What do you think?
A shocking experience in the University
This was the question that shocked me in a master’s class discussion about Peirce’s theory of signs. I had never been asked this question in an academic setting.
My undergraduate studies were at a trade school—they only called it a trade school as a joke, but the reality is that it is a trade school. Most of what we call “college” or “university” are teaching students the skills necessary to be effective in industry. Why is the term “trade school” so derogatory today? It probably has something to do with the fact that some people think that everyone “needs to go to college.”
It’s can be quite challenging to graduate from many educational institutions, but it’s fairly easy to graduate without a deep think about the purpose of the institution. This topic is beat around with possible answers such as:
“to give a stamp of approval for individuals in the working class?”
“to foster high-level intellectual discourse and research?”
“to provide the ruling class a social setting to meet their peers?”
“to create an environment for learning and self-exploration?”
“to create a safe space for the debate of all kinds of topics?”
In the 21st century, the main reason people attend higher education prepare for the working world, so that you can “get a good job.” This was certainly my motivation, and my undergraduate institution did a fantastic job achieving these ends. There is a significant issue with this style of education, however. You are instructed to learn in a programmatic way; let me demonstrate by example.
In elementary school, you are taught the names of shapes. In order to prove that you understand this relationship between names and shapes, you could be asked to draw a square, or inversely, you could write the name circle next to the shape that matches. In middle and high school, you learn more complicated “standards” such as memorizing historical events from a book or learning procedures to solve algebraic equations. Science and engineering focuses on this kind of procedural knowledge. You are taught the properties of objects in the physical world, and you are given some equations that demonstrate those relationships. You might understand what valence electrons do in a metal, but you are never doing research or discussing such discoveries. The focus is to understand the world and use levers to manipulate it.
Now enter a fancy engineering school. You are taught computer programming. Fantastic! This is some of the best procedural knowledge. Given new kinds of problems, you are able to write some software to produce massively leveraged outputs. Different kinds of problems are classified and you know which tools to use to get them under control. Whether you study computer programming, education, or hotel management, the process of learning skills is similar. You sit in a large lecture hall with a professor who clicks through a slideshow as he or she describes the best ways to gain the attention of students—and that you should never use a powerpoint.
Upon graduation, there are feelings of uncertainty, excitement, and competency. Whether you can play an instrument well, teach children, or design screws, your institution likely did a good job making sure you are prepared for what the industry expects from you for the next step. This is an impressive accomplishment, especially when much of the focus of professors revolves around research, with their teaching responsibilities being an unincentivised afterthought.
The point of this discussion is that no where in this process is the student asked what they think. There are no open ended questions or discussions of unanswerable topics. Instead, it’s Maxwell’s equations; can you use them or not? An antenna does not care about your ancestors’ experiences under colonial rule.
This is why this question was shocking during my first class in the humanities when my professor with her fancy PhD from Oxford asked. When discussions around scientific readings are performed, the question is not “how does this writing affect you?” or “how does your perspective and background differ from the author’s?”, rather the subtext is “How much of this content do you understand, and can you explain it to help your peers understand?”
Academics in the humanities are not interested in truth claims as are the natural sciences. Humanities are obsessed with classifying knowledge, ways of thinking, and discourse. This is not to say that the humanities are the path that most students should be taking, but rather that it is a misunderstood and important part of higher education. Likewise, it is amusing to see a fancy person in the humanities get tripped up on basic concepts of probability and statistics. We live in a complicated world where there are many dimensions that the mind can be pushed towards.
Interdisciplinary studies are needed and lacking. My undergraduate institution was required to teach English and writing courses, but they have a massive challenge to this end. They do not offer a bachelor of the arts and therefore they do not attract serious academics in these non-technical fields. It also becomes a matter of cultural integration. I wonder whether a humanities professor can lead the kind of discussion they desire in a room full of engineering students. Even in the first year of higher education, many students have self-selected themselves into their education programme based on their intellectual strengths and weaknesses; engineering students and liberal arts students have vastly different ways of thinking.
I suspect the best way to achieve interdisciplinary studies is to bring 3 engineering students into a small class of philosophy students. In this way, the engineering students get to experience a liberal arts experience. Conversely, some European institutions have overly ambitious interdisciplinary courses for humanities students where they aim to teach computer programming and statistics in a single eight-week course. They only realize the challenge of this effort when they start to explain that a cumulative distribution function (CDF) is the integral of a probability distribution function (PDF). “What’s an integral?”
An obvious side-note, procedural learning can be sustained a larger scale with video lectures and online quizzes. Grasping for foreign ways of thinking int he humanities requires small lectures with class participation. This is a serious challenge for institutions with limited resources.
Many universities are performing surprisingly well given their challenges, but there is a long way to go to achieve a more ideal outcome. Incentives are a particular challenge, throughout the entire system. Funding structures for institutions and professors should more closely follow student education instead of just research outcomes. Likewise, the price for students to attend university, beyond foregone opportunities, is immense in the United States.
Universities are largely taxpayer funded, with tuitions typically representing 20–30% of all revenue. Even most grants are federally (meaning taxpayer) funded, with only a few schools like Georgia Tech gaining a significant chunk of private research funds. Universities have two customers: students, and the research grantors, they should act like it. Large institutions would do well to create respected and well-compensated tracks with a focus on teaching. Perhaps, a PhD is not required to teach entry level courses, but rather a skilled course administrator could do the job. Similarly, don’t stick your highest performing researcher to teach a class that they don’t want to teach.
We all need to rethink the purpose of higher education in our society because whether we attend or not, we are paying for it. These institutions should be encouraged to adapt and challenge their students in more diverse academic ways.
