[geebee]

I think that Marc may have missed something here - he derides the humanities without recognizing that the humanities are a huge part of a typical math/science/engineering curriculum. So while Marc thinks he's comparing "technical" students to "liberal arts" students, he's actually comparing well rounded students (who have studied both science and liberal arts) to narrowly focused students (who have only studied liberal arts).

I double majored in math and literature, but if I'd only done the minimum humanities coursework for math, I still would have been forced to do a ton of humanities. At my college (at UCSD), all students had to study:

2 years of world history and cultures 1 year of a foreign language 1 year of upper division history. literature, or other humanities course 1 year of fine arts or performance arts 2 courses in math, which can be fulfilled with symbolic logic in the philosophy dept and easy statistics (without calculus) through the psychology department. 2 courses in science, which can be fulfilled with "physics for poets" type courses (again, no calculus)

This is regardless of major. So an english major can get through college without ever really studying math or science in a meaningful way, whereas a math student who does the absolute bare minimum is still going to come away with a substantial amount of humanities coursework.

I think it's time to abolish the term "broad liberal arts education". If it's only liberal arts, and doesn't include math and science, it isn't broad. And I think this is what really separates the math/sci/eng students from the humanities majors. An english who took a ton of math not reflected in his/her degree would be just as well prepared - however, these people are very rare.

[walterk]

I'm not entirely sure what the humanities requirements amount to at UCSD, but at Berkeley I do not believe that the minimum humanities requirements (typically fulfilled by intro courses) constituted a particularly strong dose of humanities, much as the math/science requirements don't constitute a particularly strong dose of math/science. In both cases, you can get away with not getting very in depth at all, and often students who are biased one way or the other are more likely to slack off in the classes they're not biased towards and/or forget them as soon as they're done with them. So there's simply no guarantee of well-roundedness either way.

The best thing, in my opinion, is to get at least a minor, with either the minor or the major being in a humanities or math/science/engineering field. If you just want to get a job doing software engineering or some such, you'll probably have to make the technical field your major, but a strong minor in comp sci can be far more formidable a programmer than many a CS major.

If I had things my way, I would actually insist on undergrads having to major in the humanities, as I'm too familiar with CS majors graduating with an impoverished understanding of society and culture and a lack of critical perspective, often precisely because they did not consider their humanities classes to be "real" classes. The more I learn, the more I'm amazed that what I've learned is somehow considered "optional" by the rest of the populace. Democracies are only as smart as their ruling majority, and as much of the realm of smart decision making in national and international affairs is dominated by social/cultural knowledge and perceptiveness as by technical knowledge, if not more. (Though to separate the two this way is admittedly artificial.) Much the same applies to businesses.

In an ideal world, every undergrad has to double major, one in humanities, the other in math/sci/engineering. And I'm not even sure that the ideal is so difficult to achieve or unreasonable to demand.