"I have a conjecture: the probability of being “woke” is almost zero for someone who has read the classics."
This seems almost self-evident to me. After all, the reason thinking people reject the repugnant postmodernist ideology is that it runs counter the entire great Western philosophical and artistic tradition from the times of Homer and the Milesians. Sophocles, Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius are exactly the targets of the mob led by Derrida, Butler, di Angelo, Žižek et al.
In previous times, say in 1930s, even those intellectuals who were open communists, but had classical education stood out as more normal than the rest of the mob. JBS Haldane got his diploma in classical studies, was a commie for a long time, but still argued that human behavior is essentially driven by biology and rejected the notion of "equality" as nonsense. He even wrote a collection of essays doubly politically incorrectly titled "The Inequality of Men".
As many have pointed out, the Woke project is a convenient way for dim-witted students to avoid having to read the classics or think. You don't have to contend with Aristotle if you can dismiss him as Patriarchal and White Supremacist. Very convenient.
I went back to look at J. B. S. "Jack" Haldane's education and background. It was far more heavily weighted towards STEM than you suggest. He was an auto-didact and was involved in scientific investigations with his father in their home laboratory for years before college. He obtained a double major in college in mathematics and classics. He was well-versed in statistics and all kinds of other STEM fields. So rather than the example of Haldane bolstering the value of the humanities in the development of a STEM professional, I think it demonstrates the opposite. After such an intensive study of STEM for so many years, from such a young age, I am not surprised that Haldane decided he wanted some exposure to Classics.
My own STEM background, as strong as it is, does not begin to compare to Haldane's. And of course, when one has a steady diet of just one kind of education, one is bound to want to broaden out a bit. And that is what Haldane did. And that is what I did as well.
The truth is somewhere in the middle and more nuanced. Yes, liberal arts is a luxury good from a pure economics perspective but life is long and the >50th percentiles who go to four-year colleges are all very rich in global terms.
More prosaically, even at the Ivy I attended a few decades ago, for the prep school kids it was review, whereas for others it would be the only time they would consume the Great Books. For me, reading philosophy has been an important part of life since I was 16 years old.
The Western tradition attracted the immigrants like me, and helps the multicultural societies we all live in cohere, just as English provides a lingua franca. The alternative is tribalism under bloated regional bureaucratic empires (i.e., USA, EU, Greater China) or corrupt petro-states (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Nigeria).
There is a value to studying "Great Books". But waiting until college for these studies is probably not a great idea. There is not enough time to both study "Great Books" plus get a solid STEM education in college.
STEM is cumulative, and so one needs to spend a prolonged period building up an expertise, if one wants to be a STEM professional. By the time I started college, I had maybe 4 or 5 times as much preparation in STEM as the average American student entering college.
There are almost no "Great Books" professionals. But what one learns from studying "Great Books" is useful for everyone, not just those who are going to be STEM professionals. I have no problem with "Great Books". However, if you let a desire to study the "Great Books" dislodge STEM education, then there will be trouble in STEM.
I am not as narrow as one might suspect. I personally read almost everything that Voltaire ever wrote, in the original. I studied the existentialists, and read many of their texts, in the original. I read a lot of French and English literature. I studied Classical History, because of personal interests. I spent about 9 years in intensive study of terpsichorean principles (up to the professional level). I spent 10 years studying classical piano and 3 years studying music theory. I took 3 years of dramatic education. I spent 3 years studying lapidary, and so on and so forth.
But this was all before or after I had obtained a solid undergraduate background in STEM. Roughly 97% of the classwork I took as an undergraduate was in STEM subjects. I took 3 or 4 times the required coursework in STEM as a graduate student and continued to audit and take classes in STEM subjects as a postdoc for years after.
And when I speak to my colleagues who have a much lighter background, it is clear what the differences are.
I have no problem with the pursuit of a broad education. I like to think I have a reasonably broad education myself, and that I have benefited from it. However, the "good liberal arts education" that many Americans pursue, even at elite institutions, is sort of a joke. It is not about "Great Books", or anything, really.
I will note that St. John's College in Annapolis attempts to pursue a "Great Books" approach, even in STEM. They present the students with Einstein in German and Euclid in Greek and the Principia in Latin, for example. I am not sure how well this approach works, to be honest.
When I began my university studies, it was common for students, at least at the graduate level in STEM, to have to master a couple of languages like German and Latin, and to be able to demonstrate their abilities to be able to pursue a PhD. I think most programs dropped these requirements not long after that, however.
A master flight instructor, of all people, put the importance of education in the best, most concise statement I've ever read: "Education makes knowledge more soluble in the mind." He was referring to the knowledge required to be a pilot, but it applies universally. The better and broader the education, the better suited the mind is to absorb more knowledge. As a scientist, I do not think the humanities and social sciences are wasted time, so long as they are as broad as possible. The problem, it seems to me, is that the scope of education in these fields has become rather pinched.
I think this is a good observation. From what I understand, almost everything that used to be part of the humanities has been discarded in favor of "social justice" brainwashing.
Before going to University, I studied French in immersion classes during the summers at a small French college (over 480 hours of class, on top of the 9 years of study I had already dedicated to learning French). One of my close friends there was similar to me, with a similar grade school background. We both had a bit of an intellectual bent, and were passionate about academic work. This person, let's call him "Joe", was a brilliant individual. Later Joe won the national championship in a trivia contest, held in French, which was not his native language.
At university, we remained in contact. He studied "arts" and I studied physics. The only way Joe was able to get through freshman honors calculus (with proofs) was that I tutored him. Joe had had a year or two of calculus in high school, already, but this was a totally different beast to attempt to understand. I think his undergraduate major was economics, but Joe took a smattering of other humanities classes. Of course, by the time he had a bachelor's degree, Joe was completely unemployable for anything, so he went to law school and eventually obtained an LLD at Oxford University in the UK, graduating with the highest honors.
Even then, because of the early incarnation of DEI at the time, Joe was unable to obtain a teaching position without a lot of scrambling. Joe was told that since he was male, it would be impossible for him to obtain a teaching position at a law school, ever. All law schools in our country were effectively banned from hiring anything but women, from then on, until the end of time, no matter what the qualifications of the candidates were.
Now decades later, Joe satisfies more of the constantly evolving "woke" victimhood criteria, so many law schools are frantic to hire him. Joe is world famous now. He has argued cases in front of various supreme courts around the world, in various languages, and won his cases. But Joe was so insulted by how he was treated as a fresh LLD that he has never returned home to our country.
However, if I compare his impact on the world, and mine, although I might not be as "smart" as Joe is, certainly not in the Humanities or in Languages, there is little comparison. I have contributed far more. My focus on just a relatively narrow set of STEM fields has been tremendously beneficial. And if I am lucky, there will be more contributions to come.
I know many think STEM is just a bunch of nonsense. They are quite proud of their liberal arts backgrounds. Fair enough.
But STEM is not just some mindless manipulations of a handful of simple equations. It is part of a grand quest that goes back millennia. And the fruits of that quest are turned into tools for human flourishing.
Discard and dismiss STEM at your peril. I think we are in danger of doing so, because of this creeping evil woke ideology spawned in the depths of the humanities that currently threatens to destroy all of Western civilization.
These are nice thought provoking ideas. Here are some complementary views of mine:
While studying Literature, with other Humanities, is wonderful, it does not necessarily need be done for university degrees. For example in Germany, they have "Volkshochschulen", which are casual institutions for adults. They typically offer various subjects throughout the year at modest prices. I took some German classes there.
Concurrently in America, we can substantially benefit by Vocational Trade Schools for "university degrees". The non-elites can surely use these quite effectively for their careers, definitely much better than by Liberal Art Colleges.
For the same reason as why we get degrees in engineering: we could in theory do it on our own, but in practice we need the discipline of a class. A reading group can do almost as well, I think. In the 1960's the Great Books program was a big deal, and there was even a children's version. Housewives would get together to discuss Plato. That disappeared for some reason.
Actually, it's *easier* to learn technical subjects on your own. You learn by doing problem sets. In the humanities, you learn by talking with other people about a book, and by arguing.
Here is a comparison for you to consider, Mr. Rasmusen.
I took one year of psychology in high school. On my own, I also studied several of Hans Eysenck's books on psychometrics for a couple of years between the ages of 11 and 13. That is my psychology background.
I had a girlfriend who obtained a bachelor's and a master's degree in psychology. The "problem sets" in Engineering are basically replaced by essays in psychology, for the most part.
English was not my girfriend's first language. So, although it was probably a bit dishonest, she asked me to write all her essays and even the takehome exams. She edited what I produced.
I never attended any of the lectures, which she did. I never did any of the reading, which she did, or at least attempted to do.
And yet, my essays always, invariably, were given the top grades in the entire class. The take-home exams, which I wrote (and she edited a bit), always were the top scoring papers submitted to the professor. And this was true not just at the undergraduate level, but the Master's level as well.
So if psychology (admittedly a quasi-STEM field, although mostly a humanities subject) is so much more difficult than STEM, how could I do this, without even breaking a sweat? It was trivial for me.
On the other hand, going through the homework and exams for graduate physics at MIT was a nightmare. We had the top student from West Point in our class. He failed out. We had the top students in physics from various countries in Europe; a lot of them crashed and burned. We had someone with a PhD in mathematics from a top school in our class. He barely survived. One class dropped from about 200 students at the start of the year to about 35 at the end. This was no cake walk.
My first year at MIT, when it had 8000 students, saw about 19 student suicides in 8 months. Compare this to other stressed populations, like those with PTSD. The pressure was immense. I have many stories about my experiences at MIT.
I do not think you can even begin to imagine what it was like. For example, people were studying day and night in the never-closing 24 hour library, weeks before the term started, to prepare. There were no spaces available in the library. People were sitting on every chair, and even on the floor. It was wall to wall students, desperate out of their minds, at 2 in the morning, studying like mad. The administration would throw free parties with the hottest bands in Boston and free beer and pizza. They also had free buses to girl's schools to bring females to campus. Not a single student showed up to these events, ever. I looked at a few of these. I walked in, saw no one was there but administrators ready to hand out free food and a band playing to an empty room, and I left. Over and over. Tell me that is common at any other college or university.
I challenge you to even survive the freshman level undergraduate homework sets at MIT in physics. You will soon understand that you have no idea what you are talking about. Sorry.
Since you were such a top writer in psychology, Alan, can you explain why so many MIT students committed suicide? I presume if they got into MIT in the first place, they should be able to flourish in many other places and fields. Why the failure in merely one institution feel like a life and death situation to them?
Yes, I have a hypothesis, of course. You see, a lot of these students were the top student in their middle school or junior high school. And then the top student in their high school. They won awards. They might have been the top student in their city or county or state or country. Some were graduate students and had been the top student in their college or university. And so on. They had gone from success, to success, to success, for years and years. They had competed and won. They had always come out on top.
Then they go to MIT. It is a very different place. It is cold. It is austere. There is no huge endowment like at Harvard to cushion things. There are no legacies or people with trust funds there. People do not "party". There are no sports teams to speak of. Most people are very far out on the spectrum and strange. I saw surveys of MIT graduates and about 60% were still virgins. I spoke to some classmates from MIT and the women were surprised that the fraction of virgins was not higher still.
My housemate was from UC Irvine. On a Friday night, we were on Massachusetts Avenue in front of MIT. A free MIT bus had just dropped off a bus load of women from one of the nearby women's colleges. Some were reasonably attractive. These women were either getting on city buses, or on the "T" or subway. We asked them what they were doing. They said "You guys are just nerds. We are going to Harvard, where the MEN are". They did not want geeks and techies. They wanted to meet rich handsome jocks with trust funds. So we watched them leave. This happened ALL the time.
Then of this population of winners, all of them have to compete with each other. Some who were the very best, always, are now the worst. They and their families have high expectations. It is expensive and they are sacrificing everything to be there, sometimes thousands of miles from home. It is lonely, and it is brutal.
And so...more than a few end it.
I am sure there are more women now than there were. I am not sure the suicide rate is still as high. The administration was constantly attempting to come up with programs to reduce it. They might have succeeded. I have no idea.
But it was a really nightmarish place, in some ways.
No one can get an engineering degree by just reading books. You need lots of practical training and hands-on labs. These facilities are expensive to set up and hard to work on. It's not "easier" to learn, I don't know where you are getting this information. How about you go to a local engineering school and see how they teach?
I've worked on his homework with my Purdue son. But you're right that I gt the wrong picture, since I don't see the labs. Still, a lot of engineering is problem sets, unlike the humanities. Take math or comp sci as the exmaple if you like.
By the way, Mr. Rasmusen, if engineering is so trivial, why on EARTH did you have to assist your son with his engineering homework? Come on, do you mean your own son is somehow mentally deficient? I thought engineering was all trivial nonsense. So why help him? Why couldn't he do all this trivial elementary stuff on his own?
No offense, but I respectfully disagree. Are you really so sure you could waltz through advanced mathematical proofs without any coaching or preparation? Or learn all the intricate procedures that computer scientists follow to produce and maintain production code, instead of just "programming"?
Most people have no idea how much work it takes to become a good scientist or a good engineer. Witness Mr Rasmusen above, who seems to think because he saw his son's homework he knows what it takes. Imagine seeing Michael Jordan practice and thinking you know what it takes to be a world class athlete.
Not waltz, but trudge, yes. That's how economists generally learn new techniques, as opposed to sitting in classes. As far as production code, I bet people learn that on the job, with practice, rather than in college classes. Coding is one of the best subjects for self-teaching.
To make things more relevant to the original essays, let's suppose that we replace every single economist on planet earth with people who have zero technical background. They might not even know decimals or fractions, for example. They might have never touched a computer, either. However, they have all had discussions about works by Ovid and Plato and Chaucer and Sophocles and so on.
Of course, they would never be exposed to material from Archimedes or Euclid; those are too "STEM-like". How do you think they would do? Would you favor removing all professional economists and replacing them with people who have discussed a few classic works in the humanities? Would that be a good idea? After all economics is just technical stuff; the really difficult and important stuff is associated with those discussions and arguments of humanities texts.
