The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind' | Hacker News Reader

The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind'

chronicle.com

55 pointsrglovejoy15 comments

These articles are awesome.

I'm always fascinated by why people seem to think that studying the humanities is living the 'life of the mind', as opposed to hard sciences or engineering; fields which provide more robust means of testing the conclusions one has arrived at through mental effort.

The author's objection to graduate school in the humanities has less to do with a lack of intellectual rigor than with the structure of the job market in that part of the academy.

So I think your comment is somewhat misleading in connecting this article (or "these articles") to your own criticism. (Which criticism may of course be valid on its own terms.)

I didn't read philk's comment as a criticism. I think it was a sidebar comment triggered by the OP's almost offhand reference to "life of mind"

I don't see where philk "connected" his own comment with any of the arguments made in the OP. It's just something he added.

Compare Adam Smith's analysis in Wealth of Nations:

"The time and study, the genius, knowledge, and application requisite to qualify an eminent teacher of the sciences, are at least equal to what is necessary for the greatest practitioners in law and physic. But the usual reward of the eminent teacher bears no proportion to that of the lawyer or physician; because the trade of the one is crowded with indigent people who have been brought up to it at the public expence; whereas those of the other two are incumbered with very few who have not been educated at their own." - http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN4.html#I.10.94

It's somewhat the opposite here. In fields like Computer Science there's more money available to pay for your education - it's typical to leave grad school without any debt, I think - than in the Humanities, where as the author pointed out it's typical to leave with huge student loan debt (which is undischargeable by bankruptcy, btw). I guess you could say that there are some fields like CS that can act as professional degrees even though they aren't officially so.

And maybe it wasn't like this is Adam Smith's time, but today a large majority of working law school grads aren't working as lawyers.

I think you're right - high tuition bills do make people think long and hard about going back to school. It's just that 22 year olds aren't so easily deterred from disastrous choices.

Have people not yet figured out that most degrees in the humanities are often not all that marketable? I thought the writing was on the wall 10 years ago. Even then far more people were entering these studies then there would ever be positions. It seems to have only gotten worse.

If you want to know more about the problems with the structure of academia (as well as how it came to be), see Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas: http://jseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis... , which I write about at the link.

Here's some useful overview stats from Department of Education, but we need a breakdown of science and non-science. My gut wonders if these might not be borrowed data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Edit: here's the link: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d08/tables_1.asp

Oh, and here's some more granular data on the science enrollment side of things: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf08306/

anybody know how some open source datasets to start pulling the information apart?

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Books are great - I read one as often as I can.

Having said that, nothing compares to a seminar room full of really smart people and led by a very smart and painfully well-informed professor. I can honestly say that the five years I spent in grad school were more intellectually invigorating than any other time in my life. It's hard to ignite that kind of spark just reading a book on your own.

it's a tautology to argue that smart people who value the life of the mind need to go to graduate school to hang around with smart people who value the life of the mind

no it's not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology

in this case you have, on one side, "smart people who value the life of the mind", and on the other side, "go to graduate school to hang around with smart people who value the life of the mind". the two are not equivalent: on one side the people are isolated; on the other they are in a supportive environment.

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You're digging in, which is a natural response to a bunch of people disagreeing with you.

Here's what I think you're missing. Although I am a pretty intellectually curious person, on my own and when working a separate full-time job, I can only do so much. When I was in graduate school, my job was to read, write and argue with other smart people who also spent all their time reading, writing and arguing (about a somewhat limited range of topics). I had very little else to do - often nothing else, if I wasn't a ta or lecturer. Graduate school isn't perfect (it's a mess in many ways, I think), and you can certainly lead one kind of life of the mind alone, but graduate school is an amazing way to immerse yourself in something. You can't replicate that experience easily, just because you have a library card.

to be honest, i was just trying to explain what a tautology is.

however, it's certainly not clear to me that someone who "values the inner life of the mind" is also the practical-minded kind of person who's going to sit down and organise the equivalent of a university class.

in more general terms, this is "why cities matter". see, for example, http://www.tnr.com/book/review/why-cities-matter - "the magic of urban density means that agglomerations of people come together for simple reasons and often achieve amazing things". for that kind of thing to happen you need to collect people together - at a large scale into cities, and at smaller scales into institutions. your average book club in podunk isn't going to be as academically stimulating as a class at yale.

True. However, the fastest way to learn almost anything is to go hang out with experts. Graduate school, at its best, is a formalization of this. (Of course, you still have to go to the library!)

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