Are the Humanities Doomed?

[mleok]

Having edited science-y stuff for awhile at one point, I'd say journalistic writing would be most useful for engineers.

It helps you clean out all the dusty adverbs, pare down the parallel phrases: you'd learn to reduce out the common elements, rather like reducing an algebraic equation [i.e.: ax + bx = (a+b)x], use active verbs, reverse out passive constructions to active ones, etc.

Those were the things I was most often correcting in grant submissions and article re-writes (one fellow let me edit while I was typing up his hand-written originals, if I clarified for him what I was doing and why, so he'd learn how to avoid them).

Since clear, brief, accurate communication is at a premium in both pursuits, that would be my thought.

M.

Yes, that makes sense that a course that focuses on clear, precise communication would be most valuable to engineering students. I do question whether any of the current writing requirements address that in any appreciable way though.

[jimbogumbo]

Our Engineers take a general Comp I class, and then follow it up with a course in Technical Writing.

[mleok]

Our Engineers take a general Comp I class, and then follow it up with a course in Technical Writing.

That seems reasonable enough, but it goes to demonstrate that the goal of clear writing does not necessarily entail engineers taking a substantial general education requirement in the humanities.

[Hibush]

Thanks for the very interesting thoughts on this topic. I don't work with either engineers or creative writers, but I do value clear writing by scientists. Engineers and creative writers make a good model since their archetypical personalities contrast.

I appreciate the common thread that a fairly conventional approach works. Have the student get basic competence in writing in whatever format motivates the student, then a specialized course in the particular style. Mamselle's unexpected endorsement of journalism is great. My scientific writing improved markedly after working with a former newspaper editor to develop some press releases. My initial attempts at those were completely backwards. "Don't bury the lede" is good advice for all technical writing.

For those who are curious, blueberry flowers have both sexes so the plural "they" might be the most appropriate pronoun. (No matter how hard you try to accommodate, somebody will move the target.) They plants are self-incompatible, so even those who are socially conservative on these matters can be assured that there is no...you know...going on.

[Wahoo Redux]

Our Engineers take a general Comp I class, and then follow it up with a course in Technical Writing.

That seems reasonable enough, but it goes to demonstrate that the goal of clear writing does not necessarily entail engineers taking a substantial general education requirement in the humanities.

There will never be one way to learn these sorts of skill-sets, something that STEM-types seem stuck on (is it because STEM people train very hard to do a specific thing that we get stuck on these sorts of assertions?). 

And there are many people who have a natural facility for these sorts of skills and can write very well with very little training.

I am simply asserting that humanities training is very good for learning to write well and think holistically and complexly.  It is not the ONLY way to learn to write or think (so spare me, Marshy), or do anything for that matter, simply that it deals with the principles of language and thought that so many people want out of college students.

This point has been made many times.

[mleok]

Our Engineers take a general Comp I class, and then follow it up with a course in Technical Writing.

That seems reasonable enough, but it goes to demonstrate that the goal of clear writing does not necessarily entail engineers taking a substantial general education requirement in the humanities.

There will never be one way to learn these sorts of skill-sets, something that STEM-types seem stuck on (is it because STEM people train very hard to do a specific thing that we get stuck on these sorts of assertions?). 

And there are many people who have a natural facility for these sorts of skills and can write very well with very little training.

I am simply asserting that humanities training is very good for learning to write well and think holistically and complexly.  It is not the ONLY way to learn to write or think (so spare me, Marshy), or do anything for that matter, simply that it deals with the principles of language and thought that so many people want out of college students.

This point has been made many times.

That's a false narrative, STEM faculty are not suggesting that there is only one way of achieving these goals, in fact, it precisely the defenders of humanities in general education requirements who are doing so. For that matter, where in my statement do you infer that I am suggesting there is only one way to achieve a particular goal, I am saying the exact opposite, that the humanities requirements are not necessary to achieve the goal of teaching engineers to communicate clearly, which is the precise point of referring to other educational systems which have no such general education requirements in university. For a writing professor, you have a serious problem with reading comprehension.

I would also ask what evidence you have that humanities is a good way of teaching students in technical fields to write clearly?