Or even better and even more apropos, why not replace not only all STEM professionals but all professional economists as well with people who have trust funds and signed up for courses in nontechnical "liberal arts subjects" but never did the homework or attended any of the actual classes and never wrote any essays or exams. They spent their entire undergraduate years drunk and/or stoned and trying to "hook up" in a stupor. Does that sound like a formula for success? Think one of those kids could easily replace you and outperform you?
That is what my essay is discussing. We fawn over these "good liberal arts educations" when they are mostly a load of hogwash.
But, these kids often are the offspring or descendants of someone rich and famous. So...
I finally checked with friends in the administration at IU. I should have done this first before engaging with you Mr. Rasmusen. Your reputation is something to behold, indeed.
Of course, people CAN teach themselves these things. But that is usually only if they are either (1) naturally gifted and talented, but that is exceedingly rare, or (2) they already have been trained to teach themselves. And even then, at least in the 2nd case above, it will be a substantial effort with no guarantee of success. These fields are incredibly challenging and competitive. Perhaps 1 out of 100 or 1 out of 1000 or even only 1 out of 10000 that starts out, makes it in the field and "succeeds" at an advanced level. These areas are not trivial, no matter what you seem to believe.
My lab partner in undergraduate physics is now a chaired economics professor at an elite institution. He obtained his PhD in mathematical economics. He is now famous and an important consultant on matters in economics. His colleagues in economics are quoted as saying he is the smartest person they have ever met in their entire lives. He is a smart guy. However, I know him pretty well. There is a reason he switched from physics to economics.
And since then, I have met a lot of other very smart people, including Fields Medallists and Nobellists in Science (not Economics, since that is only a "memorial prize", and not really a true Nobel Prize). And Economics is not quite in the same category.
At Bell Labs, I sat next to two prominent mathematical economists, what was left of the Bell Labs Economics Division after they had fired everyone else. So why were they fired? Because they could not really contribute to the STEM enterprise, so Bell Labs got rid of dozens of economists. These two were nice guys. I spoke to them often, and read their work, but they were not in the same category as the physicists or the real mathematicians at Bell Labs; not even close.
If I look at the journals Technometrics and Econometrics, there are clear differences in the quality. And economics does not come out on top; sorry.
I took a graduate Mathematical Finance course. Granted, it is not quite the same as economics, but it is vaguely related. I found it quite interesting, but not that challenging compared to what I had already seen in physics and mathematics. I came very close to accepting a job as a "quant"; that is, as a hedge fund manager. One job offer was to manage the Nobel Committee's investment portfolio. No economists were ever interviewed or recruited for these positions; only physicists and mathematicians. Gee, I wonder why that is?
If you look at Renaissance Capital and its investment returns over the last few decades, they did not achieve their success by hiring economists. I know these people personally. And I know what techniques they use. This stuff is way beyond what economists do, or are capable of; sorry.
If economics is so wonderful that we could replace all scientists and engineers and mathematicians with economists, then why haven't we done so? There are certainly lots of economists around and they are probably underemployed and could be hired cheaply. So simple economics says that all STEM positions should be filled by economists. But yet, I have not noticed this phenomenon. Interesting...
The one member of Congress that I know with an economics degree did not know what the law of supply and demand was, under questioning. That says quite a bit...
So sure, you think STEM is all trivial simplistic nonsense and you personally can compete head to head with the best scientists and mathematicians on the planet and probably outshine them all "because" you are an economist.
The entire point of a solid STEM education, up through a PhD and beyond, is to train the student to be able to "teach themselves", i.e., to develop auto-didacts. I heard this refrain many times during my education.
Of course, there are some who are able to achieve this status without extended training. And there are famous examples in the history of STEM, like Newton and Einstein and von Neumann and Ramanujan. But most cannot do this on their own, and need to be coaxed and trained and nurtured.
And I would argue that formal STEM training is not just laboratory work (although lab experiences are incredibly important in STEM; speaking to some colleagues who went to MIT for their undergraduate degrees, they felt they could have just discarded the classes completely since they learned so much more in the labs than in the classes), but also being trained to solve problems and how to think like a scientist (or a mathematician or a computer scientist).
This is not as obvious or trivial or easy as you seem to think, I assure you.
I didn't mean to imply it was easy. Rather, it's very hard, and that makes it hard to have the discipline to work through a book on your own. The function of the class is to force you to read the book carefully and solve the problems according to a schedule.
I'm thinking of undergrads. In an econ PhD program, you learn how to do research by trying to do it or by assisting a professor or by going to seminars and hearing work in progress criticized. And there, classes are more important because the most advanced topics aren't in books yet, or at least aren't written up clearly yet.
I learned lots of stuff as both an undergraduate student and as a graduate student in both mathematics and physics that was not in any book. And most of my current work is not in any book or publication and will probably not be in a book or published in a paper for decades or longer. And I draw on lots of results that are closely held and not published in any book or paper.
One learns the skills not from doing the problems ONLY but from being trained in HOW to approach the problems and how to think about the problems. This you can really only get first hand, and usually, face to face. Of course, one needs lots and lots of practice in solving the problems. This is a complicated and very challenging process.
And even for someone like me, who is a mathematical physicist, I have had years and years and years of training in laboratory science and design and construction of laboratory equipment. This was not a waste; it is in fact critical if I am going to interact with the "empirical" part of my field to create real results. I need to know this stuff, backwards and forwards. I need to know the specialized language and the techniques that the physicists and even the engineers rely on and use. Even small projects are done by a team of specialists, and I need to be able to talk to computer scientists and engineers and field observationalists and equipment designers and laboratory experimentalists and others. If I could not do so, I would not be too much use.
The author is combining two different questions: the benefits of a liberal arts education and the economics of paying for that experience. As to the former, I found the liberal arts program at a competitive college to be life changing. I attended a small, rural high school with a very limited set of courses and perspectives. The history, art, calculus, chemistry, anthropology, and english classes, among others, that I took my first year of college were earth shaking as was being surrounded by really smart, motivated, worldly peers. I didn't know what I wanted to study because I had not been exposed to much of it. My life would be quite different had I followed the few high-achieving classmates in my high school to study chemical engineering in order to join the dying paper making industry.
I managed to pay off my loans over the next 25 years and that investment was worthwhile to me, and, at the same time, I understand the economic trade off. I will also add that identifying as a teen the field of study that will provide a lifetime of financial success is an inexact science. Ask a recent pharmacy school grad.
As I suggested elsewhere, Dewey, why not write an essay for Heterodox STEM and submit it to Dorian Abbot, the founder and chief editor? Show that the entire raison d'etre of this part of Substack is pure nonsense.
Document it, put out your feelings that there are no problems whatsoever in STEM, no threats from the current woke ideology or anything else.
And then, have it published for everyone to read and critique.
Do not just argue against me. Argue against everyone.
Make your case. I would love to read it. And I would love to see how others respond. That is, if Dorian accepts your essay, of course.
Also, your summary of my original essay is more than slightly lacking. But considering all your other comments show the same propensity, is that a surprise?
Alan, I'm going to be honest... this is getting kind of weird. You wrote a blog post about the value of a liberal arts education. I responded. And, while I'm not a neutral observer, I think I proved my point.
Now, you're asking me to write an essay to show "that there are no problems whatsoever in STEM". I have no idea if there are problems in STEM. That's not what you wrote about and it is not what I responded to. So, back to my liberal arts education. I think this is an example of the fallacy known as ignoratio elenchi.
Dewey, I think we have a massive communication problem. You have not understood almost anything I wrote. Amazing, isn't it? But, whatever. I think I proved my point. You think you are some master of rhetoric and debate or possibly the greatest genius to have ever walked the earth, but you seem to be clueless. An exchange with you is like shouting down an empty well. And you have not answered a single one of my challenges. Just brainless nonsense and insults and circular reasoning. I guess that is what passes for mental acuity and perspicacity in your neck of the woods...quite impressive.
And NO I did not write an essay on the value of a liberal arts education. That claim speaks volumes right there. How can you have such low reading comprehension but yet claim to be some sort of master?
Alan- is this you? This is the blog post we are both commenting on:
A Good Liberal Arts Education and the American Caste System
by Alan Beado, Emeritus Professor at Stanley Livingstone College
"I am not sure I can see much that is "good" about a "good liberal arts education", to be honest. You do not find other countries in such a frenzy over a "liberal arts education" as people in the US seem to be. It was quite a shock for me to observe this when I moved to the US."
Never mind. Do not worry about it. You do not understand. I do not believe you CAN understand. You are too much of a "genius". I have had enough of this nonsense.
I think this is probably a waste of my time, since I do not think you are capable of comprehending anything on this topic. But in case someone else is reading this, I will go through a short summary here.
In my essay, and also in some of my comments, I was addressing three main kinds of "liberal arts education":
(1) The so-called "good" liberal arts education that US "elites" often get at "elite" US colleges and universities.
(2) The liberal arts or humanities educations that are popular in foreign (i.e., non-US) colleges and universities.
(3) The liberal arts educations frequently pursued by non-elites in the US.
In addition, I and others briefly touched on the "Great Books" version of liberal arts education (one might call it version (4)) in the comments, which is different than these other three. My essay mainly addressed version (1) and briefly mentioned version (2) and alluded to version (3), but only slightly.
Version (1) is pretty nontaxing and nondemanding and more or less worthless, unless you already are in the upper crust of US society. You can find version (1) at places like Harvard and Princeton, but probably very few other schools.
Version (2) is intensive and focused and pretty demanding, in most cases. You can find version (2) at many places outside the US, i.e., the other 96% of the world. For example, if you studied Classics or History at Oxford University in the UK, you probably would be dealing with version (2).
Version (3) is what you and your relative supposedly took. It has very little in common with version (1), and maybe not that much to do with version (2) either. Just because you have never encountered versions (1) and (2) does not mean they do not exist. And your opinions on (1) and (2) are basically irrelevant, as I suggested previously, as politely as I could. However, this did not seem to register with you. Instead, you became obnoxiously combative about your confusion, which does not create a great impression of you.
Each of these versions of liberal arts studies has advantages and disadvantages. For example, in the comments, I discussed a friend who took version (3) at an Ivy League college. However, they found they were completely unprepared for the most demanding and challenging parts of STEM. So they had to do at least 4-8 years of extra remedial STEM education. This path is expensive in time and other resources. However, as I mentioned, it might be worth it. Other countries do not promote this approach like the US does. This is worth noting.
There were a couple of people in the comments who advocated the "Great Books" approach to undergraduate education, a sort of version (4). They even suggested it was a superior form of preparation for STEM. They were also completely dismissive of STEM education and preparation.
I spoke to the administration at the school where one of these people had spent their career. Then, they entered into a disgraceful "retirement". I discovered that they are not someone to take seriously. I am sorry I even bothered with their comments at all.
And I am now thinking that you are also in the category of people who should be ignored. You are not a serious person either, in my estimation.
The other issue with the humanities/liberal arts, which was touched on in the comments, is its current corruption (which you seem to deny exists). In the words of Dorian Abbot, the founder and chief editor of Heterodox STEM, "As many have pointed out, the Woke project is a convenient way for dim-witted students to avoid having to read the classics or think. You don't have to contend with Aristotle if you can dismiss him as Patriarchal and White Supremacist. Very convenient."
Why do you think Abbot said this? Three people liked his response. Sure, you might not understand the context for this comment. But that statement of Abbot's encapsulates a lot of the reason "Heterodox Stem" exists. I am sure that since I used a question mark, you will dismiss this paragraph as unimportant and something to be thoughtlessly ignored.
You clearly think your experience, and that of your relative, is what goes on in the entire US, and probably the entire world, obviously. You take your own experience, and extrapolate it beyond all reason and common sense. You obviously have never encountered the "elites" and their "good" liberal arts educations (version (1) above) which are quite different from many standard humanities educations around the world (version (2) above, or the one you claim to have had, version (3)).
And you seem to be under the impression that the "elites" I wrote about do not exist. Or that a "gentleman's C" has never existed or now a "gentleman's A-" does not presently exist. You did not encounter this phenomenon, so it must not exist, to your way of thinking.
Clearly, you did not bother to investigate. How rational of you. It is not easy for someone like you to use Google or other search engines, I guess.
You refuse to address or even contemplate the differences between US higher education and the varieties in the many other countries on the planet. I doubt you have ever encountered anyone with a humanities or a STEM education from an institution of higher learning outside the US. If you have, you sure do not show any evidence of it. Your own personal views and experiences mean everyone else should bugger off, apparently. You and you alone are the uniquely "correct person". I call this attitude Panglossian conceit; it is not particularly healthy, in my opinion. However, I received the message you sent; loud and clear.
You obviously think your backwoods hayseed qualifications are what the entire US higher education system is like, or the entire world's university systems are like. I am not writing or commenting about whatever obscure atavistic college you went to, or supposedly went to. Sorry, but I have no idea where you went and I do not particularly care. Your alma mater is undoubtedly not indicative of the trends in the more than 6000 institutions of higher learning in the US. This is at least according to my understanding and probably that of the 2000 other people on Heterodox STEM. And you refuse to acknowledge that such a thing might be true, or could be true.
You work with some lawyers and you think that group is "fine" so there are no problems in any universities in the US (or probably anywhere else). You seem to believe that the entire US legal system and all of US humanities and all of US STEM training exhibit no problems whatsoever. Social justice is not intruding or influencing anything in US higher education, and never has, and never will, according to you. Okay, that is one point of view.
I am far more interested in people who are attempting to be world leaders in STEM, rather than someone plodding along on the margins of STEM. I have worked with a half dozen or more Nobel Prizewinners and Fields medalists. There is of course a value to providing technical support for trial lawyers or patent lawyers. But let's face it, that is not the path to revolutionizing STEM and our understanding of the universe and reality. For example, see Einstein's comments about being a patent clerk and working with patent lawyers. So you have a nice quiet safe pedestrian career and you have experienced very little. So what? You want an award for that?
You also think I am confusing the ability to pay for an education with the value of the education. Where you get that idea from, I have no clue. I did focus on the "elites", for whom these costs are irrelevant.
But I do notice that US education is obscenely expensive, to the point where fewer and fewer people are willing and able to take advantage of it. I just did not write about that in my essay. Judging from your previous posts, I bet you might deny that this is accurate as well. According to you, although costs have gone up, financial aid has almost covered all these increased costs so there are no problems. Yeah, right...
