Worth of Academia/Liberal Arts

KlIj5Hj.jpg
 
Someone once told me that art, above all, has to be a feast for the eyes.

Are the blind then inherently unable to contribute to art or even FEEL it? I don't think so. Art is art and art is a feast and a toast to life.

I think this is where the definition of art changed. Art used to be a craft, a skill, a profession, and usually a form of entertainment. A latin poet's livelihood depended on pleasing either his audience or his patron. But it became about feelings and expression. And disconnected itself from commercial imperatives in many cases. Harry Potter and website design are much closer to what I envision art as, as opposed to what I'd find in a contemporary gallery.
 
You can interpret eyes a little more broadly into all the senses - or perception generally. According to this ideal, art is aesthetically rich, although it doesn't have to be from the visuals. Otherwise, how could music be art?

I don't agree that art has to be aesthetically rich. I think that is a bunch of nonsense.
 
I think this is where the definition of art changed. Art used to be a craft, a skill, a profession, and usually a form of entertainment. A latin poet's livelihood depended on pleasing either his audience or his patron. But it became about feelings and expression. And disconnected itself from commercial imperatives in many cases. Harry Potter and website design are much closer to what I envision art as, as opposed to what I'd find in a contemporary gallery.

Funny thing because a painter told me that lol. Art is truly an exercise in bias.
 
Funny thing because a painter told me that lol. Art is truly an exercise in bias.

I'm not surprised. Because people who have taken the time to work hard and develop a skill like your painter friend find themselves playing second fiddle to the likes of Tracey Emin and other similar frauds.
 
Same amount you did that time you came home from work and hallucinated HN was standing in your kitchen wearing nothing but a feather covering his naughty parts.

Now I'm confused and scared.
 
Are you sure the reason was professor bias, and not that you didn't have the strongest grasp of how grading English papers works? (I'm not attacking you of course pan, but in my own experience many undergrads - particularly those acquainted with scientific objectivity - just don't get how English is evaluated).

The analogy with chemistry, for example, is false. In a textual analysis there is no one right answer that's approached with different methods, there are a plurality of answers that are weighted based on the application of interpretive frameworks and the successful identification of literary devices within the text.

If anything your experience here was more like the chemistry example, since your conclusion was graded more heavily than your methods. But English isn't a discipline that lends itself to objective correctness in the same way a science would, and as such shouldn't be graded like chemistry.



A+

I had a decent grasp of how the grading worked. I simply disagree with how it's implemented. It encourages groupthink without an objective reason for it. Of course, you can't read an interpret an 18th century text from a 21st century perspective so I'm not suggesting anything like that but different readers can draw different things from a well known text.
 
As cost of tuition goes up, the number of degrees that yield a positive ROI goes down. As a result, the less practical degrees will probably wither, IMO.

Frankly, I could have probably shaved a year's worth of courses off of my undergraduate curriculum if I didn't have to take a bunch of 100 level crap in order to check a bunch of boxes. I much prefer graduate school, TBH. I just take what I like/am passionate about.
 
Last edited:
Are you sure the reason was professor bias, and not that you didn't have the strongest grasp of how grading English papers works? (I'm not attacking you of course pan, but in my own experience many undergrads - particularly those acquainted with scientific objectivity - just don't get how English is evaluated).

The analogy with chemistry, for example, is false. In a textual analysis there is no one right answer that's approached with different methods, there are a plurality of answers that are weighted based on the application of interpretive frameworks and the successful identification of literary devices within the text.

If anything your experience here was more like the chemistry example, since your conclusion was graded more heavily than your methods. But English isn't a discipline that lends itself to objective correctness in the same way a science would, and as such shouldn't be graded like chemistry.



A+

lol.. A-Level(UK context) English is the last time when things like narrative structure, scansion of the verse etc. are taught. Degree level is more or less only about interpretation of the meaning of a text. And in almost cases this involves interpreting the text through modern theory... feminism, postcolonialism etc. These are your "interpretive frameworks". There is no indepedent thinking. Students are given the text and the critical theory and are expected to integrate the two in their essays. Failure to do so results in the work being defined as "writing in a vacuum" or some other buzzword for not having gotten with the program.
 
