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Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

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Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#171

Post by dredmorbius »

will4274 wrote: post #149

What if the problem is that the humanities are getting worse? The ancient definition of a liberal arts education was language (typically ancient Greek), mathematics, literature (often poetry), physical sciences, and history. During my time at University, I found that students in STEM were required to take classes in literature, language, and history. At my University, it was 8 of 40 classes - 20% of the work over fou…

The Seven Liberal Arts were literally the trivium and quadrivium.

The first were the humanities: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. They were followed by the scientific arts: mathematics, trigonometry, music, and astronomy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education

The evolution of higher education is itself fairly fascinating. The United States produced fewer high school graduates in 1900 than it doees PhDs today, as a fraction of the population.

Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#172

Post by orbifold »

anoncoward111 wrote: post #18
seibelj wrote: post #8

I was a double major in CS and Latin, and once I asked my Latin advisor about grad school for Latin. I didn’t intend on going, I was just curious about what she would say as a tenured Latin professor at a good university. The look on her face when I asked was complete shock and she went on a rant about how it was the dumbest idea ever. She told me how she was going on sabbatical to write a book that only 30 people wo…

Which is a shame, because I would happily teach Latin for a guaranteed $18,000 a year. Latin is an amazing language that has a lot of tangential applications. At the very least, Latin shouldn't go extinct.

In Germany they pay teachers way more than that and some high schools teach Latin.

Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#173

Post by glup »

throwawaymath wrote: post #152
scythe wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I also believe that humanities should master at least basic calculus. I agree that mathematics is underappreciated by most people who work in the humanities. But I strongly disagree that they should learn calculus. In fact, I would argue that calculus is the problem with the perception of math in the social sciences. There are plenty of types of math that could potentially be applied in sociology and its variants, p…

Statistics needs no introduction. Calculus by contrast deals with continuous changes in well-defined quantities, which are not like anything a sociologist encounters. Calculus comprises the foundation of statistics. Without calculus you can learn to apply statistical experiments, but you can’t really understand what’s going on. That makes for brittle insight. Just because the set of all humans is strictly finite does…

I feel like I would have been a lot more interested in calculus in high school if I had first understood how statistics could be used for inference, and how calculus was vital for understanding statistics.

Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#174

Post by pjc50 »

igravious wrote: post #121
seibelj wrote: post #8

I was a double major in CS and Latin, and once I asked my Latin advisor about grad school for Latin. I didn’t intend on going, I was just curious about what she would say as a tenured Latin professor at a good university. The look on her face when I asked was complete shock and she went on a rant about how it was the dumbest idea ever. She told me how she was going on sabbatical to write a book that only 30 people wo…

You'll notice the tag-line for the blog is “Digital Humanities: Using tools from the 1990s to answer questions from the 1960s about 19th century America.” That's what I've been doing for the last half a decade, Digital Humanities (DH). DH is what you get when you ask yourself, “What happens when you add computational methods to the scholar's toolkit? What kind of questions can you ask? What does it imply for scholars…

Peterson is telling people what they want to hear, which is why he has an audience. He's not carrying out a sincere inquiry into philosophical truth.

Same difference as why newspapers have an astrology column not an astronomy one.

Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#175

Post by fsloth »

woodruffw wrote: post #31
seibelj wrote: post #8

I was a double major in CS and Latin, and once I asked my Latin advisor about grad school for Latin. I didn’t intend on going, I was just curious about what she would say as a tenured Latin professor at a good university. The look on her face when I asked was complete shock and she went on a rant about how it was the dumbest idea ever. She told me how she was going on sabbatical to write a book that only 30 people wo…

I received the same rant/incredulity from several of my own professors (in Philosophy). It was incredibly disheartening to see academics essentially give up on any sort of robust future for their field.

It's not about whether the academics give up or not. It's about whether they get funding or not. No funding, no future.

Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#176

Post by sonnyblarney »

Waterluvian wrote: post #80
darpa_escapee wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to be human and get sick on $18k a year.

Don't bin us all in together. Most of the modern world it's really not that expensive to go get real sick.

It's expensive to get sick everywhere nowadays, it's just that the cost is spread out in most Western countries.

Though socialized medicine countries have much less per-capita medical spending, it's still quite a lot.

Or rather ... maybe getting sick is not so expensive. But getting sick and old is ...

Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#177

Post by firebones »

throwawaymath wrote: post #148
Fomite wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things that drove me nuts at university is how much some STEM students mocked a particular set of "...for humanities" math classes without knowing their content. There were some great applications of mathematical thinking that people were shamed about taking.

Can you give an example?

I'm not who you are asking, but this book https://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Experience-Phillip-J-Dav... hits some of the philosophy of math. It's been a long time since I've dipped into it, but IIRC, it puts mathematical discoveries and exploration into more of a cultural and philosophical context. I could see this being sampled for a good crossover course that would cover humanities requirements for STEM, and STEM requirements for humanities.

Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#178

Post by tragic »

This topic is fairly personal to me, since - after I got bitten hard by the continental philosophy bug at the age of 18 - I really did aspire to go into academia and teach it. But I got to the point of applying for PhDs and something of the reality started to dawn, not least that there would be another three years of genteel poverty to endure before there was any hope of a steady job. I had the good fortune to take to programming at that time.

The student loan situation is not quite so bad here in the UK (although it is worse now than when I was going through the system). Yet it clearly puts the humanities at a disadvantage. You don't need to have read Toqueville or Heidegger to see that taking on a six figure debt for the slender possibility of a poorly paid and stressful job later is a really bad idea.

Add in the 'other' relevant numbers - "how many papers have you published this year?" and friends - and frankly I'm surprised that anyone is left to teach today's students. It sounds miserable, and also -from the student's point of view - must reduce engagement with the material.

Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#179

Post by firebones »

gowld wrote: post #114
neltnerb wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, that's an interesting point. Universities have increased their student body share from foreign countries. And from the same source, only 2% study humanities. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/international-studen... There's a spike from 3% to 5% of the total college population, so that doesn't account for the whole story. But the makeup of their elite school demographics might also differ from average.

That's because rich foreign students pay full price, as public schools cut funding and raise spending on educationally-worthless perks to raise their USNews rankings. USNews has done grievous injury to tertiary education in USA.

And some would argue the same for hospitals.

Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#180

Post by endisukaj »

randcraw wrote: post #86

A quarter of a million dollars for a degree in spanish; no job prospects; followed by 20+ years of loan repayment... Is there any wonder that such degrees are unpopular? None of the humanities majors improves your employment prospects, while all could be reproduced for free by reading maybe 20 books at your leisure. That makes the humanities more like a form of entertainment than a preparation for life, which is what…

Even a non-humanities major can be reduced to reading 20 (technical) books at your own leisure.
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