You also refuse to address any counter-evidence that suggests your view is not the only one with merit. You just make slurs and complain about "800 question marks". Did you count them? Would you swear to the "800 question marks" assertion under oath, under penalty of perjury, or penalty of felony? That kind of crude exaggeration and inability or unwillingness to engage with contrary viewpoints is what seems to characterize most of your remarks. These must be the hallmarks of your "superior" liberal arts "education".
I invited you to write an essay demonstrating why the 2000 people here on Heterodox STEM and many thousands more on similar websites are completely mistaken about the current putatively troubling trends in STEM (or the humanities, if you prefer). You rejected that suggestion in a haughty manner.
You spewed all manner of insults and borderline invective. Frankly, you made yourself look ridiculous. I guess the old adage, "when you have no arguments, pound the table" holds in this case. It is not particularly convincing. Is that what your lawyer coworkers do? Is that what your vaunted training in rhetoric taught you? Any gratuitous statements like that...well, of course, anyone with an ounce of reason will just dismiss them and ignore them.
You have never experienced any trouble in STEM, apparently, and seem to be in complete denial that it might exist. No one you know has ever experienced any problems from the intrusion of social justice ideology into STEM, it would seem. I have, and many more times than just once. So has Dorian Abbot. So have many others on this website and other websites that focus on this topic, as well as many of my friends and associates. I know people personally who wrote letters to the New York Times on this topic, and received a torrent of death threats for their trouble. Whether you admit there are flashing yellow caution lights in STEM at the moment, or not, trouble seems to be brewing.
You can bury your head in the sand if you feel like it, however. Be my guest. No one can force you to pay attention. None of it probably matters to you, not one whit.
You are SO SURE that you are completely correct but you are unwilling to actually do any work or effort to put your case forward. Instead, you just seem to favor "trolling". Interesting...
Why are you so lazy and arrogant? Think about that. I am done with you. I should never have wasted my time engaging with someone like you. There is no point in discussing anything with you. And that is probably how you like it, isn't it? What a great technique! So clever...
I think you seem to be unaware that the liberal arts program you took is, in the vast majority of cases, no longer available. The history, art, anthropology and English classes, as well as psychology and sociology and vast swaths of other stuff, are long gone; effectively discarded. It has all been replaced with woke victimology courses and struggle sessions and other kinds of nonsense.
Sure, the courses might still have names like History 101 and Art 201 and so on. But that is not what the content is.
Have you never heard of the chant, "Hey ho, hey ho, Western Civ has got to go"? What do you think these students were referring to? What were they protesting? You never wondered?
If you are from an "oppressor" group, like a Jew or a white male or heterosexual, you will be brutalized and attacked from day one. You will have a target painted on you. You will be bullied. Does this sound like an enlightening undergraduate experience to you? And since you were from a rural area, you would be doubly hated. The lowest of the low are white male heterosexuals from rural areas. And they will let you know it, in spades. Sound good to you? Does it sound like a great intellectual experience?
When you refer to what you were exposed to, you are not addressing what I was writing about. That is, suppose one has an option for 10 one-semester classes per year. In 4 years, you take 40 one semester classes. The elites at the elite schools take 40 different classes in 40 different subjects, mostly at the freshman level. And the legacies and trust fund babies do not need to even show up to the classes or do any of the homework or exams. They still pass. THIS is what I am referring to as a "good liberal arts education".
Did you take 40 different courses in 40 different subjects, mostly at the freshman level, as an undergraduate? Did you skip all your classes? Did you avoid doing any of the homework or essays or exams? If you didn't, you are not familiar with what I am talking about. You are looking at the world through rose-colored glasses, and remembering a reality that has long since ceased to exist, at least in the US.
The debt you took on, decades ago, Is nothing like the debt today's students are burdened with. And the quality of classes you took was probably infinitely better than what is available now, even in the "very best" institutions.
I am probably older than you, so when I went through, almost everyone could pay their own way through college with zero debt. It was not difficult at all. Those days are long gone, thanks to the greed of the administrators and bureaucrats who have corrupted the schools.
Of course, it is not easy to ask someone who is 15 or 16 or 17 to pick a field to study and concentrate in. That has always been true.
I started studying French in College, then went into Mechanical Engineering, and then back to French, and then into Physics, with a heavy dose of Mathematics. And that was after a very heavy background in physics and mathematics and chemistry in junior high and high school. So I did not take a straight path. If you look at many famous physicists and mathematicians throughout history, a lot of them did not take a straight path either. So what? Is this new? It was always like this. Is that a surprise?
And as I have written in a previous essay on Heterodox STEM, STEM evolves, constantly. And you need a broad enough background in STEM that you can evolve with the field and accommodate the market that you are faced with. It has always been like this, as near as I can tell. You just have to take a shot at it, and do your best. And always keep your eyes open for possibilities and traps.
I am not talking about a lifetime of financial success. I am talking about being able to eat. Are you in favor of being able to feed yourself? At least having a subsistence level of existence? I am.
No one can guarantee you a lifetime of financial success, as I wrote above. Unless you have inherited money, a lifetime of financial success is a very remote possibility. And even a lot of those who inherit money get fleeced or waste it all or fritter it away.
Interestingly, a younger relative just graduated from the same college as I did. Our experiences were quite similar, aside from the fact that it is much, much harder to be admitted and the cost is much higher (although so is the financial aid). There are still stringent course requirements for picking a major, taking 300 level/advanced courses, and satisfying the graduation requirements. I suppose there might be a way to be an art or dance major and avoid much of that challenge, but I did not know anyone who took that cynical approach, and the studio art majors that I knew had double majors paired with something more practical/applicable to earning a living. There is absolutely no option, then or now, to take 40 intro courses and graduate. And the vast majority of the campus was pre-med, pre-law, etc. There were a number of 3-2 programs for students who wanted the foundation of a liberal arts education followed by a more technical degree, although most students who wanted that experience graduated in 4 years and then went to grad school. That's what I did.
I think that we likely agree on some of your concerns. But, the pinata you are holding up doesn't match my experience, nor what appears to be the present reality at at least one liberal arts college. I can't speak to what is happening at other campuses.
I know what I observed at both Harvard and Princeton University. Perhaps you think I did not observe what I did. You are going to tell me that this sort of stuff does not go on at Harvard and Princeton?
And I know what Jordan Peterson and Peter Boghossian and Christopher Rufo and Lawrence Krauss and Heather Mac Donald and Thomas Sowell and Victor Davis Hanson and many others have pointed out, repeatedly. Perhaps all these academics decrying the state of the humanities and academia in the US, some who resigned tenured positions, are all lying. Is that it? You think they are all liars?
Perhaps you think that the efforts to create new colleges like Ralston College and the University of Austin are just nonsense because there are no problems whatsoever in American higher education. Why are there efforts at college and university reform going on in Florida, and being considered in Texas? Is this just because the people attempting the reforms are right wing flakes who want to destroy perfectly good academic institutions? Perhaps you think that Hillsdale College is just full of delusional fools when they differentiate between their approach and the standard approach at US colleges. Perhaps all the articles bemoaning the state of US college education in the Chronicle of Higher Education are written by liars. All the reports about required CRT training at the University of California are all lies, are they?. All the reports about required diversity statements at various schools, are lies, do you think? All the reports of colleges and universities that have dropped SAT and GRE and MCAT and GMAT and LSAT requirements are all false, is that right? Do you deny that both Stanford and Yale now have more administrators than students? What about the reports that about 80% of US colleges now are at least partly segregated; are those false? Do you think Jonathon Haidt is deceptive? Just full of it? How about Bret Weinstein? How did Weinstein win his lawsuit, do you think? Do you think that the reports that more than 3/4 of US faculty are now adjuncts are all false? Do you personally know a lot of adjuncts and what their lives are like? I do.
Do you think there is no such thing as a Gentleman's C/A- and never was such a thing? At any colleges or universities in the US? Are you sure? What about Van Jones, who reportedly attended Yale under a no exam and no grade policy? Is that false?
How many universities and graduate schools have you attended and worked for? My total is at least 6; how about yours? How many job interviews for faculty positions have you had? I have had 7 offers and many more interviews; how about you?
I have attended colleges and universities that would let you take 40 or even 30 disconnected courses in random subjects and "graduate". It is not the smartest thing to do, but if you have tens of millions of dollars or more behind you, then that is exactly what you can do and have a "successful" life. You have never met any of these people, have you? Some are close personal friends of mine. You think they do not exist? Really?
I describe below a person I know who obtained a fancy 4 year liberal arts bachelor's degree at an Ivy League school, and then needed a solid 4 years of remedial STEM study so they could go to graduate school (and years of extra study after the PhD as well) to be able to compete at a world class level. Sure, you can do that if you want. Most of the rest of the world does not do that sort of stuff. Maybe they should, but I do not think they do. Show me another country where this is encouraged. Ever wonder how people from other countries get their PhDs and MDs and JDs years ahead of Americans? Is that a mystery to you?
It is quite an extra investment one is making, but go right ahead. I have no objections. I personally took way more than the minimum in both STEM and the humanities and I do not regret it.
So I think you are not quite understanding ANYTHING I have written here. Quite interesting...
And you clearly think there is zero problem at all in US academia. That is quite a claim. Amazing...What do you think Heterodox STEM is about? Or the Heterodox Academy? Why do they even exist?
I would love to have had you listen in on the phone calls I have had with professors from my graduate school who served on my committee as they described the current situation. What I have heard is far, far worse than what I have alluded to here. But you really are like an ostrich, I guess. Everything is fine...wow.
That said, that out of the thousands of colleges in the US, I have no doubt that some are in better shape than others. University of Chicago seems to be standing reasonably firm. MIT is perhaps pulling back from the brink. The service academies were never really the best schools in the country, but I do not think they have deteriorated to the same extent as some others. Hillsdale has not changed. I am not sure St. Johns in Annapolis has changed much. I am sure we could find a good couple of hundred colleges and universities that are not beset by either (1) corruption that favors legacies (but legacies only attend a small handful of schools, let's face it) and (2) a decay into woke social justice nonsense, or at least is attempting to resist these forces.
Well, my liberal arts response is "the lady doth protest too much, methinks."
I learned rhetoric as a liberal arts student. And I think you're falling into the fallacy of composition, in which a few specific examples, experiences, and anecdotes get applied to the whole (it would be way cooler if I could use the latin phrase but I never took that class).
Yes, there are examples of illiberal behavior on campuses. I think smart phones and social media have profoundly screwed up our youth and I find The Coddling of the American Mind to have been a compelling set of arguments.
But I work with recent law school grads and they seem. . . fine. I suspect the amplification of controversy that caused these problems has also super-spread certain issues into your news silo. It exists but I'm skeptical that it is an existential crisis.
And, back to the rhetoric, when you take a position against emotion based politics and identity based arguments, and then respond to any general push back in a way that mirrors those problems, it undermines your position. As I said, I think we likely agree about much of this, but your tone and tenor hurt your argument.
Agree, what Alan described sounds exaggerated or cherry picked from the very worst cases across the country. I work and socialize with recent computer science and physics graduates from those infamous "woke" universities and they are completely fine? Competent and hardworking folks. Even the white men are quite fond of their institutions and don't complain much about DEI. They do complain about climate change.
Techie, I have a suggestion for you and Dewey and any others who want to quibble with my essays here. If you are so convinced that you are correct, why not write an essay with references documenting your point of view, and then submit it to Dorian Abbot to be published here on Heterodox STEM? See what others think about it. Let's have you defend your ideas in public. I think it would be a very interesting and compelling experiment. Have the courage of your convictions, as they say.
For example, here are my suggestions for themes for your essays, based on my study of your posts here.
(1) Please document how many people with zero STEM background but only a strong humanities background have out-competed all those with strong STEM educations, in STEM fields. For example, I want to see the statistics on STEM Nobel Prizewinners (in physics, biology/medicine and chemistry) who won Nobel Prizes in STEM with no background in STEM. I want to see a list of Fields Medalists and Abel Prizewinners who had no background whatsoever in mathematics and no formal study in mathematics. Show me how pure humanities studies (humanities only, with no STEM courses), or arguing about Great Books in Philosophy and history is a better preparation for a STEM career than degrees in Engineering or physics or mathematics or chemistry or biology.
I want data. I want evidence. Say I am from Missouri, the "show me state". Show me. Do not just mindlessly assert it. Demonstrate it with real data and statistics.
(2) Go back to last week's excellent essay on Heterodox STEM by Adrienne M. Wootten here:
Show how every example and anecdote Ms. Wootten presents, and every statistic and data point and study she mentions, are complete nonsense. Go through every reference she has linked to in her essay, and convince us that all of them are complete garbage, and fantasies of someone deluded.
I am open to persuasion. I am sure lots of other readers of Heterodox STEM would welcome an essay from you or Dewey or anyone else on these sorts of topics. Do not just blindly claim that there are no problems whatsoever in STEM or at elite US educational institutions. Take the bull by the horns, and show us.
Also, if you think I am "cherry picking" and everything is completely fine in STEM, and there are no negative signs whatsoever, look at the previous weekly essays on Heterodox STEM. Do not take my word for it. Look at what others have written and documented with extensive references.
I might also mention a famous joke that is common in the Boston area. Whenever a building or a bridge or a tunnel fails, the public says, "Well that was created by a Harvard engineer."
I wonder why they tell that joke?
I did have a Harvard engineer as a girlfriend (who also had a trust fund). And believe me, she had plenty to say about the trust fund babies and Harvard engineers.
Well things might be marginally "ok" at the moment, but the trends are all negative. The fact that you even know white males from these elite institutions is an indication that DEI has not quite "bitten" yet. However, just examine the current plans and programs to push DEI and woke ideology further and further. Look at what Stanford is doing, according to Victor Davis Hanson. Look at the interviews with the Big Tech employers in Silicon Valley, and see what they think of the current crop of Stanford students that they are observing. Look at the lawsuits against these elite institutions by Asians who were discriminated against because of DEI.
Also, just because you might not be white or a white male or Jewish does not mean you are "safe". The current woke ideology is to also go after "white adjacents" such as South Asians and East Asians as well. The basic message these woke leaders is sending is, that if you do well in STEM, you should be forbidden from working in STEM. Period. Does that sound like a great idea? Not to me it doesn't.
