I like your point about the fact that we might not need all the STEM graduates we’re producing. It relates directly to the what is school for question. In my field, wildlife science, we’re graduating far more students than there is demand for. At VT, about 25% of graduates are in the field 5 years after graduation. What are these students here for? Many of them think they’re here to get a job working outside or with animals, but the majority won’t achieve this and we’re not being honest with them. I think what these students get is some liberal arts education, some science education, citizenship skills, and a bunch of student loans. Not all bad, but not what they signed up for.

I agree but I don’t see the connection between the humanities and the ability to innovate.

Thanks for the thorough response Siddharth. My blog post was sort of a stream of consciousness documentation and I never really laid out any clear points, I don’t think. I do think the humanities are valuable, but I think programming is just as valuable, at least in certain fields. Your point 1 speaks to creating a motivation for innovation, but not developing the skills required to innovate. I disagree with point 2. I think requiring a music, art, and literature portfolio as part of the science and engineering application process would force otherwise potentially innovative people who are not interested in music, art, or literature to spend their time doing things they don’t like to do instead of working things that do like to do, perhaps programming. I don’t see a necessary connection between music, art, and literature and innovation in the sciences. Is there any data on this? Point 3, again, where is the data?

I’ve thought about the issues you raise here quite a bit. I think the best we can do is to establish the facts, e.g. these events happened, but I don’t think there is a reliable way to recover the true (multi)causal structure that produced them in the form of a narrative. It’s even difficult to do this with current events. Power structures drive the narrative. Dissidents drive counter narratives. Personally, I’m agnostic about most narratives explaining historical or current events, or at least skeptical that they’re entirely true. On a light-hearted note, I recently encountered what was termed “the 6 degrees of Noam Chomsky thinking” in which you must in 6 causal steps or less link any world event back to the US military industrial complex.

I absolutely agree that you do not have to believe in the equal validity of ideas to promote equality. You only have to believe every individual has an equal right to hold and communicate their ideas. Whether it is important to avoid certain topics or not probably depends on the context. If you’re talking about something that isn’t obviously related to politics or religion, it’s probably smart not to go there. But many ideas people disagree about, probably the ones they disagree about most strongly, have to do with politics and religion, so they can’t be avoided. I certainly don’t have the magic bullet to facilitate dialog between people who disagree, but I think it is important to emphasize the distinction between ideas and people and to not try to silence those who disagree with you. It also helps if people can take criticism of their ideas without taking it personally, which I feel that I can do easily, but this is not the case for many people. I wonder if that is something that students could be taught to do, but I suspect it would be very hard to achieve.

Agreed!

Timely debate from last night:

http://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/upcoming-debates/item/1500-free-speech-is-threatened-on-campus

Well, I would be happy to talk about any of the points you disagree with if you point the rest out. I hope you aren’t disagreeing with my lived experience in the Atheist/skeptic movement! I think this is another question I have about not questioning someone’s lived experience. What if you disagree with how they interpreted the experience or weave it into their worldview? People misinterpret things and make mistakes understanding situations. My interpretation of how my experiences with social justice activism play into the larger movement can be wrong. If someone thinks I’m wrong, I want to know. It is a disservice to me if I’m not challenged because I’m not given the opportunity to change my mind. Of course, it is no one’s duty to disabuse me of my incorrect opinions. I realize this is trickier if we’re talking about someone experiencing racism, I just want to see if this is a global rule, or just for more sensitive topics. On that note, I found a very similar story from the inside perspective of a feminist. I linked one of her images in my post, but just came across the blog today. If you’re up for it, I’d be interested in what you think of her history of feminism and the influence of postmodernism. Of course, it’s long and you have other things to do so I understand if you decline.

I didn’t indicate this in the blog post, but I do see the brave space concept as a step in the right direction, but if . To a certain extent, I agree we should own our impact. How strongly you challenge someone should depend on the setting. If we’re in the classroom talking about social justice, I agree it is best to adhere to the brave space framework. But I think in other courses, we might want to challenge each other in more uncomfortable ways and I don’t necessarily know how you will perceive everything I say. Some people are personally offended by things that the reasonable person is not offended by. Should I own the impact of something I said if I think the person’s offense is unreasonable? This just leads to everyone being offended by everything so they don’t have to hear ideas they don’t like. But my questions were more concerned with how the safe space concept is taken onto the campus as a whole and beyond by social justice advocates. Here, I think we need more leeway to expect for a lot of people to be offended while we’re talking about difficult topics. For example, the University of Kentucky Secular Student Alliance I was the president of had an panel event where panel members of different faith communities discussed their religion or lack thereof. People got offended and it wasn’t our representative that did most of the offending. But everyone seemed to have a good time, were friendly after the event, and I think everyone learned from the experience. I think this challenging environment is what the University is all about.

Thanks, Ken. I haven’t encountered Phenomenology before, but after a quick 5 minutes on Wikipedia, I feel qualified to comment on it (joke). My problem with this approach is that there is no good reason to a priori think that this is a reliable method to arrive at or approximate truth. It may be that our intuitions about how well students are learning things that are hard to quantify are reliable, but I don’t see a way around applying the Scientific Method in order to find out. Our evolutionary history surely selected for the ability to judge others’ characters in areas related to survival, but to the extent our intuitions about how well students are doing are reliable, I think they are byproducts of selection for other things. Given the huge literature in psychology showing how flawed our intuitions can be, even ones we are very confident in, and the huge literature on unconscious biases, I am suspicious we can intuit our way to the best ways of assessing students.

That is much more plausible, but if it is correct, it is Dr. Welch that is missing the point. He’s clearly arguing that global connectedness is the grand narrative he uses to motivate teaching and provides an example of how he does it.