[mleok]

The standard argument for teaching humanities to engineers have always centered around discussions of soft skills, oral and written communcation, creative problem solving, teamwork, and critical analysis, for example in this leaflet,

https://www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/media/document/2019-11/soft-skills-and-humanities.pdf

and this short paper on the importance of the humanities in an engineering curriculum,

https://www.asee.org/public/conferences/20/papers/6052/download#

but it's almost a point of dogma that humanities courses actually help students achieve these goals. But, it's unclear to me how general education humanities classes actually address any of these skills.

[Parasaurolophus]

The standard argument for teaching humanities to engineers have always centered around discussions of soft skills, oral and written communcation, creative problem solving, teamwork, and critical analysis, for example in this leaflet,

https://www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/media/document/2019-11/soft-skills-and-humanities.pdf

and this short paper on the importance of the humanities in an engineering curriculum,

https://www.asee.org/public/conferences/20/papers/6052/download#

but it's almost a point of dogma that humanities courses actually help students achieve these goals. But, it's unclear to me how general education humanities classes actually address any of these skills.

Presumably the idea is that humanities courses involve doing a lot of written and oral communication, critical analysis, etc., and that these topics are frequently excplicitly addressed in those courses.

If that's the idea, then it seems about as plausible as the point of dogma that engineering, physics, or mathematics help students to develop their mathematical abilities. I don't think an engineer will be super well-served with taking just a single comp class, but neither will the English student if they just take stats 1.

To the extent that we see humanities instructors emphasizing 'soft skills' or whatever, or claiming particular ability at instilling them (and I have my doubts for some subjects!), I think that's mostly driven by systematic attacks on the humanities and their value, which force them to articulate ill-fitting reasons for their "value" as compared to STEM and applied degrees.

[Wahoo Redux]

I teach business and tech people to write.  That's how I know.  It is very frustrating trying to teach people who lack basic concepts.  We all experience this in our disciplines.

Fine, if you believe in a plurality of learning experiences, great.  That's what I was getting at.  I suppose I am responding to the repeated insistences from certain posters who mischaracterize what we do and say in the humanities.  Apologies.

The critical inquiry into teaching humanities and writing has been going on for years.  If you are really, truly curious:

go to Ebscohost;

use the "Title" function for "literature" and "teaching writing" and maybe include a general key word like "reading" or "classroom." 

Do the same thing with JStore and those title words.

It is exhausting to have to prove something that we academics are all capable of finding out ourselves.

And I suspect your challenge is exactly the challenge that college in general faces: how do we "prove" that college is worth anything?  Gates and Zuckerberg both dropped out of the top college.  Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed.   The summary from Wikipedia is kind of funny:

Jobs later explained that he decided to drop out because he did not want to spend his parents' money on an education that seemed meaningless to him.

On the other hand, Bezos was summa from Princeton.  Do we suppose he wouldn't have joined the other tech greats without the Ivies?  Maybe he is brilliant because he looks like a tiny, kindly Lex Luthor.  Musk, perhaps the most innovative of innovators, dropped out of a Stanford PhD program.

Philip Roth had a masters in English lit.  Seamus Heaney was a school teacher.  John Updike studied drawing.  Our greatest writers---Frost, Hemingway, and Faulkner---barely had any college.  Then there's T.S. Eliot who simply let the last requirement on his Harvard PhD languish and took a job at a British bank.

So one could make the argument, as many do, that there is nothing provably good about anything we do.  One could just as easily achieve lasting, international success by doing your own thing as you could struggling and stumbling through all those stupid degrees. 

I have never use the algebra or geometry I learned in high school.  I suspect I learned a great deal, however.

[marshwiggle]

Presumably the idea is that humanities courses involve doing a lot of written and oral communication, critical analysis, etc., and that these topics are frequently excplicitly addressed in those courses.

If that's the idea, then it seems about as plausible as the point of dogma that engineering, physics, or mathematics help students to develop their mathematical abilities. I don't think an engineer will be super well-served with taking just a single comp class, but neither will the English student if they just take stats 1.

If a student takes stats 1 and gets a B or above, then s/he will have learned something useful.  If s/he has been frog-marched through with a bare pass, s/he has probably learned essentially nothing, and the course was a waste of time.

To the extent that we see humanities instructors emphasizing 'soft skills' or whatever, or claiming particular ability at instilling them (and I have my doubts for some subjects!), I think that's mostly driven by systematic attacks on the humanities and their value, which force them to articulate ill-fitting reasons for their "value" as compared to STEM and applied degrees.