If you are paying attention, there is a lot of tension emerging between LGB and TQ+ as well. I decry all this identity politics. It is all nonsense and I think we should return to merit. Which is the same attitude that Dorian Abbot, the editor and founder of Heterodox STEM has, and it is the reason he is an enemy of the woke. Dorian's lecture at MIT on planetary atmospheres was cancelled for this very reason, and it was quite prominent in the news. Were you not aware of this?
I think that Heterodox STEM, and its founder Dorian Abbot, see these negative trends, as I do. And we are concerned. We would like to reverse these negative trends before it is too late. The advantage, and disadvantage, of being old, is that I have a pretty good idea of what STEM was like in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s and so on. And it was a very different environment than it is currently. I am not saying things were perfect before, but in many ways, they were better than they are now. I think those on Heterodox STEM want to encourage things in STEM to get better.
Also, the fact that these white males you met are all worried about climate change and not DEI and related issues shows the effect of brainwashing and the woke agenda. Having worked on climate change science for several years, I have a unique perspective on it. And believe me, my view is quite different than what is in the media. I could write a long article about it. But perhaps Heterodox STEM is not the place for the discussion of climate change science.
At one time, when the internet was quite young, I gave over 500 interviews to the media about climate change science. However, since the internet did not really exist in its current form back then, hopefully none of these clips and articles still exist. The entire field is completely politicized now, which is why I left it. It is far too dangerous to work in now, and no one is allowed to be honest about the science, really.
You wrote a brief, shallow, sweeping blog entry about the idea and value of a "liberal arts education."
I responded, saying your blanket conclusions do not match my experience and, at the same time, that I agree with some of your concerns. I also explicitly said that I cannot speak to the situation as a whole, in hopes that you might see that none of us are in a position to make general statements about hundreds of colleges and tens of thousands of students.
You responded with a disjointed diatribe that contained at least 800 question marks and included the rookie mistake of assuming any criticism of your proclamations must be chalked up to lack of understanding rather than actual disagreement.
I decided to take a different approach and poke fun to try to find some common ground while resisting your hysterical certainties.
You responded with an insult about my reading comprehension. Again, a JV retort. And strange, since the one thing liberal arts students are typically credited with being able to do is read and obsess over text.
Looking at your post and comments, I think you could have benefited greatly from... a liberal arts education. It's not too late.
Though I heartily sympathize with the description of the liberal arts cafeteria curriculum described by Alan Beado, and even relish his contempt, I think perhaps one should not abandon such a curriculum simply because it has been abused or poorly implemented. Indeed, it may be this very corruption which has prevent many from seeing the value of it and leading them, justly, to ridicule its false and venal ambassadors. Something very important has been lost when college is merely seen as a way of making money for oneself.
It is nice to be able to support yourself, particularly if you have invested years and hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in education.
Of course, some do not need to worry about supporting themselves; the elites, the legacies, etc. And it is for those people that the American "good liberal arts education" is somewhat suitable.
In other countries, if you want to study Spanish, you study Spanish. If you want to study Electrical Engineering, you study Electrical Engineering. If you want to study Psychology, you study Psychology. If you want to study Philosophy, you study Philosophy. Anyone who is not at all serious is free to take a broad smorgasbord of disconnected classes, but they will not be able to support themselves later on this basis alone. In addition, they will not know very much either. At least if you pursue an intensive course of study in Philosophy, you should at a minimum, have a pretty good knowledge of Philosophy, even if you are unable to support yourself. I get the impression that the American dilettante approach is not recognized in the US for the aberration that it is.
I might also mention that the need to be able to support yourself has become more acute now that college in the US costs more. The cost of US colleges has gone up much faster than inflation, for more than 35 years. Where did all this money go? It did not go to instruction, because the faculty salaries have not risen near as fast and might not have even kept up with inflation. Way more faculty now are sort of "rent a prof" adjunct types, who are paid peanuts and have no benefits, and often have less qualifications. This extra cash basically went to administration, which has grown much faster than anything else at these colleges and universities. Administrators cannot be fired, effectively, and do not teach or do research or even raise much money (with the exception of sometimes schmoozing some donors, but their policies are now alienating a lot of donors). These administrators are the main group (aside from the humanities faculty) that are pushing woke ideology and destroying the value of a college or university education. So they cost a lot of money, but they ruin the institution. And, once again, although they do not have tenure, they cannot be fired. Increasingly, people with tenure can be fired, as we have seen over and over and over.
Also, now the humanities have been completely corrupted and turned into assorted woke studies and victimhood-ology activism. And now, this toxic mix is threatening STEM.
There is, of course, a difference between supporting oneself, which I hope it will not surprise you I think a good idea, and the exclusive pursuit of money . I commend your perspective, though, and am very much in agreement.
As I tell all students who are curious about studying STEM and becoming STEM professionals, it is not a good idea to go into STEM with the idea of making money. It is an even worse idea to go into STEM with the idea that you will become rich.
One should only pursue STEM if one has a passion for the field. If you do not have a passion for STEM, your chance of getting a stable STEM position is pretty small. Even those with a passion for STEM usually do not ever obtain a stable STEM position (particularly in R&D; if you are a programmer or an engineer, your chances are better).
And with the influence of woke ideology on STEM, things are far worse now than they were before. If you do not have an "in" of some kind, your chance of making a living in STEM is getting smaller all the time.
Of course, there are potential options for making a little bit of money in STEM. One can be a quant/hedge fund manager. One can also potentially create a valuable new technology and try to capitalize on it. But these are longshots, at best.
Even if you are successful, it takes a lot of skill to avoid having someone else steal everything you have. Things are unbelievably treacherous. Most people who are good at STEM are not particularly good at vicious knife-fights and back-stabbing and cheating and lying and stealing. There are a million ways for a STEM person to get taken to the cleaners. The laws and the cards are all stacked against you.
Patents are not much protection. The Silicon Valley route has turned into a machine to steal everything you have. And so on and so forth.
So trying to use STEM (and even worse, the Humanities, where almost no one is even able to support themselves) as a stepping stone to wealth is almost certainly bound to fail.
I could write many pages on this topic. I could write books on this topic. I am not sure where you are in the world, or how familiar you are with what is going on. The entire point of this part of Substack, Heterodox STEM, is to actually discuss these issues, so I am surprised you are not aware of it.
Basically STEM people do not control their own field anymore. This is true in academia and in corporations and in government and in nonprofits. These are the main places where one finds STEM, and in almost none of these do STEM people control their destinies. They used to, at least to a certain degree. But no longer. These STEM organizations have been taken over by a cadre of bureaucrats and administrators who subscribe to other values, such as wokism and CRT and DEI and CEI and ESG and anti-racism and so on.
So for example, if you apply DEI and anti-racism to STEM, that means that about 90% or more of the people who currently are doing STEM, are supposed to be fired or driven out of STEM; by "any means necessary". It is far more important to have unproductive incompetent people in those positions who satisfy some arbitrary woke check boxes, i.e., have some arbitrary victimhood status, than it is to have anyone with merit or qualifications in the job. We are no longer allowed to hire anyone who can do the job, to do the job. This reflects badly on the people running things, so they have changed all the rules.
The same is true of funding. More and more of R&D and STEM funds are being used to create DEI and anti-racism programs instead of actually doing any STEM work. Friends in STEM management report to me that all anyone at big R&D organizations do now is fight about DEI. No one is doing any work any more. It is a perfect weapon because it is vague, and it cannot be challenged, so you can use it to destroy your adversaries and competition. So there is a lot of infighting and backstabbing. Everyone hates each other. These DEI programs do not improve diversity or anything. They generate hatred and do not create productive organizations or even satisfy their own woke criteria, according to numerous studies of the matter, like those from Harvard Business School.
We are no longer able to publish politically incorrect truths in STEM. It is too dangerous. The papers are rejected or retracted.
The standards at STEM training institutions are being dropped to satisfy DEI criteria. We are no longer in control of admissions. The people in charge demand that only people who cannot perform be admitted.
At my graduate institution, a tiny elite place which was the very best in the world at the time in its little narrow area, things have completely changed. My friends who are still there report that no one has any ideas anymore. All the productive staff and students are gone. Professors are afraid to go to their offices because the graduate students will physically attack them and attempt to kill them. One taught a graduate fluid mechanics course, and was shocked to discover that none of the students had even heard of calculus, let alone ever studied it. They did not know calculus and did not see why they needed to know it, since to these completely unprepared students, it was all bullshit, created by evil old white males. So therefore, they could ignore it.
The students have rioted and gone on strike. They demand that they never be forced to graduate, that they never be made to leave graduate school, that they never have to do any studies or work, and that they be paid a "living wage" forever, while they are there. And they are there forever. They vandalize the property and the labs. They are like roving bands of ignorant violent thugs. They cannot be failed and they cannot be expelled and they cannot be forced to do any work or study or exams or anything.
According to woke ideology, one cannot use reasoning or logic or evidence or the scientific method or mathematics or search for truth in STEM. These are all branded "white supremacist concepts" and are now supposedly obsolete. They all have to be discarded. If you are caught using them, you are to be sanctioned, and driven out of STEM. This is an ugly toxic situation, as I am sure you appreciate.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. If this continues unabated, STEM is done for.
And these ideologies of wokeness and CRT and DEI and CEI and anti-racism and ESG come from the humanities. This is a long term effort that has been going on for decades. And it is coming to fruition and succeeding.
I work for one of those big tech companies. Profit still matters, and shareholders still demand their yield on a quarterly basis. While DEI can get funny sometimes, nothing got quite out of hand as you described in grad school. Humanity people don't write code or build robots after all, so when layoff hits, they are the first ones to go.
What you described in your graduate institution sounds quite bad, Is there formal reporting on all of this? If graduate students of fluid mechanics didn't study calculus or threatened to kill their professors, I'd expect to read them in the news, somewhere.
Look up the University of California graduate student strike from a year or two ago. You will find plenty of documentation of it. But all from an odd perspective. When you only receive one side of the story, do not be too sure that it is the "truth".
No, I doubt that this made the media. The riots and strike were in the media of course, but the stories were watered down to make these seem like very minor incidents, or even told from the perspective of the angry students, not from any other viewpoint. And I have many other examples of DEI going wrong at other institutions, told to me privately by friends. None of these are in the media.
However, DEI is everywhere. Harvard Business School studies of DEI show that it is a failure in almost every imaginable way. Look up CRT training videos by Ashleigh Shackleford; there is a video from a course she taught at Sandia that is outrageous. Do you think that Shackleford's work makes morale better at organizations?
If you want to see stories in the media about woke stuff failing, look for the examples described in Congressional testimony under oath on the subject. Or look at the stories about Riley Gaines' visit to SDSU and the fallout from that. Look at the reports on the visit of Judge Duncan to Stanford Law School. Look at the lawsuits by Asians being denied admission to various schools because of DEI. Of course, since the media is in favor of DEI and wokeness, most of the media never cover these topics. However, there are lots of other articles on Heterodox STEM about this very subject.
In fact, that is the main point of Heterodox STEM. That is why it was formed; to discuss these problems and their impact or potential impact on STEM.
If you want to see DEI and wokeness getting in the way of profits, look at ImBev and Disney and Target. There are lots of other examples of "go woke, go broke". The big tech firms are sort of monopolies, and propped up substantially by the US government which is pushing DEI and wokeness. So you do not really see the full effect of the damage DEI and wokeness are doing in Big Tech. But even in Big Tech, they are still more or less profit-centric.
Also, look at the recruiting problems that the US military is having in this new era of DEI. Things are bad and morale is terrible in the US military, for this very reason.
I have a degree in engineering, which I myself find lacking, so I read humanities as much as possible on the side. I also spend a lot of time talking to other engineers about humanities to mitigate the lack of formal education in these disciplines.
I think engineering studies how to organize and manipulate things, and humanity studies how to organize and manipulate people. There are a lot of similarities.
However, if you fuck something up in a system of things, the consequences are usually obvious and immediate. If you fuck something up in a system of people, the consequences can be very slow to show, and the cause and effect can be ambiguous, leaving a lot of room for wishful and magical thinking.
I would suggest that everyone who is interested should do this. Having a broad background is beneficial and fulfilling.
However, although I have a lot of contempt for psychology as a field, the subcategory of industrial or corporate psychology, and learning how to read people and situations, is immensely important and valuable.
The best way to learn the humanities is with a set of required courses that all students take at the same time. Then they can talk with each other about the same books.
It's noteworthy that business schools moved 20 years ago to a rigid cohort system, where the 1st year courses are almost all required and you take all your classes with the same 50 student cohort. That's even tho the MBA's only have 2 years of courses. Law schools are rigid in the 1st year too. And PhD programs in economics.
This is fine. But it is not preparation for STEM. Not in competitive STEM fields.
I know someone who went through a "good liberal arts" program at a prominent Ivy League School. Even though they took a fair amount of mathematics and physics as an undergraduate, they still needed to take an extra 3 or 4 years of intense STEM undergraduate and graduate courses and obtain a masters degree or two before they were prepared to attempt a PhD in physics at Caltech. And then needed a good 3 or 4 years of postdoctoral study after spending several years at Caltech to get a PhD. So after their 4 years of undergraduate training, they needed another 12 or 13 years to be ready to start their career in STEM. That is quite a bit of time.
Maybe that 4 years of time and immense amount of debt they incurred to get a liberal arts bachelor's at an Ivy League School was worth it. But it definitely did not help them much when it came to having a career in STEM. It was mostly just treading water and accumulating debt.
Speaking as a STEM professional, waving that undergraduate liberal arts degree around does not mean near as much as the Masters degrees and the PhD and the postdoctoral study.
If I was hiring people in STEM (which I intend to be doing), believe me, I would not necessarily hold 4 years of liberal arts education against someone who has other strong credentials. But if ALL the candidate has is a liberal arts background or a humanities background, and even worse, if they have exotic pronouns on their cv or resume, their application will probably be discarded immediately. And I am not the only potential employer who says this. Look around.
"I have a conjecture: the probability of being “woke” is almost zero for someone who has read the classics."
This seems almost self-evident to me. After all, the reason thinking people reject the repugnant postmodernist ideology is that it runs counter the entire great Western philosophical and artistic tradition from the times of Homer and the Milesians. Sophocles, Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius are exactly the targets of the mob led by Derrida, Butler, di Angelo, Žižek et al.
