refuse to consider any changes to the general education requirements that still force students into their classrooms.

[eigen]

[. . . ]

Similarly, there's been a huge push back against STEM faculty offering disciplinary writing courses- we're told that since we are not suited to properly teach writing.

I'm going to guess that this is just the usual attempt at turf protection/job security. At my institution over the last few decades: in the absence of minimally effective academic leadership, programs like business added courses like "business math" and "business writing" solely for the purpose of increasing the major's credit hour requirements to capture more butts in seats. So now the "common business core" is more than a third of the 120 credits needed to graduate, with another set of required "specialized" courses required on top of that for each of the different majors run by the business department. Same for education majors. Now the faculty in departments like history or English absolutely refuse to consider any changes to the general education requirements that still force students into their classrooms.

Probably. But we're in the situation where we require more writing classes of our student body than we have faculty to teach, which makes it especially tricky.

[Wahoo Redux]

Eigen, I cannot tell you how happy posts like yours make me---but I see many more like Polly's latest, which essentially describes the ideal situation for hiring expert practitioners to flesh out curriculum, which is how adjuncting is supposed to work (although I'm a little dubious about some aspects of her story)----but English in her configuration, which teaches a core skill-set to virtually every freshman or sophomore in every discipline, is simply paid a "pittance"----which is apparently okay. 

And part of my credentials as a PTW teacher is my experience as a writing center director in which I worked with engineering faculty who asked me to help with their students' writing. 

And I've never actually known any humanities faculty who were approached by STEM faculty, and vice versa.  The humanities' attitude toward STEM is mostly defensiveness.

I can only hope there are more faculty like you and me (I'd love to do something interdisciplinary---if they'd let me; working with engineering faculty as a WC director was fascinating and I learned all sorts of stuff [on the simplest level, of course]).