I don't know that a liberal arts degree is necessarily useless in the job market depending on what you learn and how rigorous the course was. A quality liberal arts grad should have/be able to:

  1. The ability to write well and quickly comprehend the salient points of others' writing
  2. Do fairly advanced math (calculus at least)
  3. Study effectively and rapidly assimilate new knowledge
  4. Break down the logic of arguments and objectively evaluate their worth

Those are pretty valuable things to be able to do in any job, but I don't get the sense that most liberal arts grads can do them. Rather, liberal arts seems to be the fallback major of failed engineers and scientists.

Outside of engineering and truly advanced math calculus is actually pretty useless. Algebra based prob and stats are infinitely more practical.

Source: Mathematician/Data Scientist
 
Outside of engineering and truly advanced math calculus is actually pretty useless. Algebra based prob and stats are infinitely more practical.

Source: Mathematician/Data Scientist

I'm also a working data scientist, and I do agree with you that probability and stats are more useful. Of course, stats implicitly use a lot of calculus when you're defining probabilities using distributions, but that's abstracted from most people using statistics in practice (as are calculus based gradient calculations utilized in gradient descent). In any case, knowing some math is pretty handy.

And personally I think lower level calculus is a lot easier than linear algebra, probability, stats, etc. But different people find different sorts of math difficult.

Funny anecdote you might like: I have a math PhD working for me, and the other day after he did a presentation on a piece of failed analysis (wasn't his fault, the data wasn't there to make a good model IMO) I found him reading a book on Fourier analysis (his dissertation was on harmonic analysis). I asked him why he was reading it and he told me that sometimes he misses the purity of math as opposed to the dirty business of data analysis in the real world. I think he found it comforting.
 
Outside of engineering and truly advanced math calculus is actually pretty useless. Algebra based prob and stats are infinitely more practical.

Source: Mathematician/Data Scientist

I would say you are brushing with to broad of brush, when it come to calculus. It is the main math disciple (alongside statistics) when it come to economic or financial analysis.
 
I'll have to cede this argument to you since you probably have a greater range of knowledge but I found this problem when I was taking English classes and there were no identity politics in play.

Actually, it was an interesting dichotomy that I found most off putting - the idea that every argument is acceptable juxtaposed against the grading reality that any argument the teacher disagreed with was wrong even if structured and logically sound. That I couldn't get a unique take from the literature because it didn't resonate with the professor, regardless of how well written it was, while a poorly written piece that matched the professor's ideology would still score well.

.

It's funny, that with as much experience I have as both a professor and a student, I have never experienced this caricature you are describing concerning Literature courses. I've heard people repeat it, but I've never seen it.

"Every argument is acceptable" I've never even heard a student say this, much less an educator. It goes against almost everything we believe in from a pedagogical level. The entire point of the writing and analytical reading process is to analyze the validity and strength of arguments.

I'm sorry that you got such a terrible education, wherever it was. I would say that maybe my experiences have been skewed because I graduated from, and have taught at top 5-10 universities, but I have also taught at community and state colleges and I still haven't seen what you are describing.
 
lol.. A-Level(UK context) English is the last time when things like narrative structure, scansion of the verse etc. are taught. Degree level is more or less only about interpretation of the meaning of a text. And in almost cases this involves interpreting the text through modern theory... feminism, postcolonialism etc. These are your "interpretive frameworks". There is no indepedent thinking. Students are given the text and the critical theory and are expected to integrate the two in their essays. Failure to do so results in the work being defined as "writing in a vacuum" or some other buzzword for not having gotten with the program.

You don't interpret text through a theory. You put the theory and text in conversation with each other if it is relevant, analyzing the tensions and slippages.

Putting text in conversation with a theoretical framework is not compulsory unless the entire course is about theory, in which case the course's purpose is precisely to analyze literature's ability to theorize.

You can in essence "write in a vacuum": its called formalist criticism or new criticism.
No school worth its salt would penalize a student for doing so.
 
I don't know that a liberal arts degree is necessarily useless in the job market depending on what you learn and how rigorous the course was. A quality liberal arts grad should have/be able to:

  1. The ability to write well and quickly comprehend the salient points of others' writing
  2. Do fairly advanced math (calculus at least)
  3. Study effectively and rapidly assimilate new knowledge
  4. Break down the logic of arguments and objectively evaluate their worth

Those are pretty valuable things to be able to do in any job, but I don't get the sense that most liberal arts grads can do them. Rather, liberal arts seems to be the fallback major of failed engineers and scientists.

