This administration’s systemic attacks on universities, science funding, national parks, national health, the CDC, NASA (science funding was gutted) and limp reactions from opposing views just accelerates the fall of the US and the decline of this country
This is never what humanities at the university of Chicago represented, as the article points out:
that humanities professors are “woke” activists whose primary concern is the political indoctrination of “the youth.” Most of the Chicago faculty I spoke with saw—and defended—their disciplines in terms that were, if anything, conservative. Implicit in their impassioned defenses was the belief that the role of a humanist is to preserve knowledge, safeguard learning from the market and the tides of popular interest, and ward off coarse appeals to economic utility.
A lot of the people in the humanities involved with Chicago, Nussbaum, Dewey, Rorty, Roth, are defenders of exactly the Western tradition people ostensibly want to preserve. The assault on this isn't going to strengthen tech and science, which is under attack by the exact same people for the same reasons. Scientists, medical programs, vaccine research is coming under the cleaver just like the humanities do by the same strain of anti-intellectualism. This isn't revitalizing the sciences, as if the humanities are somehow at odds with engineering, it's a decline into Americas version of some kind of oligarchic Third Worldism.
For what it's worth, I have enjoyed a very successful career in data science and software engineering after taking some AP STEM courses in high school, followed by three liberal arts degrees. Many of the best engineers I've known have had similar backgrounds. A good liberal arts education teaches one how to think and learn independently. It's not a substitute for a highly-specialized education in, say, molecular biology, but it provides a really solid foundation to easily pick up more logic-derived technical skills like software development. It's also essential for an informed citizenry and functional democracy.
In general the more difficult your degree the better it teaches you how to learn, because you are forced to learn more difficult stuff.
How right you are! From now on I'm only hiring folks who created abiogenesis in a cereal bowl while fellating a hungry lion. Anyone else had it much too easy, amirite?
It's either that or just folks who discovered a new elementary particle while defending Afghani women from the Taliban.
Anything else would be way too easy.
My favourite pastime is quoting Cicero in planning meetings.
I also hire SEs - if I see a resume come in with a CS and liberal arts background, they are definitely going to the top of the pile and getting an interview. If they can explain to me how Plato relates to their work as a SE then the job is theirs...
It's ok - most companies that matter are led by people who have spent more time reading the Mahabharata rather than Plato. Enjoy your scraps.
Is that in both respective fields of study, though?
It aplears liberal arts/humanities majors are much more willing to work non-related jobs where their STEM collegues more strictly pursue relevant titles.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherrim/2023/01/11/the-p...