On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 11:09 PM, Mark Marino <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:markcmarino@gmail.com">markcmarino@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
Hi, IDC-ers,<br><br>Last summer I met a computer scientist who shared with me his hierarchy of knowledge. In his schema, the sciences were at the top and all branches of knowledge and learning in the academy fell underneath. By his account, at one time, due to a collective ignorance, much of knowledge was ordered under the Humanities, but slowly over time that ice cap had been chipped away and had floated off and melted into the larger sea of Science where it belonged. By his account medicine, astronomy, and many other realms of knowledge had been relocated to their rightful place, leaving only certain types of speculative philosophy, perhaps a few arts, and other trivial or superfluous enterprises.<br>
<snip><br><br> Can we propose imaginary courses that might accomplish these goals? Or does this in effect undervalue that work that any good humanities course does already?<br><br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>
mark,</div><div><br></div><div>why do you want to do more teaching? My sense is that the more you teach the *less* respect you will get from your computer scientist, who probably teaches half as much as you do and twice as much as people in your medical school. The problem of prestige in our universities is that the "highest good" spoken of be the administration is always undergraduate education, all the while scientists and engineers are negotiating to do less and less of it. Meanwhile we are raising tuition (20% in the UC system this year) and admitting more students than ever. And they, for the most part, have no idea what they are missing. </div>
<div><br></div><div>I've done a lot of interdisciplinary teaching in my time, with scientists and engineers. Two things are obvious to me: 1) scientists and engineers are usually shocked, shocked, by how hard I work at teaching, and I kind of mail it in compared to some of my (especially junior) colleagues in the humanities and 2) these classes don't really count--they are perceived as a fun distraction for and by scientists/science majors, in which they get to do science but get humanities credit, and a not-real science course by either the humanities or science students. I recommend against proposing them if only because you should never do anything the university administration is eager for you to do :) voice of experience here...</div>
<div><br></div><div>I'm in for more radical solutions these days: first, scientists and engineers should be called out on how little teaching they do (and I mean my tenured colleagues, not the adjuncts and lecturers we are instructed to hire by our deans in order to fill the gap) or administrators should be called out whenever they claim that they value undergrad education. They don't. But second, humanities majors should be harder, be harder to get into and stay in, and should include some part of the required science core. Departments should be willing to experiment with tracks that include some science or engineering as part of (on top of) a humanities major, and negotiate with scientists and engineers to teach humanities majors in ways that serve a humanities degree... not the reverse (which is what I think you are proposing here). I'd rather see us lure away CS students or biology students with a better, harder, more prestigious degree... and that could be what "digital humanities" becomes. Along the line, you might have to work with scientists and engineers to achieve it, and that can be good... not all of them or even the majority of them are like your computer scientist.</div>
<div><br></div><div>ck</div><div><br></div></div>