In previous times, say in 1930s, even those intellectuals who were open communists, but had classical education stood out as more normal than the rest of the mob. JBS Haldane got his diploma in classical studies, was a commie for a long time, but still argued that human behavior is essentially driven by biology and rejected the notion of "equality" as nonsense. He even wrote a collection of essays doubly politically incorrectly titled "The Inequality of Men".
As many have pointed out, the Woke project is a convenient way for dim-witted students to avoid having to read the classics or think. You don't have to contend with Aristotle if you can dismiss him as Patriarchal and White Supremacist. Very convenient.
Yes, this is a brilliant observation, succinctly put.
I went back to look at J. B. S. "Jack" Haldane's education and background. It was far more heavily weighted towards STEM than you suggest. He was an auto-didact and was involved in scientific investigations with his father in their home laboratory for years before college. He obtained a double major in college in mathematics and classics. He was well-versed in statistics and all kinds of other STEM fields. So rather than the example of Haldane bolstering the value of the humanities in the development of a STEM professional, I think it demonstrates the opposite. After such an intensive study of STEM for so many years, from such a young age, I am not surprised that Haldane decided he wanted some exposure to Classics.
My own STEM background, as strong as it is, does not begin to compare to Haldane's. And of course, when one has a steady diet of just one kind of education, one is bound to want to broaden out a bit. And that is what Haldane did. And that is what I did as well.
The truth is somewhere in the middle and more nuanced. Yes, liberal arts is a luxury good from a pure economics perspective but life is long and the >50th percentiles who go to four-year colleges are all very rich in global terms.
More prosaically, even at the Ivy I attended a few decades ago, for the prep school kids it was review, whereas for others it would be the only time they would consume the Great Books. For me, reading philosophy has been an important part of life since I was 16 years old.
The Western tradition attracted the immigrants like me, and helps the multicultural societies we all live in cohere, just as English provides a lingua franca. The alternative is tribalism under bloated regional bureaucratic empires (i.e., USA, EU, Greater China) or corrupt petro-states (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Nigeria).
There is a value to studying "Great Books". But waiting until college for these studies is probably not a great idea. There is not enough time to both study "Great Books" plus get a solid STEM education in college.
STEM is cumulative, and so one needs to spend a prolonged period building up an expertise, if one wants to be a STEM professional. By the time I started college, I had maybe 4 or 5 times as much preparation in STEM as the average American student entering college.
There are almost no "Great Books" professionals. But what one learns from studying "Great Books" is useful for everyone, not just those who are going to be STEM professionals. I have no problem with "Great Books". However, if you let a desire to study the "Great Books" dislodge STEM education, then there will be trouble in STEM.
I am not as narrow as one might suspect. I personally read almost everything that Voltaire ever wrote, in the original. I studied the existentialists, and read many of their texts, in the original. I read a lot of French and English literature. I studied Classical History, because of personal interests. I spent about 9 years in intensive study of terpsichorean principles (up to the professional level). I spent 10 years studying classical piano and 3 years studying music theory. I took 3 years of dramatic education. I spent 3 years studying lapidary, and so on and so forth.
But this was all before or after I had obtained a solid undergraduate background in STEM. Roughly 97% of the classwork I took as an undergraduate was in STEM subjects. I took 3 or 4 times the required coursework in STEM as a graduate student and continued to audit and take classes in STEM subjects as a postdoc for years after.
And when I speak to my colleagues who have a much lighter background, it is clear what the differences are.
I have no problem with the pursuit of a broad education. I like to think I have a reasonably broad education myself, and that I have benefited from it. However, the "good liberal arts education" that many Americans pursue, even at elite institutions, is sort of a joke. It is not about "Great Books", or anything, really.
I will note that St. John's College in Annapolis attempts to pursue a "Great Books" approach, even in STEM. They present the students with Einstein in German and Euclid in Greek and the Principia in Latin, for example. I am not sure how well this approach works, to be honest.
When I began my university studies, it was common for students, at least at the graduate level in STEM, to have to master a couple of languages like German and Latin, and to be able to demonstrate their abilities to be able to pursue a PhD. I think most programs dropped these requirements not long after that, however.
A master flight instructor, of all people, put the importance of education in the best, most concise statement I've ever read: "Education makes knowledge more soluble in the mind." He was referring to the knowledge required to be a pilot, but it applies universally. The better and broader the education, the better suited the mind is to absorb more knowledge. As a scientist, I do not think the humanities and social sciences are wasted time, so long as they are as broad as possible. The problem, it seems to me, is that the scope of education in these fields has become rather pinched.
I think this is a good observation. From what I understand, almost everything that used to be part of the humanities has been discarded in favor of "social justice" brainwashing.
Before going to University, I studied French in immersion classes during the summers at a small French college (over 480 hours of class, on top of the 9 years of study I had already dedicated to learning French). One of my close friends there was similar to me, with a similar grade school background. We both had a bit of an intellectual bent, and were passionate about academic work. This person, let's call him "Joe", was a brilliant individual. Later Joe won the national championship in a trivia contest, held in French, which was not his native language.
At university, we remained in contact. He studied "arts" and I studied physics. The only way Joe was able to get through freshman honors calculus (with proofs) was that I tutored him. Joe had had a year or two of calculus in high school, already, but this was a totally different beast to attempt to understand. I think his undergraduate major was economics, but Joe took a smattering of other humanities classes. Of course, by the time he had a bachelor's degree, Joe was completely unemployable for anything, so he went to law school and eventually obtained an LLD at Oxford University in the UK, graduating with the highest honors.
Even then, because of the early incarnation of DEI at the time, Joe was unable to obtain a teaching position without a lot of scrambling. Joe was told that since he was male, it would be impossible for him to obtain a teaching position at a law school, ever. All law schools in our country were effectively banned from hiring anything but women, from then on, until the end of time, no matter what the qualifications of the candidates were.
Now decades later, Joe satisfies more of the constantly evolving "woke" victimhood criteria, so many law schools are frantic to hire him. Joe is world famous now. He has argued cases in front of various supreme courts around the world, in various languages, and won his cases. But Joe was so insulted by how he was treated as a fresh LLD that he has never returned home to our country.
However, if I compare his impact on the world, and mine, although I might not be as "smart" as Joe is, certainly not in the Humanities or in Languages, there is little comparison. I have contributed far more. My focus on just a relatively narrow set of STEM fields has been tremendously beneficial. And if I am lucky, there will be more contributions to come.
I know many think STEM is just a bunch of nonsense. They are quite proud of their liberal arts backgrounds. Fair enough.
But STEM is not just some mindless manipulations of a handful of simple equations. It is part of a grand quest that goes back millennia. And the fruits of that quest are turned into tools for human flourishing.
Discard and dismiss STEM at your peril. I think we are in danger of doing so, because of this creeping evil woke ideology spawned in the depths of the humanities that currently threatens to destroy all of Western civilization.
These are nice thought provoking ideas. Here are some complementary views of mine:
While studying Literature, with other Humanities, is wonderful, it does not necessarily need be done for university degrees. For example in Germany, they have "Volkshochschulen", which are casual institutions for adults. They typically offer various subjects throughout the year at modest prices. I took some German classes there.
Concurrently in America, we can substantially benefit by Vocational Trade Schools for "university degrees". The non-elites can surely use these quite effectively for their careers, definitely much better than by Liberal Art Colleges.
But my question is this. Why get a degree in humanities when one can read Cervantes and Yeats and Homer on one's own time?
For the same reason as why we get degrees in engineering: we could in theory do it on our own, but in practice we need the discipline of a class. A reading group can do almost as well, I think. In the 1960's the Great Books program was a big deal, and there was even a children's version. Housewives would get together to discuss Plato. That disappeared for some reason.
Actually, it's *easier* to learn technical subjects on your own. You learn by doing problem sets. In the humanities, you learn by talking with other people about a book, and by arguing.
Here is a comparison for you to consider, Mr. Rasmusen.
I took one year of psychology in high school. On my own, I also studied several of Hans Eysenck's books on psychometrics for a couple of years between the ages of 11 and 13. That is my psychology background.
I had a girlfriend who obtained a bachelor's and a master's degree in psychology. The "problem sets" in Engineering are basically replaced by essays in psychology, for the most part.
English was not my girfriend's first language. So, although it was probably a bit dishonest, she asked me to write all her essays and even the takehome exams. She edited what I produced.
I never attended any of the lectures, which she did. I never did any of the reading, which she did, or at least attempted to do.
And yet, my essays always, invariably, were given the top grades in the entire class. The take-home exams, which I wrote (and she edited a bit), always were the top scoring papers submitted to the professor. And this was true not just at the undergraduate level, but the Master's level as well.
So if psychology (admittedly a quasi-STEM field, although mostly a humanities subject) is so much more difficult than STEM, how could I do this, without even breaking a sweat? It was trivial for me.
On the other hand, going through the homework and exams for graduate physics at MIT was a nightmare. We had the top student from West Point in our class. He failed out. We had the top students in physics from various countries in Europe; a lot of them crashed and burned. We had someone with a PhD in mathematics from a top school in our class. He barely survived. One class dropped from about 200 students at the start of the year to about 35 at the end. This was no cake walk.
My first year at MIT, when it had 8000 students, saw about 19 student suicides in 8 months. Compare this to other stressed populations, like those with PTSD. The pressure was immense. I have many stories about my experiences at MIT.
I do not think you can even begin to imagine what it was like. For example, people were studying day and night in the never-closing 24 hour library, weeks before the term started, to prepare. There were no spaces available in the library. People were sitting on every chair, and even on the floor. It was wall to wall students, desperate out of their minds, at 2 in the morning, studying like mad. The administration would throw free parties with the hottest bands in Boston and free beer and pizza. They also had free buses to girl's schools to bring females to campus. Not a single student showed up to these events, ever. I looked at a few of these. I walked in, saw no one was there but administrators ready to hand out free food and a band playing to an empty room, and I left. Over and over. Tell me that is common at any other college or university.
I challenge you to even survive the freshman level undergraduate homework sets at MIT in physics. You will soon understand that you have no idea what you are talking about. Sorry.
Since you were such a top writer in psychology, Alan, can you explain why so many MIT students committed suicide? I presume if they got into MIT in the first place, they should be able to flourish in many other places and fields. Why the failure in merely one institution feel like a life and death situation to them?
Yes, I have a hypothesis, of course. You see, a lot of these students were the top student in their middle school or junior high school. And then the top student in their high school. They won awards. They might have been the top student in their city or county or state or country. Some were graduate students and had been the top student in their college or university. And so on. They had gone from success, to success, to success, for years and years. They had competed and won. They had always come out on top.
Then they go to MIT. It is a very different place. It is cold. It is austere. There is no huge endowment like at Harvard to cushion things. There are no legacies or people with trust funds there. People do not "party". There are no sports teams to speak of. Most people are very far out on the spectrum and strange. I saw surveys of MIT graduates and about 60% were still virgins. I spoke to some classmates from MIT and the women were surprised that the fraction of virgins was not higher still.
My housemate was from UC Irvine. On a Friday night, we were on Massachusetts Avenue in front of MIT. A free MIT bus had just dropped off a bus load of women from one of the nearby women's colleges. Some were reasonably attractive. These women were either getting on city buses, or on the "T" or subway. We asked them what they were doing. They said "You guys are just nerds. We are going to Harvard, where the MEN are". They did not want geeks and techies. They wanted to meet rich handsome jocks with trust funds. So we watched them leave. This happened ALL the time.
Then of this population of winners, all of them have to compete with each other. Some who were the very best, always, are now the worst. They and their families have high expectations. It is expensive and they are sacrificing everything to be there, sometimes thousands of miles from home. It is lonely, and it is brutal.
And so...more than a few end it.
I am sure there are more women now than there were. I am not sure the suicide rate is still as high. The administration was constantly attempting to come up with programs to reduce it. They might have succeeded. I have no idea.
But it was a really nightmarish place, in some ways.
No one can get an engineering degree by just reading books. You need lots of practical training and hands-on labs. These facilities are expensive to set up and hard to work on. It's not "easier" to learn, I don't know where you are getting this information. How about you go to a local engineering school and see how they teach?
I've worked on his homework with my Purdue son. But you're right that I gt the wrong picture, since I don't see the labs. Still, a lot of engineering is problem sets, unlike the humanities. Take math or comp sci as the exmaple if you like.
By the way, Mr. Rasmusen, if engineering is so trivial, why on EARTH did you have to assist your son with his engineering homework? Come on, do you mean your own son is somehow mentally deficient? I thought engineering was all trivial nonsense. So why help him? Why couldn't he do all this trivial elementary stuff on his own?
No offense, but I respectfully disagree. Are you really so sure you could waltz through advanced mathematical proofs without any coaching or preparation? Or learn all the intricate procedures that computer scientists follow to produce and maintain production code, instead of just "programming"?
Most people have no idea how much work it takes to become a good scientist or a good engineer. Witness Mr Rasmusen above, who seems to think because he saw his son's homework he knows what it takes. Imagine seeing Michael Jordan practice and thinking you know what it takes to be a world class athlete.
Not waltz, but trudge, yes. That's how economists generally learn new techniques, as opposed to sitting in classes. As far as production code, I bet people learn that on the job, with practice, rather than in college classes. Coding is one of the best subjects for self-teaching.
To make things more relevant to the original essays, let's suppose that we replace every single economist on planet earth with people who have zero technical background. They might not even know decimals or fractions, for example. They might have never touched a computer, either. However, they have all had discussions about works by Ovid and Plato and Chaucer and Sophocles and so on.
Of course, they would never be exposed to material from Archimedes or Euclid; those are too "STEM-like". How do you think they would do? Would you favor removing all professional economists and replacing them with people who have discussed a few classic works in the humanities? Would that be a good idea? After all economics is just technical stuff; the really difficult and important stuff is associated with those discussions and arguments of humanities texts.
Or even better and even more apropos, why not replace not only all STEM professionals but all professional economists as well with people who have trust funds and signed up for courses in nontechnical "liberal arts subjects" but never did the homework or attended any of the actual classes and never wrote any essays or exams. They spent their entire undergraduate years drunk and/or stoned and trying to "hook up" in a stupor. Does that sound like a formula for success? Think one of those kids could easily replace you and outperform you?
