The Decline of American Civilization

From a posting by logician Richard Zach at the University of Calgary on the state of education in the US:

Gregory A. Petsko is the Gyula and Katica Tauber Professor of Biochemistry & Chemistry at Brandeis University. In his column in Genome Biology (also published at Inside Higher Ed), he wrote an open letter to George Philip, the President of SUNY Albany, who evicerated the language department at his university. Priceless:

It seems to me that the way you went about [announcing the closure of the departments in a Friday afternoon meeting] couldn't have been more likely to alienate just about everybody on campus. In your position, I would have done everything possible to avoid that. I wouldn't want to end up in the 9th Bolgia (ditch of stone) of the 8th Circle of the Inferno, where the great 14th century Italian poet Dante Alighieri put the sowers of discord. There, as they struggle in that pit for all eternity, a demon continually hacks their limbs apart, just as in life they divided others.

The Inferno is the first book of Dante's Divine Comedy, one of the great works of the human imagination. There's so much to learn from it about human weakness and folly. The faculty in your Italian department would be delighted to introduce you to its many wonders -- if only you had an Italian department, which now, of course, you don't.

As a holder of an arts degree who worked in the high tech industry where almost all of my co-workers held advanced science degrees. I can tell you that I held my own. I rose through the years and became a key member of the R&D group. I can assure people that an arts degree is a thing of value, even if the business-oriented institutional presidents of US universities do not believe it. Smarts is smarts. Sure it helps to have training in the field in which you work. But except for the very tiny, tiny number of jobs which are real specialist jobs, a generalist education is more than enough if you have the smarts to go with it. Why? Because so much of knowledge is changing, you need to do lifelong learning and that requires a love of learning.

The wonder of an arts degree is that it puts you in contact with thousands of years of the human mind and its wondrous creations. This a purely technical education cannot and will not do. I believe that a background in the humanities is an excellent general background from which you can pursue specialist training in areas relevant to the workplace. I've seen far too many holders of advanced technical education simply unable to adapt to the demands of changing skills in a fast-moving technical workplace.

Finally, a bit of relevant history... The Berkeley Free Speech Movement arose in the crisis of education where large "multiversities" like the University of California Berkeley saw their mission as no longer one of broad education but as a factory to turn out technicians for the modern economy.

Here is a bit from the famous speech by Mario Savio on December 2, 1964:

Now, I ask you to consider: if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the board of directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I'll tell you something: the faculty are a bunch of employees, and we're the raw material! But we're a bunch of raw material[s] that don't mean to have any process upon us, don't mean to be made into any product, don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We're human beings!

And that -- that brings me to the second mode of civil disobedience. There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

Here's the video of that speech:



That was the battle for a human education 50 years ago. Sadly, that fight still goes one. And it appears that the forces of enlightenment are engaged in a fighting retreat, giving ground, but trying to retain their principles as much as possible. Sad.