On that list, why is it that the business and science majors on this board are the worst at #1 and #4, and furthermore even lack the ability to realize they aren't good at them. That lack of self-awareness might be a clue to what makes liberal arts study so crucial.
 
Are you sure the reason was professor bias, and not that you didn't have the strongest grasp of how grading English papers works? (I'm not attacking you of course pan, but in my own experience many undergrads - particularly those acquainted with scientific objectivity - just don't get how English is evaluated).

This is true, but it also why I give my students my rubric ahead of time, especially if I'm teaching a lower division writing course of any kind. I ensure they know how they are being graded. This prevents students from thinking their papers are graded on a whim.
 
I'm also a working data scientist, and I do agree with you that probability and stats are more useful. Of course, stats implicitly use a lot of calculus when you're defining probabilities using distributions, but that's abstracted from most people using statistics in practice (as are calculus based gradient calculations utilized in gradient descent). In any case, knowing some math is pretty handy.

And personally I think lower level calculus is a lot easier than linear algebra, probability, stats, etc. But different people find different sorts of math difficult.

Funny anecdote you might like: I have a math PhD working for me, and the other day after he did a presentation on a piece of failed analysis (wasn't his fault, the data wasn't there to make a good model IMO) I found him reading a book on Fourier analysis (his dissertation was on harmonic analysis). I asked him why he was reading it and he told me that sometimes he misses the purity of math as opposed to the dirty business of data analysis in the real world. I think he found it comforting.

I did like that anecdote. I have a tremendous amount of admiration for the guys who love math like that. I've always been more interested in applications/messy problems which is probably why I'm on the MS-MBA-MFin route instead of a PhD.

My main reason for proposing prob/stats over calculus is because prob/stats can force "mathematical thinking" in ways that I do not think calculus can. The word problems tend to be a bit more concrete, also IMO.
 
I would say you are brushing with to broad of brush, when it come to calculus. It is the main math disciple (alongside statistics) when it come to economic or financial analysis.

Good call out, in hindsight I probably could have phrased that better.
 
On that list, why is it that the business and science majors on this board are the worst at #1 and #4, and furthermore even lack the ability to realize they aren't good at them. That lack of self-awareness might be a clue to what makes liberal arts study so crucial.

In a nutshell:

Business:
Taught/incented to convey a point in as few words as possible at as low of a grade level as possible. Business readers are extremely literal and do not want to be left to interpret things. This is done to move ideas from one person's head to another person's head as quickly as humanly possible, as time is always in insufficient supply and critical thinking or idea exploration takes time. From where you sit, this is sacrilege but it's a different skill set developed for a different set of circumstances and problems.

STEM:
Over-emphasis of quantitative skills at expense of articulation and writing skills. In my experience, many brilliant STEM specialists are not particularly articulate, the ones who are articulate are truly special (Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a popular example, typically the "good" STEM professors). There is also a self-righteous streak in STEM specialists because, well, they "reach" right answers all the time, so why wouldn't they be "reaching the right answer" in a discussion that is outside of their domain? In liberal arts, you guys spend way more time "in the debate", in STEM, you get the right answer and move on. For STEM it works in the context of their problems and their circumstances.

Liberal Arts:
More flexibility, less "true right" answers, much more time spent "in the gray" or "in the debate". Often have more room/time to articulate thoughts and enough leeway with word choice and sentence structure to craft sentences and arguments. Different skill set which works for their problems and their circumstances.

It's a culture clash, for all intents and purposes. The nature of message boards/the web also exacerbates some things at the expense of others.

TL/DR - Everyone is writing from an "I'm right, you're wrong" perspective. The main difference is Lib Arts posters tend to frame it as "let's have a debate" and the Biz/STEM posters tend to frame it as "I have solved for X, time to move on".

Economic View - it's the incentives, find those and you can understand why people do what they do

Constructionist View - It's what people allow themselves to be subject to. Figure that out and you can figure out why people do what they do.

There we go, something for everybody.
 
Last edited:
if college just becomes about helping people more successfully enter the job market, then is basically becomes trade school. which we do need more of, but there should always still be places to enrich the mind.
 
Back
Top