That is what my essay is discussing. We fawn over these "good liberal arts educations" when they are mostly a load of hogwash.
But, these kids often are the offspring or descendants of someone rich and famous. So...
I finally checked with friends in the administration at IU. I should have done this first before engaging with you Mr. Rasmusen. Your reputation is something to behold, indeed.
I think you are sadly deluded.
Of course, people CAN teach themselves these things. But that is usually only if they are either (1) naturally gifted and talented, but that is exceedingly rare, or (2) they already have been trained to teach themselves. And even then, at least in the 2nd case above, it will be a substantial effort with no guarantee of success. These fields are incredibly challenging and competitive. Perhaps 1 out of 100 or 1 out of 1000 or even only 1 out of 10000 that starts out, makes it in the field and "succeeds" at an advanced level. These areas are not trivial, no matter what you seem to believe.
My lab partner in undergraduate physics is now a chaired economics professor at an elite institution. He obtained his PhD in mathematical economics. He is now famous and an important consultant on matters in economics. His colleagues in economics are quoted as saying he is the smartest person they have ever met in their entire lives. He is a smart guy. However, I know him pretty well. There is a reason he switched from physics to economics.
And since then, I have met a lot of other very smart people, including Fields Medallists and Nobellists in Science (not Economics, since that is only a "memorial prize", and not really a true Nobel Prize). And Economics is not quite in the same category.
At Bell Labs, I sat next to two prominent mathematical economists, what was left of the Bell Labs Economics Division after they had fired everyone else. So why were they fired? Because they could not really contribute to the STEM enterprise, so Bell Labs got rid of dozens of economists. These two were nice guys. I spoke to them often, and read their work, but they were not in the same category as the physicists or the real mathematicians at Bell Labs; not even close.
If I look at the journals Technometrics and Econometrics, there are clear differences in the quality. And economics does not come out on top; sorry.
I took a graduate Mathematical Finance course. Granted, it is not quite the same as economics, but it is vaguely related. I found it quite interesting, but not that challenging compared to what I had already seen in physics and mathematics. I came very close to accepting a job as a "quant"; that is, as a hedge fund manager. One job offer was to manage the Nobel Committee's investment portfolio. No economists were ever interviewed or recruited for these positions; only physicists and mathematicians. Gee, I wonder why that is?
If you look at Renaissance Capital and its investment returns over the last few decades, they did not achieve their success by hiring economists. I know these people personally. And I know what techniques they use. This stuff is way beyond what economists do, or are capable of; sorry.
If economics is so wonderful that we could replace all scientists and engineers and mathematicians with economists, then why haven't we done so? There are certainly lots of economists around and they are probably underemployed and could be hired cheaply. So simple economics says that all STEM positions should be filled by economists. But yet, I have not noticed this phenomenon. Interesting...
The one member of Congress that I know with an economics degree did not know what the law of supply and demand was, under questioning. That says quite a bit...
So sure, you think STEM is all trivial simplistic nonsense and you personally can compete head to head with the best scientists and mathematicians on the planet and probably outshine them all "because" you are an economist.
Well, maybe you can, or...
The entire point of a solid STEM education, up through a PhD and beyond, is to train the student to be able to "teach themselves", i.e., to develop auto-didacts. I heard this refrain many times during my education.
Of course, there are some who are able to achieve this status without extended training. And there are famous examples in the history of STEM, like Newton and Einstein and von Neumann and Ramanujan. But most cannot do this on their own, and need to be coaxed and trained and nurtured.
And I would argue that formal STEM training is not just laboratory work (although lab experiences are incredibly important in STEM; speaking to some colleagues who went to MIT for their undergraduate degrees, they felt they could have just discarded the classes completely since they learned so much more in the labs than in the classes), but also being trained to solve problems and how to think like a scientist (or a mathematician or a computer scientist).
This is not as obvious or trivial or easy as you seem to think, I assure you.
I didn't mean to imply it was easy. Rather, it's very hard, and that makes it hard to have the discipline to work through a book on your own. The function of the class is to force you to read the book carefully and solve the problems according to a schedule.
I'm thinking of undergrads. In an econ PhD program, you learn how to do research by trying to do it or by assisting a professor or by going to seminars and hearing work in progress criticized. And there, classes are more important because the most advanced topics aren't in books yet, or at least aren't written up clearly yet.
I learned lots of stuff as both an undergraduate student and as a graduate student in both mathematics and physics that was not in any book. And most of my current work is not in any book or publication and will probably not be in a book or published in a paper for decades or longer. And I draw on lots of results that are closely held and not published in any book or paper.
One learns the skills not from doing the problems ONLY but from being trained in HOW to approach the problems and how to think about the problems. This you can really only get first hand, and usually, face to face. Of course, one needs lots and lots of practice in solving the problems. This is a complicated and very challenging process.
And even for someone like me, who is a mathematical physicist, I have had years and years and years of training in laboratory science and design and construction of laboratory equipment. This was not a waste; it is in fact critical if I am going to interact with the "empirical" part of my field to create real results. I need to know this stuff, backwards and forwards. I need to know the specialized language and the techniques that the physicists and even the engineers rely on and use. Even small projects are done by a team of specialists, and I need to be able to talk to computer scientists and engineers and field observationalists and equipment designers and laboratory experimentalists and others. If I could not do so, I would not be too much use.
The author is combining two different questions: the benefits of a liberal arts education and the economics of paying for that experience. As to the former, I found the liberal arts program at a competitive college to be life changing. I attended a small, rural high school with a very limited set of courses and perspectives. The history, art, calculus, chemistry, anthropology, and english classes, among others, that I took my first year of college were earth shaking as was being surrounded by really smart, motivated, worldly peers. I didn't know what I wanted to study because I had not been exposed to much of it. My life would be quite different had I followed the few high-achieving classmates in my high school to study chemical engineering in order to join the dying paper making industry.
I managed to pay off my loans over the next 25 years and that investment was worthwhile to me, and, at the same time, I understand the economic trade off. I will also add that identifying as a teen the field of study that will provide a lifetime of financial success is an inexact science. Ask a recent pharmacy school grad.
As I suggested elsewhere, Dewey, why not write an essay for Heterodox STEM and submit it to Dorian Abbot, the founder and chief editor? Show that the entire raison d'etre of this part of Substack is pure nonsense.
Document it, put out your feelings that there are no problems whatsoever in STEM, no threats from the current woke ideology or anything else.
And then, have it published for everyone to read and critique.
Do not just argue against me. Argue against everyone.
Make your case. I would love to read it. And I would love to see how others respond. That is, if Dorian accepts your essay, of course.
Also, your summary of my original essay is more than slightly lacking. But considering all your other comments show the same propensity, is that a surprise?
Alan, I'm going to be honest... this is getting kind of weird. You wrote a blog post about the value of a liberal arts education. I responded. And, while I'm not a neutral observer, I think I proved my point.
Now, you're asking me to write an essay to show "that there are no problems whatsoever in STEM". I have no idea if there are problems in STEM. That's not what you wrote about and it is not what I responded to. So, back to my liberal arts education. I think this is an example of the fallacy known as ignoratio elenchi.
I think it is time to move on.
Dewey, I think we have a massive communication problem. You have not understood almost anything I wrote. Amazing, isn't it? But, whatever. I think I proved my point. You think you are some master of rhetoric and debate or possibly the greatest genius to have ever walked the earth, but you seem to be clueless. An exchange with you is like shouting down an empty well. And you have not answered a single one of my challenges. Just brainless nonsense and insults and circular reasoning. I guess that is what passes for mental acuity and perspicacity in your neck of the woods...quite impressive.
And NO I did not write an essay on the value of a liberal arts education. That claim speaks volumes right there. How can you have such low reading comprehension but yet claim to be some sort of master?
Alan- is this you? This is the blog post we are both commenting on:
A Good Liberal Arts Education and the American Caste System
by Alan Beado, Emeritus Professor at Stanley Livingstone College
"I am not sure I can see much that is "good" about a "good liberal arts education", to be honest. You do not find other countries in such a frenzy over a "liberal arts education" as people in the US seem to be. It was quite a shock for me to observe this when I moved to the US."
Never mind. Do not worry about it. You do not understand. I do not believe you CAN understand. You are too much of a "genius". I have had enough of this nonsense.
I think this is probably a waste of my time, since I do not think you are capable of comprehending anything on this topic. But in case someone else is reading this, I will go through a short summary here.
In my essay, and also in some of my comments, I was addressing three main kinds of "liberal arts education":
(1) The so-called "good" liberal arts education that US "elites" often get at "elite" US colleges and universities.
(2) The liberal arts or humanities educations that are popular in foreign (i.e., non-US) colleges and universities.
(3) The liberal arts educations frequently pursued by non-elites in the US.
In addition, I and others briefly touched on the "Great Books" version of liberal arts education (one might call it version (4)) in the comments, which is different than these other three. My essay mainly addressed version (1) and briefly mentioned version (2) and alluded to version (3), but only slightly.
Version (1) is pretty nontaxing and nondemanding and more or less worthless, unless you already are in the upper crust of US society. You can find version (1) at places like Harvard and Princeton, but probably very few other schools.
Version (2) is intensive and focused and pretty demanding, in most cases. You can find version (2) at many places outside the US, i.e., the other 96% of the world. For example, if you studied Classics or History at Oxford University in the UK, you probably would be dealing with version (2).
Version (3) is what you and your relative supposedly took. It has very little in common with version (1), and maybe not that much to do with version (2) either. Just because you have never encountered versions (1) and (2) does not mean they do not exist. And your opinions on (1) and (2) are basically irrelevant, as I suggested previously, as politely as I could. However, this did not seem to register with you. Instead, you became obnoxiously combative about your confusion, which does not create a great impression of you.
Each of these versions of liberal arts studies has advantages and disadvantages. For example, in the comments, I discussed a friend who took version (3) at an Ivy League college. However, they found they were completely unprepared for the most demanding and challenging parts of STEM. So they had to do at least 4-8 years of extra remedial STEM education. This path is expensive in time and other resources. However, as I mentioned, it might be worth it. Other countries do not promote this approach like the US does. This is worth noting.
There were a couple of people in the comments who advocated the "Great Books" approach to undergraduate education, a sort of version (4). They even suggested it was a superior form of preparation for STEM. They were also completely dismissive of STEM education and preparation.
I spoke to the administration at the school where one of these people had spent their career. Then, they entered into a disgraceful "retirement". I discovered that they are not someone to take seriously. I am sorry I even bothered with their comments at all.
And I am now thinking that you are also in the category of people who should be ignored. You are not a serious person either, in my estimation.
The other issue with the humanities/liberal arts, which was touched on in the comments, is its current corruption (which you seem to deny exists). In the words of Dorian Abbot, the founder and chief editor of Heterodox STEM, "As many have pointed out, the Woke project is a convenient way for dim-witted students to avoid having to read the classics or think. You don't have to contend with Aristotle if you can dismiss him as Patriarchal and White Supremacist. Very convenient."
Why do you think Abbot said this? Three people liked his response. Sure, you might not understand the context for this comment. But that statement of Abbot's encapsulates a lot of the reason "Heterodox Stem" exists. I am sure that since I used a question mark, you will dismiss this paragraph as unimportant and something to be thoughtlessly ignored.
You clearly think your experience, and that of your relative, is what goes on in the entire US, and probably the entire world, obviously. You take your own experience, and extrapolate it beyond all reason and common sense. You obviously have never encountered the "elites" and their "good" liberal arts educations (version (1) above) which are quite different from many standard humanities educations around the world (version (2) above, or the one you claim to have had, version (3)).
And you seem to be under the impression that the "elites" I wrote about do not exist. Or that a "gentleman's C" has never existed or now a "gentleman's A-" does not presently exist. You did not encounter this phenomenon, so it must not exist, to your way of thinking.
Clearly, you did not bother to investigate. How rational of you. It is not easy for someone like you to use Google or other search engines, I guess.
You refuse to address or even contemplate the differences between US higher education and the varieties in the many other countries on the planet. I doubt you have ever encountered anyone with a humanities or a STEM education from an institution of higher learning outside the US. If you have, you sure do not show any evidence of it. Your own personal views and experiences mean everyone else should bugger off, apparently. You and you alone are the uniquely "correct person". I call this attitude Panglossian conceit; it is not particularly healthy, in my opinion. However, I received the message you sent; loud and clear.
You obviously think your backwoods hayseed qualifications are what the entire US higher education system is like, or the entire world's university systems are like. I am not writing or commenting about whatever obscure atavistic college you went to, or supposedly went to. Sorry, but I have no idea where you went and I do not particularly care. Your alma mater is undoubtedly not indicative of the trends in the more than 6000 institutions of higher learning in the US. This is at least according to my understanding and probably that of the 2000 other people on Heterodox STEM. And you refuse to acknowledge that such a thing might be true, or could be true.
You work with some lawyers and you think that group is "fine" so there are no problems in any universities in the US (or probably anywhere else). You seem to believe that the entire US legal system and all of US humanities and all of US STEM training exhibit no problems whatsoever. Social justice is not intruding or influencing anything in US higher education, and never has, and never will, according to you. Okay, that is one point of view.
I am far more interested in people who are attempting to be world leaders in STEM, rather than someone plodding along on the margins of STEM. I have worked with a half dozen or more Nobel Prizewinners and Fields medalists. There is of course a value to providing technical support for trial lawyers or patent lawyers. But let's face it, that is not the path to revolutionizing STEM and our understanding of the universe and reality. For example, see Einstein's comments about being a patent clerk and working with patent lawyers. So you have a nice quiet safe pedestrian career and you have experienced very little. So what? You want an award for that?
You also think I am confusing the ability to pay for an education with the value of the education. Where you get that idea from, I have no clue. I did focus on the "elites", for whom these costs are irrelevant.
But I do notice that US education is obscenely expensive, to the point where fewer and fewer people are willing and able to take advantage of it. I just did not write about that in my essay. Judging from your previous posts, I bet you might deny that this is accurate as well. According to you, although costs have gone up, financial aid has almost covered all these increased costs so there are no problems. Yeah, right...