The fact is that STEM people don't spend remotely the amount of time trying to force people to take quantitative classes to improve their numerical analysis skills that humanities people spend arguing that STEM people must take humanities courses. (In lots of places, students don't even have to take math in their last year or two of high school, and that's considered to be completely reasonable, as though to require them to do so would be placing some onerous burden on them.)

So when humanities people are as insistent on the "hard skills" that STEM requires as they are on the "soft skills" that they promote, then they'll have some credibility in explaining why their own courses are so important for everyone.

[Hibush]

The fact is that STEM people don't spend remotely the amount of time trying to force people to take quantitative classes to improve their numerical analysis skills that humanities people spend arguing that STEM people must take humanities courses. (In lots of places, students don't even have to take math in their last year or two of high school, and that's considered to be completely reasonable, as though to require them to do so would be placing some onerous burden on them.)

So when humanities people are as insistent on the "hard skills" that STEM requires as they are on the "soft skills" that they promote, then they'll have some credibility in explaining why their own courses are so important for everyone.

I am curious about the venues where you experience this intense insistence. At my university I don't see it at all. That said, I am in a fairly science-oriented college and the traditional humanities faculty are in a different college. Their influence on the curriculum in my college is nil. Nor do opinion pieces in CHE or IHE by hopeful humanities professors have any influence. To the extent we have humanities requirements, or expectations of competence in things offered in the humanities, it is because faculty in my college think they matter.

I get the impression that your context is different, and would like to understand it better.

[marshwiggle]

The fact is that STEM people don't spend remotely the amount of time trying to force people to take quantitative classes to improve their numerical analysis skills that humanities people spend arguing that STEM people must take humanities courses. (In lots of places, students don't even have to take math in their last year or two of high school, and that's considered to be completely reasonable, as though to require them to do so would be placing some onerous burden on them.)

So when humanities people are as insistent on the "hard skills" that STEM requires as they are on the "soft skills" that they promote, then they'll have some credibility in explaining why their own courses are so important for everyone.

I am curious about the venues where you experience this intense insistence. At my university I don't see it at all. That said, I am in a fairly science-oriented college and the traditional humanities faculty are in a different college. Their influence on the curriculum in my college is nil. Nor do opinion pieces in CHE or IHE by hopeful humanities professors have any influence. To the extent we have humanities requirements, or expectations of competence in things offered in the humanities, it is because faculty in my college think they matter.

I get the impression that your context is different, and would like to understand it better.

Since we don't have the same general education requirements in Canada, the main context for my discussion is here. I find the whole discussion of the importance of general education, and humanities requirements in particular, like trying to nail Jello to the wall. The promoters insist on its vital importance, while at the same time avoiding being pinned down on any specific, measurable outcomes by which the efficacy can be evaluated.

By contrast, in lots of STEM disciplines, it is common to have constant re-evaluation of curricula, addition of new more relevant courses and removable of outdated ones, and replacement of infrastructure for labs and computer software and hardware in order to provide up-to-date practical experience. It's understood that a course or even program that was good and popular in the past may be retired if it doesn't have perceived value for the students. In other words, if enrollment is declining, figure out how to attract more students or be prepared to be shut down. Trying to legislate a "captive audience" is rarely an option. Arguing that this course, program, etc. has been established for decades doesn't matter.

[Hegemony]

A recent article (and I wish I could remember where it was) made an interesting case by noting that in countries with a substantial safety net, humanities enrollments are not in decline. It's not that all humanities graduates are unemployable and poverty-stricken, and only a safety net keeps them from starvation. It's that in societies where the safety net is weak, typical college students (and most importantly, the college students' parents) are full of anxiety about being left behind in the dog-eat-dog economy, where you do see people living under bridges and perishing for lack of health insurance. So they aim at the majors and professions that are perceived to be the surest at bringing in large incomes.

One problem with this is that these tend to be oversubscribed fields with clear, structured career paths — law and medicine, for instance. At least in my state, there is a huge oversupply of lawyers and many of them are having to switch careers. But law is perceived as a sure-fire money-making career, and so the pre-law majors are booming. The same is true of Computer Science, which is actually 13th on the list of majors where graduates do not find good jobs in the field. (Source: Business Insider.) Meanwhile, humanities majors go on to a wide range of careers, way too many to name — government, communications, television, arts organizations, corporations, all kinds of things. I remember going in to our local TV station and finding that every single person I met there — production, newscast writing, etc. — had been one of our English majors.  But English is not perceived as leading to a lucrative career. I'm now used to parents and students not understanding this. But it's dismaying to find that other academics get it wrong too.

