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Comment by jhbadger | Hacker News Reader

That's not Eagleton's point. The guy's a literary critic and is upset that STEM fields have taken the prestige position in universities, which to him means universities are "dying". While I have probably more respect for the humanities than most people with a scientific background, Eagleton makes the error that a lot of people with his background do, which is to assume that only people trained in the humanities are capable of critical thinking and that STEM fields generate robots with no interests outside their technical fields.

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I wonder what people with scientific backgrounds actually think about humanities. I live in a town where you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a scientist. Just a couple of anecdotes: 1) My kids participate in a youth music program, and several of the most prominent donors who support the program are retired scientists. 2) The parents who clamor for more liberal K-12 education, with arts, humanities, and even gym, are the scientists. 3) My parents, both scientists, have always been interested in the humanities.

I have a science-field PhD, and am about to start an assistant professorship in a STEM field. This pretty much echoes my feelings on the humanities - that they're a worthwhile thing that people should absolutely be exposed to.

And also, that playing the "Whose field is more important" game is a losing one for all involved.

What town?

A little background. I work as a dev/mgr at a Liberal Arts university and my oldest graduated from the same one in 2015. I graduated from an Engineering school with a Chemistry BS and Environmental Systems Engineering MS.

We were discussing the criticisms of late about STEM schools don't teach you critical thinking and Liberal Arts does. From our limited and admittedly biased standpoint is that there is an arrogance about how good liberals arts is relative to STEM that is unwarranted. Her experience is that she was not encouraged to think but to parrot back the biased opinions of her faculty. Failure to conform your thinking to their ideas was met with public criticism in the classroom and a lower grade.

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