You also refuse to address any counter-evidence that suggests your view is not the only one with merit. You just make slurs and complain about "800 question marks". Did you count them? Would you swear to the "800 question marks" assertion under oath, under penalty of perjury, or penalty of felony? That kind of crude exaggeration and inability or unwillingness to engage with contrary viewpoints is what seems to characterize most of your remarks. These must be the hallmarks of your "superior" liberal arts "education".
I invited you to write an essay demonstrating why the 2000 people here on Heterodox STEM and many thousands more on similar websites are completely mistaken about the current putatively troubling trends in STEM (or the humanities, if you prefer). You rejected that suggestion in a haughty manner.
You spewed all manner of insults and borderline invective. Frankly, you made yourself look ridiculous. I guess the old adage, "when you have no arguments, pound the table" holds in this case. It is not particularly convincing. Is that what your lawyer coworkers do? Is that what your vaunted training in rhetoric taught you? Any gratuitous statements like that...well, of course, anyone with an ounce of reason will just dismiss them and ignore them.
You have never experienced any trouble in STEM, apparently, and seem to be in complete denial that it might exist. No one you know has ever experienced any problems from the intrusion of social justice ideology into STEM, it would seem. I have, and many more times than just once. So has Dorian Abbot. So have many others on this website and other websites that focus on this topic, as well as many of my friends and associates. I know people personally who wrote letters to the New York Times on this topic, and received a torrent of death threats for their trouble. Whether you admit there are flashing yellow caution lights in STEM at the moment, or not, trouble seems to be brewing.
You can bury your head in the sand if you feel like it, however. Be my guest. No one can force you to pay attention. None of it probably matters to you, not one whit.
You are SO SURE that you are completely correct but you are unwilling to actually do any work or effort to put your case forward. Instead, you just seem to favor "trolling". Interesting...
Why are you so lazy and arrogant? Think about that. I am done with you. I should never have wasted my time engaging with someone like you. There is no point in discussing anything with you. And that is probably how you like it, isn't it? What a great technique! So clever...
I think you seem to be unaware that the liberal arts program you took is, in the vast majority of cases, no longer available. The history, art, anthropology and English classes, as well as psychology and sociology and vast swaths of other stuff, are long gone; effectively discarded. It has all been replaced with woke victimology courses and struggle sessions and other kinds of nonsense.
Sure, the courses might still have names like History 101 and Art 201 and so on. But that is not what the content is.
Have you never heard of the chant, "Hey ho, hey ho, Western Civ has got to go"? What do you think these students were referring to? What were they protesting? You never wondered?
If you are from an "oppressor" group, like a Jew or a white male or heterosexual, you will be brutalized and attacked from day one. You will have a target painted on you. You will be bullied. Does this sound like an enlightening undergraduate experience to you? And since you were from a rural area, you would be doubly hated. The lowest of the low are white male heterosexuals from rural areas. And they will let you know it, in spades. Sound good to you? Does it sound like a great intellectual experience?
When you refer to what you were exposed to, you are not addressing what I was writing about. That is, suppose one has an option for 10 one-semester classes per year. In 4 years, you take 40 one semester classes. The elites at the elite schools take 40 different classes in 40 different subjects, mostly at the freshman level. And the legacies and trust fund babies do not need to even show up to the classes or do any of the homework or exams. They still pass. THIS is what I am referring to as a "good liberal arts education".
Did you take 40 different courses in 40 different subjects, mostly at the freshman level, as an undergraduate? Did you skip all your classes? Did you avoid doing any of the homework or essays or exams? If you didn't, you are not familiar with what I am talking about. You are looking at the world through rose-colored glasses, and remembering a reality that has long since ceased to exist, at least in the US.
The debt you took on, decades ago, Is nothing like the debt today's students are burdened with. And the quality of classes you took was probably infinitely better than what is available now, even in the "very best" institutions.
I am probably older than you, so when I went through, almost everyone could pay their own way through college with zero debt. It was not difficult at all. Those days are long gone, thanks to the greed of the administrators and bureaucrats who have corrupted the schools.
Of course, it is not easy to ask someone who is 15 or 16 or 17 to pick a field to study and concentrate in. That has always been true.
I started studying French in College, then went into Mechanical Engineering, and then back to French, and then into Physics, with a heavy dose of Mathematics. And that was after a very heavy background in physics and mathematics and chemistry in junior high and high school. So I did not take a straight path. If you look at many famous physicists and mathematicians throughout history, a lot of them did not take a straight path either. So what? Is this new? It was always like this. Is that a surprise?
And as I have written in a previous essay on Heterodox STEM, STEM evolves, constantly. And you need a broad enough background in STEM that you can evolve with the field and accommodate the market that you are faced with. It has always been like this, as near as I can tell. You just have to take a shot at it, and do your best. And always keep your eyes open for possibilities and traps.
I am not talking about a lifetime of financial success. I am talking about being able to eat. Are you in favor of being able to feed yourself? At least having a subsistence level of existence? I am.
No one can guarantee you a lifetime of financial success, as I wrote above. Unless you have inherited money, a lifetime of financial success is a very remote possibility. And even a lot of those who inherit money get fleeced or waste it all or fritter it away.
Interestingly, a younger relative just graduated from the same college as I did. Our experiences were quite similar, aside from the fact that it is much, much harder to be admitted and the cost is much higher (although so is the financial aid). There are still stringent course requirements for picking a major, taking 300 level/advanced courses, and satisfying the graduation requirements. I suppose there might be a way to be an art or dance major and avoid much of that challenge, but I did not know anyone who took that cynical approach, and the studio art majors that I knew had double majors paired with something more practical/applicable to earning a living. There is absolutely no option, then or now, to take 40 intro courses and graduate. And the vast majority of the campus was pre-med, pre-law, etc. There were a number of 3-2 programs for students who wanted the foundation of a liberal arts education followed by a more technical degree, although most students who wanted that experience graduated in 4 years and then went to grad school. That's what I did.
I think that we likely agree on some of your concerns. But, the pinata you are holding up doesn't match my experience, nor what appears to be the present reality at at least one liberal arts college. I can't speak to what is happening at other campuses.
I know what I observed at both Harvard and Princeton University. Perhaps you think I did not observe what I did. You are going to tell me that this sort of stuff does not go on at Harvard and Princeton?
And I know what Jordan Peterson and Peter Boghossian and Christopher Rufo and Lawrence Krauss and Heather Mac Donald and Thomas Sowell and Victor Davis Hanson and many others have pointed out, repeatedly. Perhaps all these academics decrying the state of the humanities and academia in the US, some who resigned tenured positions, are all lying. Is that it? You think they are all liars?
Perhaps you think that the efforts to create new colleges like Ralston College and the University of Austin are just nonsense because there are no problems whatsoever in American higher education. Why are there efforts at college and university reform going on in Florida, and being considered in Texas? Is this just because the people attempting the reforms are right wing flakes who want to destroy perfectly good academic institutions? Perhaps you think that Hillsdale College is just full of delusional fools when they differentiate between their approach and the standard approach at US colleges. Perhaps all the articles bemoaning the state of US college education in the Chronicle of Higher Education are written by liars. All the reports about required CRT training at the University of California are all lies, are they?. All the reports about required diversity statements at various schools, are lies, do you think? All the reports of colleges and universities that have dropped SAT and GRE and MCAT and GMAT and LSAT requirements are all false, is that right? Do you deny that both Stanford and Yale now have more administrators than students? What about the reports that about 80% of US colleges now are at least partly segregated; are those false? Do you think Jonathon Haidt is deceptive? Just full of it? How about Bret Weinstein? How did Weinstein win his lawsuit, do you think? Do you think that the reports that more than 3/4 of US faculty are now adjuncts are all false? Do you personally know a lot of adjuncts and what their lives are like? I do.
Do you think there is no such thing as a Gentleman's C/A- and never was such a thing? At any colleges or universities in the US? Are you sure? What about Van Jones, who reportedly attended Yale under a no exam and no grade policy? Is that false?
How many universities and graduate schools have you attended and worked for? My total is at least 6; how about yours? How many job interviews for faculty positions have you had? I have had 7 offers and many more interviews; how about you?
I have attended colleges and universities that would let you take 40 or even 30 disconnected courses in random subjects and "graduate". It is not the smartest thing to do, but if you have tens of millions of dollars or more behind you, then that is exactly what you can do and have a "successful" life. You have never met any of these people, have you? Some are close personal friends of mine. You think they do not exist? Really?
I describe below a person I know who obtained a fancy 4 year liberal arts bachelor's degree at an Ivy League school, and then needed a solid 4 years of remedial STEM study so they could go to graduate school (and years of extra study after the PhD as well) to be able to compete at a world class level. Sure, you can do that if you want. Most of the rest of the world does not do that sort of stuff. Maybe they should, but I do not think they do. Show me another country where this is encouraged. Ever wonder how people from other countries get their PhDs and MDs and JDs years ahead of Americans? Is that a mystery to you?
It is quite an extra investment one is making, but go right ahead. I have no objections. I personally took way more than the minimum in both STEM and the humanities and I do not regret it.
So I think you are not quite understanding ANYTHING I have written here. Quite interesting...
And you clearly think there is zero problem at all in US academia. That is quite a claim. Amazing...What do you think Heterodox STEM is about? Or the Heterodox Academy? Why do they even exist?
I would love to have had you listen in on the phone calls I have had with professors from my graduate school who served on my committee as they described the current situation. What I have heard is far, far worse than what I have alluded to here. But you really are like an ostrich, I guess. Everything is fine...wow.
That said, that out of the thousands of colleges in the US, I have no doubt that some are in better shape than others. University of Chicago seems to be standing reasonably firm. MIT is perhaps pulling back from the brink. The service academies were never really the best schools in the country, but I do not think they have deteriorated to the same extent as some others. Hillsdale has not changed. I am not sure St. Johns in Annapolis has changed much. I am sure we could find a good couple of hundred colleges and universities that are not beset by either (1) corruption that favors legacies (but legacies only attend a small handful of schools, let's face it) and (2) a decay into woke social justice nonsense, or at least is attempting to resist these forces.
Well, my liberal arts response is "the lady doth protest too much, methinks."
I learned rhetoric as a liberal arts student. And I think you're falling into the fallacy of composition, in which a few specific examples, experiences, and anecdotes get applied to the whole (it would be way cooler if I could use the latin phrase but I never took that class).
Yes, there are examples of illiberal behavior on campuses. I think smart phones and social media have profoundly screwed up our youth and I find The Coddling of the American Mind to have been a compelling set of arguments.
But I work with recent law school grads and they seem. . . fine. I suspect the amplification of controversy that caused these problems has also super-spread certain issues into your news silo. It exists but I'm skeptical that it is an existential crisis.
And, back to the rhetoric, when you take a position against emotion based politics and identity based arguments, and then respond to any general push back in a way that mirrors those problems, it undermines your position. As I said, I think we likely agree about much of this, but your tone and tenor hurt your argument.
Agree, what Alan described sounds exaggerated or cherry picked from the very worst cases across the country. I work and socialize with recent computer science and physics graduates from those infamous "woke" universities and they are completely fine? Competent and hardworking folks. Even the white men are quite fond of their institutions and don't complain much about DEI. They do complain about climate change.
Techie, I have a suggestion for you and Dewey and any others who want to quibble with my essays here. If you are so convinced that you are correct, why not write an essay with references documenting your point of view, and then submit it to Dorian Abbot to be published here on Heterodox STEM? See what others think about it. Let's have you defend your ideas in public. I think it would be a very interesting and compelling experiment. Have the courage of your convictions, as they say.
For example, here are my suggestions for themes for your essays, based on my study of your posts here.
(1) Please document how many people with zero STEM background but only a strong humanities background have out-competed all those with strong STEM educations, in STEM fields. For example, I want to see the statistics on STEM Nobel Prizewinners (in physics, biology/medicine and chemistry) who won Nobel Prizes in STEM with no background in STEM. I want to see a list of Fields Medalists and Abel Prizewinners who had no background whatsoever in mathematics and no formal study in mathematics. Show me how pure humanities studies (humanities only, with no STEM courses), or arguing about Great Books in Philosophy and history is a better preparation for a STEM career than degrees in Engineering or physics or mathematics or chemistry or biology.
I want data. I want evidence. Say I am from Missouri, the "show me state". Show me. Do not just mindlessly assert it. Demonstrate it with real data and statistics.
(2) Go back to last week's excellent essay on Heterodox STEM by Adrienne M. Wootten here:
https://hxstem.substack.com/p/introspection-before-any-possible
Show how every example and anecdote Ms. Wootten presents, and every statistic and data point and study she mentions, are complete nonsense. Go through every reference she has linked to in her essay, and convince us that all of them are complete garbage, and fantasies of someone deluded.
I am open to persuasion. I am sure lots of other readers of Heterodox STEM would welcome an essay from you or Dewey or anyone else on these sorts of topics. Do not just blindly claim that there are no problems whatsoever in STEM or at elite US educational institutions. Take the bull by the horns, and show us.
Also, if you think I am "cherry picking" and everything is completely fine in STEM, and there are no negative signs whatsoever, look at the previous weekly essays on Heterodox STEM. Do not take my word for it. Look at what others have written and documented with extensive references.
Investigate for yourself.
I might also mention a famous joke that is common in the Boston area. Whenever a building or a bridge or a tunnel fails, the public says, "Well that was created by a Harvard engineer."
I wonder why they tell that joke?
I did have a Harvard engineer as a girlfriend (who also had a trust fund). And believe me, she had plenty to say about the trust fund babies and Harvard engineers.
Well things might be marginally "ok" at the moment, but the trends are all negative. The fact that you even know white males from these elite institutions is an indication that DEI has not quite "bitten" yet. However, just examine the current plans and programs to push DEI and woke ideology further and further. Look at what Stanford is doing, according to Victor Davis Hanson. Look at the interviews with the Big Tech employers in Silicon Valley, and see what they think of the current crop of Stanford students that they are observing. Look at the lawsuits against these elite institutions by Asians who were discriminated against because of DEI.
Also, just because you might not be white or a white male or Jewish does not mean you are "safe". The current woke ideology is to also go after "white adjacents" such as South Asians and East Asians as well. The basic message these woke leaders is sending is, that if you do well in STEM, you should be forbidden from working in STEM. Period. Does that sound like a great idea? Not to me it doesn't.
