New report: Yes, STEM—but humanities and social sciences too! (Updated)
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.2487
The Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has issued The Heart of the Matter , a report requested by legislators from both parties. It ‘identifies three goals and thirteen broad recommendations for advancing the humanities and social sciences in America'—and frames itself emphatically as complementing STEM.
A visit to the commission’s home page switches on a seven-minute video. It begins with an image of a yellow flower and the voice of actor John Lithgow intoning, ‘The stem of the flower is...STEM, science, technology, engineering and math. But the blossom of the flower is the humanities. Without the blossom, the stem is completely useless.’
Later in the clip, one of the commission members, Robert Birgeneau , a physicist and former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, declares, ‘No humanities, no civilization.’ The commission also includes Charles Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering.
And it includes Norman Augustine, who led creation of what the new report calls ‘the influential National Academies report Rising Above the Gathering Storm .’ The new humanities and social sciences report cites that work early on, and makes a point of noting that ‘the scientific community has worked to strengthen’ STEM education and ‘to encourage new and expanded funding for scientific research.’ The new report adds:
Scientific advances have been critical to the extraordinary achievements of the past century, and we must continue to invest in basic and applied research in the biological and physical sciences. But we also must invest more time, energy, and resources in research and education in the humanities and social sciences. We must recognize that all disciplines are essential for the inventiveness, competitiveness, security, and personal fulfillment of the American public.
The new report lists languages, literature, history, film, civics, philosophy, religion, and the arts as the humanities, and anthropology, economics, political science and government, sociology, and psychology as the social sciences. ‘Together,’ it says, ‘they help us understand what it means to be human and connect us with our global community.’
As of the morning of 19 June, articles about the new report had begun appearing in the media, including at the Washington Post , the New York Times , and Reuters . The Times reports that it ‘comes amid concern about low humanities enrollments and worries that the Obama administration’s emphasis on science education risks diminishing a huge source of the nation’s intellectual strength’ and that it ‘is intended as a rallying cry against the entrenched idea that the humanities and social sciences are luxuries that employment-minded students can ill afford.’
At the Miami Herald, an op-ed supporting the new report has appeared from commission members Eduardo Padrón, president of Miami Dade College, and Donna Shalala, president of the University of Miami.
But probably the most notable is an op-ed that appeared in USA Today, coauthored by Augustine and fellow commission member David Skorton, president of Cornell University. The humanities and social sciences, they declare, and ‘not just the physical and life sciences, are...vital to the future of this country.’
Updated 21 June, 2013:
With STEM enthusiasm as both model and counterpoint, will a wide national conversation develop?
High-visibility support has begun to widen in the media for The Heart of the Matter , the report requested by legislators from both parties that advocates ‘advancing the humanities and social sciences in America'—and that, as reported earlier , frames itself emphatically as complementing STEM advocacy. Whether or not this attention grows into the robust national conversation envisioned by the reporting organization, that complementarity increasingly calls to mind co-opetition, the neologism combining the words cooperation and competition.
Members of the reporting organization—the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences—have now been interviewed at PBS’s Newshour and NPR’s Morning Edition . Commission chair Richard Brodhead, president of Duke University, appeared in the Newshour piece and published an op-ed in the Raleigh News and Observer.
At Time, legal scholar and historian Annette Gordon-Reed, also a commission member, wrote a similar commentary , headlined ‘Critics of the liberal arts are wrong.’ She proposed that STEM and the liberal arts are too widely viewed as an either/or proposition. At the Los Angeles Times, James Cuno, another commission member, argued in an op-ed against cuts in arts and humanities budgets, and asserted that the economy ‘disproportionately rewards’ STEM graduates.
Carlo Rotella, director of American studies and professor of English at Boston College, writes and comments in prominent media and serves as a columnist at the Boston Globe. His 21 June column argued that debate on these matters is too often ‘muddied by way too much talk about the meaning of life and the enriching experience of beauty’ while involving too little talk about ‘advanced analytical and expressive ability.’ To illustrate, he drew on an experience overseas:
When I visited 14 universities across China in 2009, I was struck by how hungry the students seemed to be for anything at all that felt like analytical engagement with culture. As impassioned, inspired, and game as those students were, their minds were being slowly starved by rote instruction.... When they studied American literature, for instance, most of them weren’t even reading Melville or Whitman; they were reading textbooks that explained why Melville and Whitman were important, then repeating that material on tests.
CNNMoney, CNN’s business website, involves the magazines Fortune and Money. In a commentary there, Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel Rasmussen, identified as ‘senior partners at ReD Associates, a strategy and innovation consulting firm based in the human sciences,’ argued that everyone needs the humanities. This includes ‘every American business leader who has even a shred of ambition,’ they proclaimed, because ‘understanding people and their cultures is the key competitive strategy.’ They asserted, ‘Workers trained in the humanities are better at understanding the worlds of others than students of the hard sciences.’
At the Pacific Standard—where commission member Kathleen Hall Jamieson chairs the editorial board—a commentary agrees with the report but criticizes it for presenting not reasons, but rhetoric and platitudes. The headline cautions, ‘Save the humanities—from themselves.’
Saving the humanities from themselves constitutes a major theme in David Brooks’s New York Times column in support of the new report. Brooks served on the reporting commission. The ‘humanities are not only being bulldozed by an unforgiving job market,’ he warns, but they ‘are committing suicide.’ He summarized:
Somewhere along the way, many people in the humanities lost faith in [the humanities’] uplifting mission. The humanities turned from an inward to an outward focus. They were less about the old notions of truth, beauty and goodness and more about political and social categories like race, class and gender. Liberal arts professors grew more moralistic when talking about politics but more tentative about private morality because they didn’t want to offend anybody.
The humanities are ‘in crisis,’ Brooks reiterated, but ‘rescuers are stepping forth.’ He advised readers: ‘The report is important, and you should read it.’
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.