Showing posts with label C.P. Snow. Show all posts
Showing posts with label C.P. Snow. Show all posts

Monday, November 11, 2013

Humanities wailing about the rise of STEM

Seen on the Web, repeatedly, college humanities profs wailing about the emphasis and money going into Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) departments, starving their humanities departments.  Statistics show the rising numbers of students with STEM majors, and the declining number of humanities majors.  This has been around since C.P. Snow wrote about "Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution".  The trend is understandable, college students want to major in something that leads to a job upon graduation.  At least intelligent students do.
   The humanities departments need to connect their disciplines to jobs.  Right now, humanities departments view their mission as training more humanities professors.  That's a loser, their aren't that many college prof jobs out there, and most of them are underpaid "adjunct" professors, part time, no health benefit jobs.   Humanities need to show prospective majors where the jobs are.
  Take English for example.  Show how an English major can lead to jobs.  Creative writing, best selling author is always attractive.  As well as playwright, screenwriting, writing instruction books, advertising copy, journalism.  Surely a knowledge of Shakespeare is useful to writing plays, movie scripts, or TV shows.  Understanding the English novel, from Pride and Prejudice to Hemingway is helpful to writers of mainsteam fiction, genre fiction, romance novels, fantasy and science fiction, westerns and mysteries.  This will require the typical English prof to conceal his aristocratic distaste for things like advertising and genre fiction, but that's better than unemployment.
   Foreign language departments need to expalin the need to speak the language, and know the culture, for overseas work in diplomacy, intelligence, sales, import/export work, journalism, and business.   Employers already know that they need American employees with language skills to represent them overseas.
   History is an ever expanding and super broad field.  Covering everything that ever happened since the invention of writing, makes history the broadest field of all.  History books have gone on to the best seller list from the days of Bruce Catton, and Barbara Tuchman, up thru David McCullough.  Plenty of good fiction have been written with a historical slant, from C.S. Forester to Tom Clancy.   As a background for a career in politics, diplomacy, or intelligence, history is far superior to political science, sociology or economics.  History is real, with real examples.  The others are theoretical, and mostly opinion.