If you are paying attention, there is a lot of tension emerging between LGB and TQ+ as well. I decry all this identity politics. It is all nonsense and I think we should return to merit. Which is the same attitude that Dorian Abbot, the editor and founder of Heterodox STEM has, and it is the reason he is an enemy of the woke. Dorian's lecture at MIT on planetary atmospheres was cancelled for this very reason, and it was quite prominent in the news. Were you not aware of this?
I think that Heterodox STEM, and its founder Dorian Abbot, see these negative trends, as I do. And we are concerned. We would like to reverse these negative trends before it is too late. The advantage, and disadvantage, of being old, is that I have a pretty good idea of what STEM was like in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s and so on. And it was a very different environment than it is currently. I am not saying things were perfect before, but in many ways, they were better than they are now. I think those on Heterodox STEM want to encourage things in STEM to get better.
Also, the fact that these white males you met are all worried about climate change and not DEI and related issues shows the effect of brainwashing and the woke agenda. Having worked on climate change science for several years, I have a unique perspective on it. And believe me, my view is quite different than what is in the media. I could write a long article about it. But perhaps Heterodox STEM is not the place for the discussion of climate change science.
At one time, when the internet was quite young, I gave over 500 interviews to the media about climate change science. However, since the internet did not really exist in its current form back then, hopefully none of these clips and articles still exist. The entire field is completely politicized now, which is why I left it. It is far too dangerous to work in now, and no one is allowed to be honest about the science, really.
I perceive a profound reading comprehension problem. If I were grading you as a student, it would not be in your favor.
Sure, go ahead, live in your comfortable bubble. There are no problems. Whatever...
You wrote a brief, shallow, sweeping blog entry about the idea and value of a "liberal arts education."
I responded, saying your blanket conclusions do not match my experience and, at the same time, that I agree with some of your concerns. I also explicitly said that I cannot speak to the situation as a whole, in hopes that you might see that none of us are in a position to make general statements about hundreds of colleges and tens of thousands of students.
You responded with a disjointed diatribe that contained at least 800 question marks and included the rookie mistake of assuming any criticism of your proclamations must be chalked up to lack of understanding rather than actual disagreement.
I decided to take a different approach and poke fun to try to find some common ground while resisting your hysterical certainties.
You responded with an insult about my reading comprehension. Again, a JV retort. And strange, since the one thing liberal arts students are typically credited with being able to do is read and obsess over text.
Looking at your post and comments, I think you could have benefited greatly from... a liberal arts education. It's not too late.
Though I heartily sympathize with the description of the liberal arts cafeteria curriculum described by Alan Beado, and even relish his contempt, I think perhaps one should not abandon such a curriculum simply because it has been abused or poorly implemented. Indeed, it may be this very corruption which has prevent many from seeing the value of it and leading them, justly, to ridicule its false and venal ambassadors. Something very important has been lost when college is merely seen as a way of making money for oneself.
It is nice to be able to support yourself, particularly if you have invested years and hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in education.
Of course, some do not need to worry about supporting themselves; the elites, the legacies, etc. And it is for those people that the American "good liberal arts education" is somewhat suitable.
In other countries, if you want to study Spanish, you study Spanish. If you want to study Electrical Engineering, you study Electrical Engineering. If you want to study Psychology, you study Psychology. If you want to study Philosophy, you study Philosophy. Anyone who is not at all serious is free to take a broad smorgasbord of disconnected classes, but they will not be able to support themselves later on this basis alone. In addition, they will not know very much either. At least if you pursue an intensive course of study in Philosophy, you should at a minimum, have a pretty good knowledge of Philosophy, even if you are unable to support yourself. I get the impression that the American dilettante approach is not recognized in the US for the aberration that it is.
I might also mention that the need to be able to support yourself has become more acute now that college in the US costs more. The cost of US colleges has gone up much faster than inflation, for more than 35 years. Where did all this money go? It did not go to instruction, because the faculty salaries have not risen near as fast and might not have even kept up with inflation. Way more faculty now are sort of "rent a prof" adjunct types, who are paid peanuts and have no benefits, and often have less qualifications. This extra cash basically went to administration, which has grown much faster than anything else at these colleges and universities. Administrators cannot be fired, effectively, and do not teach or do research or even raise much money (with the exception of sometimes schmoozing some donors, but their policies are now alienating a lot of donors). These administrators are the main group (aside from the humanities faculty) that are pushing woke ideology and destroying the value of a college or university education. So they cost a lot of money, but they ruin the institution. And, once again, although they do not have tenure, they cannot be fired. Increasingly, people with tenure can be fired, as we have seen over and over and over.
Also, now the humanities have been completely corrupted and turned into assorted woke studies and victimhood-ology activism. And now, this toxic mix is threatening STEM.
There is, of course, a difference between supporting oneself, which I hope it will not surprise you I think a good idea, and the exclusive pursuit of money . I commend your perspective, though, and am very much in agreement.
As I tell all students who are curious about studying STEM and becoming STEM professionals, it is not a good idea to go into STEM with the idea of making money. It is an even worse idea to go into STEM with the idea that you will become rich.
One should only pursue STEM if one has a passion for the field. If you do not have a passion for STEM, your chance of getting a stable STEM position is pretty small. Even those with a passion for STEM usually do not ever obtain a stable STEM position (particularly in R&D; if you are a programmer or an engineer, your chances are better).
And with the influence of woke ideology on STEM, things are far worse now than they were before. If you do not have an "in" of some kind, your chance of making a living in STEM is getting smaller all the time.
Of course, there are potential options for making a little bit of money in STEM. One can be a quant/hedge fund manager. One can also potentially create a valuable new technology and try to capitalize on it. But these are longshots, at best.
Even if you are successful, it takes a lot of skill to avoid having someone else steal everything you have. Things are unbelievably treacherous. Most people who are good at STEM are not particularly good at vicious knife-fights and back-stabbing and cheating and lying and stealing. There are a million ways for a STEM person to get taken to the cleaners. The laws and the cards are all stacked against you.
Patents are not much protection. The Silicon Valley route has turned into a machine to steal everything you have. And so on and so forth.
So trying to use STEM (and even worse, the Humanities, where almost no one is even able to support themselves) as a stepping stone to wealth is almost certainly bound to fail.
I get the state of humanity is pretty bad. But how exactly is it threatening STEM now?
I could write many pages on this topic. I could write books on this topic. I am not sure where you are in the world, or how familiar you are with what is going on. The entire point of this part of Substack, Heterodox STEM, is to actually discuss these issues, so I am surprised you are not aware of it.
Basically STEM people do not control their own field anymore. This is true in academia and in corporations and in government and in nonprofits. These are the main places where one finds STEM, and in almost none of these do STEM people control their destinies. They used to, at least to a certain degree. But no longer. These STEM organizations have been taken over by a cadre of bureaucrats and administrators who subscribe to other values, such as wokism and CRT and DEI and CEI and ESG and anti-racism and so on.
So for example, if you apply DEI and anti-racism to STEM, that means that about 90% or more of the people who currently are doing STEM, are supposed to be fired or driven out of STEM; by "any means necessary". It is far more important to have unproductive incompetent people in those positions who satisfy some arbitrary woke check boxes, i.e., have some arbitrary victimhood status, than it is to have anyone with merit or qualifications in the job. We are no longer allowed to hire anyone who can do the job, to do the job. This reflects badly on the people running things, so they have changed all the rules.
The same is true of funding. More and more of R&D and STEM funds are being used to create DEI and anti-racism programs instead of actually doing any STEM work. Friends in STEM management report to me that all anyone at big R&D organizations do now is fight about DEI. No one is doing any work any more. It is a perfect weapon because it is vague, and it cannot be challenged, so you can use it to destroy your adversaries and competition. So there is a lot of infighting and backstabbing. Everyone hates each other. These DEI programs do not improve diversity or anything. They generate hatred and do not create productive organizations or even satisfy their own woke criteria, according to numerous studies of the matter, like those from Harvard Business School.
We are no longer able to publish politically incorrect truths in STEM. It is too dangerous. The papers are rejected or retracted.
The standards at STEM training institutions are being dropped to satisfy DEI criteria. We are no longer in control of admissions. The people in charge demand that only people who cannot perform be admitted.
At my graduate institution, a tiny elite place which was the very best in the world at the time in its little narrow area, things have completely changed. My friends who are still there report that no one has any ideas anymore. All the productive staff and students are gone. Professors are afraid to go to their offices because the graduate students will physically attack them and attempt to kill them. One taught a graduate fluid mechanics course, and was shocked to discover that none of the students had even heard of calculus, let alone ever studied it. They did not know calculus and did not see why they needed to know it, since to these completely unprepared students, it was all bullshit, created by evil old white males. So therefore, they could ignore it.
The students have rioted and gone on strike. They demand that they never be forced to graduate, that they never be made to leave graduate school, that they never have to do any studies or work, and that they be paid a "living wage" forever, while they are there. And they are there forever. They vandalize the property and the labs. They are like roving bands of ignorant violent thugs. They cannot be failed and they cannot be expelled and they cannot be forced to do any work or study or exams or anything.
According to woke ideology, one cannot use reasoning or logic or evidence or the scientific method or mathematics or search for truth in STEM. These are all branded "white supremacist concepts" and are now supposedly obsolete. They all have to be discarded. If you are caught using them, you are to be sanctioned, and driven out of STEM. This is an ugly toxic situation, as I am sure you appreciate.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. If this continues unabated, STEM is done for.
And these ideologies of wokeness and CRT and DEI and CEI and anti-racism and ESG come from the humanities. This is a long term effort that has been going on for decades. And it is coming to fruition and succeeding.
I stumbled upon this article.
I work for one of those big tech companies. Profit still matters, and shareholders still demand their yield on a quarterly basis. While DEI can get funny sometimes, nothing got quite out of hand as you described in grad school. Humanity people don't write code or build robots after all, so when layoff hits, they are the first ones to go.
What you described in your graduate institution sounds quite bad, Is there formal reporting on all of this? If graduate students of fluid mechanics didn't study calculus or threatened to kill their professors, I'd expect to read them in the news, somewhere.
Look up the University of California graduate student strike from a year or two ago. You will find plenty of documentation of it. But all from an odd perspective. When you only receive one side of the story, do not be too sure that it is the "truth".
No, I doubt that this made the media. The riots and strike were in the media of course, but the stories were watered down to make these seem like very minor incidents, or even told from the perspective of the angry students, not from any other viewpoint. And I have many other examples of DEI going wrong at other institutions, told to me privately by friends. None of these are in the media.
However, DEI is everywhere. Harvard Business School studies of DEI show that it is a failure in almost every imaginable way. Look up CRT training videos by Ashleigh Shackleford; there is a video from a course she taught at Sandia that is outrageous. Do you think that Shackleford's work makes morale better at organizations?
If you want to see stories in the media about woke stuff failing, look for the examples described in Congressional testimony under oath on the subject. Or look at the stories about Riley Gaines' visit to SDSU and the fallout from that. Look at the reports on the visit of Judge Duncan to Stanford Law School. Look at the lawsuits by Asians being denied admission to various schools because of DEI. Of course, since the media is in favor of DEI and wokeness, most of the media never cover these topics. However, there are lots of other articles on Heterodox STEM about this very subject.
In fact, that is the main point of Heterodox STEM. That is why it was formed; to discuss these problems and their impact or potential impact on STEM.
If you want to see DEI and wokeness getting in the way of profits, look at ImBev and Disney and Target. There are lots of other examples of "go woke, go broke". The big tech firms are sort of monopolies, and propped up substantially by the US government which is pushing DEI and wokeness. So you do not really see the full effect of the damage DEI and wokeness are doing in Big Tech. But even in Big Tech, they are still more or less profit-centric.
Also, look at the recruiting problems that the US military is having in this new era of DEI. Things are bad and morale is terrible in the US military, for this very reason.
I have a degree in engineering, which I myself find lacking, so I read humanities as much as possible on the side. I also spend a lot of time talking to other engineers about humanities to mitigate the lack of formal education in these disciplines.
I think engineering studies how to organize and manipulate things, and humanity studies how to organize and manipulate people. There are a lot of similarities.
However, if you fuck something up in a system of things, the consequences are usually obvious and immediate. If you fuck something up in a system of people, the consequences can be very slow to show, and the cause and effect can be ambiguous, leaving a lot of room for wishful and magical thinking.
I would suggest that everyone who is interested should do this. Having a broad background is beneficial and fulfilling.
However, although I have a lot of contempt for psychology as a field, the subcategory of industrial or corporate psychology, and learning how to read people and situations, is immensely important and valuable.
Awesome
The best way to learn the humanities is with a set of required courses that all students take at the same time. Then they can talk with each other about the same books.
It's noteworthy that business schools moved 20 years ago to a rigid cohort system, where the 1st year courses are almost all required and you take all your classes with the same 50 student cohort. That's even tho the MBA's only have 2 years of courses. Law schools are rigid in the 1st year too. And PhD programs in economics.
This is fine. But it is not preparation for STEM. Not in competitive STEM fields.
I know someone who went through a "good liberal arts" program at a prominent Ivy League School. Even though they took a fair amount of mathematics and physics as an undergraduate, they still needed to take an extra 3 or 4 years of intense STEM undergraduate and graduate courses and obtain a masters degree or two before they were prepared to attempt a PhD in physics at Caltech. And then needed a good 3 or 4 years of postdoctoral study after spending several years at Caltech to get a PhD. So after their 4 years of undergraduate training, they needed another 12 or 13 years to be ready to start their career in STEM. That is quite a bit of time.
Maybe that 4 years of time and immense amount of debt they incurred to get a liberal arts bachelor's at an Ivy League School was worth it. But it definitely did not help them much when it came to having a career in STEM. It was mostly just treading water and accumulating debt.
Speaking as a STEM professional, waving that undergraduate liberal arts degree around does not mean near as much as the Masters degrees and the PhD and the postdoctoral study.
If I was hiring people in STEM (which I intend to be doing), believe me, I would not necessarily hold 4 years of liberal arts education against someone who has other strong credentials. But if ALL the candidate has is a liberal arts background or a humanities background, and even worse, if they have exotic pronouns on their cv or resume, their application will probably be discarded immediately. And I am not the only potential employer who says this. Look around.