Want Innovative Thinking? Hire from the Humanities
blogs.hbr.org
blogs.hbr.org
Having done humanities subjects as well as CS, I would say that the workload was quite potentially similar in difficulty and sophistication and would likely stand people in good stead, as the article says... IF you did the readings for the humanities courses, which quite a number of people doing a Bachelor of Arts really obviously didn't. It was obvious you could skate by with the equivalent of a B- or C+ while doing 15 hours a week total work, which usually inspired great quantities of rage and disdain from the engineering/science students.
Steve Jobs taking a calligraphy class was necessary, but not sufficient, to create the Macintosh. He still needed a team of those tedious non-humanities folks -- not least of whom was Woz -- for Apple to succeed.
Bill Gates and Zuckerberg had educations rich in the humanities. But that was not enough: they also had a deep background in actual programming.
The humanities by themselves are not enough. You need the rubber as well as the road.
Related, apple was staffed by total weirdos for its first 8-10 years, people who neither fit the stereotype of engineer or humanities major. See any article at folklore.org
I picked examples that I'm familiar with. In another field I'm confident that the pattern repeats -- that humanities is an edge but not a base.
Slightly OT -- one of my dreams upon makin' bacon is to go here for a few years: http://stjohnscollege.edu/