Over the past few weeks I’ve been
observing the response to Rick Scott’s suggestion that
Florida public universities focus on STEM, rather
than disciplines such as anthropology. You can start
with John Hawks,
and follow his links. More recently I notice a piece in
Slate, America Needs
Broadly Educated Citizens, Even Anthropologists.
There several separate issues here. Superficial concerns
of money going to your political antagonists,
commonsense considerations of the best utilization of
public educational resources, and broader reflections
upon the nature of a ‘liberal’ education.
First, there’s the plain issue that anthropologists have
a reputation for being Left-liberals, and Rick Scott is
a conservative Republican. Here’s some ratios from Dan Klein:
![]( "How_Diverse_Ratio_graph_htm_m3bc550c4")
As you can see, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans
in anthropology is about 30:1. This obviously
has an effect in the orientation of the discipline in
terms of the values which they impart to their
students. A substantial number of
anthropologists don’t consider themselves scientists.
Quite often they’re clearly activists, and you know very
well what direction their activism is going to go. As one of five non-progressive people
involved in science communication I have seen firsthand
how narrow-minded and partisan people who come out of
the social sciences aside from economics can be. While a
liberal biologist is strongly influenced by their
political outlook and will defend it forcefully,
anthropologists seem trained to throw around scurrilous
terms and associations as if that was the ultimate
training of their profession. While normal people
believe that their ideological opponents are wrong, it
seems that many anthropologists as activists believe
that their political enemies are malevolent demons. Who
wants to continue funding wannabe-kommissars?
Of course as I can admit academics in
general are liberal. But a major difference between
anthropologists and physicists is that the benefits
conferred by physics are clear and distinct. Even a
field as non-scientific as law can be acknowledged to
have necessary utility in an advanced society. In
contrast, though anthropology is edifying and sharpens
our perceptions of the state of human affairs it is a
new discipline which is not necessary
for a modern society. In a straightened fiscal
environment I think it’s reasonable to suppose that public education should be
focused on fields which have a practical import.
Honestly I think that an elaborated land-grant attitude
should suffuse more public universities. I emphasize
public, because private universities can continue to
cherish the idea of a liberal education. And the reality
is that the wealthy and upper middle class who tend to
attend these private colleges (only 25% of American
college students are at private universities, many at
relatively non-selective religious institutions) can
afford a liberal education because their connections
will guarantee them a good job after graduation. In
contrast, working class students are unlikely to be
approached by any investment banks after getting a
degree in history at a public university. The American elite is highly
stratified, and the chances are going to be that the
top echelons will come from private universities.
No surprise that Harvard,
Stanford, and Yale are the top three
feeder universities for Congress. There shouldn’t be a
worry that the American elite is not sufficiently
liberally educated, that elite is drawn from a set of
top-tier universities where the student body is elite in
class and intellectual aptitudes. Social capital and
prestige of their institution are such that a degree in
English or or history can still go a long way.
Finally, there’s the issue about whether people in the
humanities and liberal arts are broadly educated. I
don’t think they really are. My undergraduate degrees
are in biology and biochemistry. Since I went to a
non-elite public university I saw the full range of
students, and those who were not science majors were
often quite academically unmotivated and passed their
classes through bursts of cramming. In the sciences the
situation was different because failing was a much more
clear and present option. Many people switched out of
science majors when they hit organic chemistry or
physical chemistry, because they failed them or knew
they could not pass the courses.
When I met history or political science majors there
were sometimes awkward moments because it was clear I
knew more history and political science than they did. I
have a strong interest in these areas, and in my naive
youth I thought that someone majoring in history or
political science would wish to discuss these topics.
But usually the reality was that they’d rather drink a
beer.
But is it better with genuinely smart students who went
to the top schools? Unfortunately that hasn’t
been my experience. As a specific example
years ago I ran into someone at a party who turned out
to have a background in classical Roman history from an
Ivy League university. As a Roman history buff I was
excited to talk to them about various issues, but I
quickly realized that this individual was more
interested in seeming smart than saying
anything substantive (I wanted to discuss Bryce
Ward-Perkins’ revisionist How Rome Fell, and my
interlocutor seemed to lose all interest when I was not
sufficiently impressed by their name-checking of
scholars in the “Rome did not fall, it evolved” school
of thought. They were not even prepared from what I
could gather to defend that position on empirical
grounds).
Too many smart liberal arts graduates remind me
of the blonde douche in Good Will Hunting:
This is not to say that STEM graduates don’t lack
something. They are no paragons of enlightenment.
There’s often a certain inflexibility and lack of
creativity which is encouraged by a STEM background,
especially one rooted in the physical or mathematical
sciences. It is well known that high level terrorists and
intellectual Creationists
disproportionately come from an engineering background.
A broad knowledge of history, literature, and the arts,
does build character, and gives those who are focused on
narrow technical details something more to grasp upon
when they feel without purpose. The economic plentitude
due to the productivity driven by STEM fields is at the
end of the day at the service of the finer aspects of
culture. Modern engineering means that we can produce
music much more efficiently than in the past, but
without music there would be no point in the engineering
in the first place.
To recap, here is my main issue with the current
proponents of the liberal arts:
1 – The professoriate seems inordinately hostile to
half the political spectrum. That’s fine if you’re
drawing from private resources, but this is not usually
the case.
2 – Those without social capital derived from family
connections need to accrue specialized technical skills
to compensate for their deficit. Upper class and upper
middle class individuals with an entree into white
collar jobs by virtue of their class status can afford
to focus on becoming more polished. Everyone should not
be given the same advice, because not everyone starts
from the same life circumstances.
3 – The average American college student doesn’t learn
much, because they aren’t that bright or intellectually
oriented. They don’t do their reading until the last
second, and have only marginal passion for the books
which they purchase. Your mind can’t be broadened if you
barely use it.
4 – Those liberal arts graduates who are very bright
are too often enamored of the latest intellectual
fashion, and are keener upon signalling their
ideological purity and intellectual superiority than
actually understanding anything.
All that being said, I do believe that a pure technical
education, as one might receive in certain university
systems, is not optimal. There are diminishing marginal
returns on the frontiers of hours invested in any given
discipline, and complementation when you alternate
across very different domains. But just as Rick
Scott was being overly simplistic when denying the
importance of majors outside of STEM, his critics need
to remember that not everyone has the same aptitudes
and options.