Incidentally, the major with the highest amount of later employment in the field is Religious Studies.

[Caracal]

The standard argument for teaching humanities to engineers have always centered around discussions of soft skills, oral and written communcation, creative problem solving, teamwork, and critical analysis, for example in this leaflet,

https://www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/media/document/2019-11/soft-skills-and-humanities.pdf

and this short paper on the importance of the humanities in an engineering curriculum,

https://www.asee.org/public/conferences/20/papers/6052/download#

but it's almost a point of dogma that humanities courses actually help students achieve these goals. But, it's unclear to me how general education humanities classes actually address any of these skills.

Presumably the idea is that humanities courses involve doing a lot of written and oral communication, critical analysis, etc., and that these topics are frequently excplicitly addressed in those courses.

If that's the idea, then it seems about as plausible as the point of dogma that engineering, physics, or mathematics help students to develop their mathematical abilities. I don't think an engineer will be super well-served with taking just a single comp class, but neither will the English student if they just take stats 1.

To the extent that we see humanities instructors emphasizing 'soft skills' or whatever, or claiming particular ability at instilling them (and I have my doubts for some subjects!), I think that's mostly driven by systematic attacks on the humanities and their value, which force them to articulate ill-fitting reasons for their "value" as compared to STEM and applied degrees.

This is a really good point. Obviously students can pick up all kinds of useful skills from any class or major. However, it isn't like humanities has some lock on writing. I like the model that some schools use of teaching writing "throughout the disciplines." This can involve STEM faculty teaching some sections of the intro writing course focusing on scientific topics. Most of the principles of good writing are the same whether you are writing a scientific paper or an English essay.

A required writing course can be incredibly useful, but only if it is done correctly. Writing courses work if you have small class sizes that allow instructors to assign multiple drafts and give extensive feedback throughout the process. If you have somebody teaching 4 sections with 30 students each, it won't be very useful.

The same applies to lots of gen ed requirements. I think it would be very useful for engineering students to take courses that exposed them to different perspectives on the disciplines from the humanities. There's lots of environmental history, for example, that is very relevant to engineering fields. You could imagine sequences of courses or team taught courses where faculty from different disciplines collaborated to give students a broader perspective on their fields. However, gen-ed requirements often are just done on the cheap and there's no reason for students to view them as anything but hoops to jump through.

[Parasaurolophus]

If a student takes stats 1 and gets a B or above, then s/he will have learned something useful.  If s/he has been frog-marched through with a bare pass, s/he has probably learned essentially nothing, and the course was a waste of time.

Surely the same is true of a student who gets a B or above in comp or any other writing- and reading-intensive class.

It also, as you note, doesn't amount to a ton in isolation. But, as I'm pointing out, this seems true across the curriculum. The humanities are not some specially-deficient outlier here. If you want mathematical skills, then there are several different paths to obtaining them, and the more you practice, the better you'll get. If you want reading and writing skills, then there are several different paths to obtaining them, and the more you practice, the better you'll get. If you want critical thinking skills, etc.

By the by, when I took stats 1 it was pretty much just duplicating HS-level content. Stats 2 introduced some new stuff, but now we're talking about the value of having taken two classes, not just one.

The fact is that STEM people don't spend remotely the amount of time trying to force people to take quantitative classes to improve their numerical analysis skills that humanities people spend arguing that STEM people must take humanities courses. (In lots of places, students don't even have to take math in their last year or two of high school, and that's considered to be completely reasonable, as though to require them to do so would be placing some onerous burden on them.)

So when humanities people are as insistent on the "hard skills" that STEM requires as they are on the "soft skills" that they promote, then they'll have some credibility in explaining why their own courses are so important for everyone.

Like Hibush, I don't really see this going on. What I do see are persistent (and political!) attacks on the value of the humanities, widespread misinformation and suspicion about the humanities, and virtually no cognate attacks or suspicion about STEM subjects. When people demand that you come up with some value your subject is uniquely qualified to confer or face cutbacks, it's not surprising that people try to articulate some such value, even though the demand is misguided in the first place. And that's a demand that's been echoed in this thread, by the way.

It reminds me of the doctrine of medium-specificity in art. And like it, although it's plausible on its face, closer inspection reveals it to be full of shit.