Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) have been front and center in pedagogic debates for at least a decade. Strengthening STEM education from kindergarten through college, the argument goes, will improve the nation's security, competitiveness, health, and standard of living. Better-paying jobs will await the fortunate few who graduate with majors in one of the STEM fields.
This argument is more or less true. In 2006 the National Academies expressed concern about the declining state of STEM education in the US. The Department of Education, NASA, NSF, and other federal agencies contributed funds to address the concern. In 2012 President Barack Obama asked for an additional billion dollars to enhance STEM instruction through a Master Teachers Corps.
Select states, corporations, and philanthropists have been splashing buckets of cash and resources about. Several universities are planning to double the number of graduates in science and engineering over the next decade. The race is on, and it is just as intense as the one that followed Sputnik's launch in 1957, except that this time the US is not competing with another superpower.
But there is a downside to most good things. Given that the number of students, resources, and even courses taken to graduate are all finite, something has to give. The likely casualty may be the humanities, particularly the communication and critical thinking skills that the humanities engender. Regardless of experience, engineers and scientists need to communicate. A lack of adequate skills can damage or even end careers.
Professors of humanities have been sounding the alarm. Writing in the 8 April 2013 issue of my local newspaper, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Michael Levenson, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, lamented: "The humanities will not go quietly. They won't disappear unless and until we agree to be machines instead of persons." In an earlier article appearing 29 August 2012, Thomas Peyser, professor of English at Randolph-Macon College, wrote "… . and we can be confident that the abandonment of instruction in grammar is robbing us not just of future writers but of future scientists, physicians and engineers as well."
Communication skills
As a professor of engineering, I voice my support of those who teach humanities, in part because of cases like the following. An intelligent, overachieving engineering senior recently wrote a report about the goal of engineers to mimic lotus leaves' biochemical processes. It began:
This paper discusses an interesting topic, biomimetic, that engineering could benefit greatly by paying more attention to developed structures on animals that are highly successful in environments with similar conditions under which an engineering design is meant to operate.
Who could make sense of such nonsense? As Peyser wrote in the Richmond Times-Dispatch about another mangled sentence: "[This is] a complicated assertion [that] is just a jumble of phrases whose connection to one another is a mystery; the words might as well be alphabetized."
After witnessing my engineering students' declining ability to communicate effectively, I decided to take matters into my own hands. Last fall I offered to seniors and graduate engineering students an elective course on the art of writing. My colleagues in the English department enthusiastically supported the endeavor, and some even volunteered to deliver guest lectures.
In my "Effective Technical Writing" class, there are no exams; only weekly reading and writing assignments. I challenge the students to improve the writings of famed novelists and newspaper columnists, as well as well-written technical papers, all of which I carefully select. I also ask the pupils to write original essays on select technical as well as nontechnical topics.
The class time is split between open discussions and structured lectures on the beauty and pitfalls of language. Judging from the students' evaluations as well as from the quantifiable improvement in their writing skills throughout the 14-week semester, the experiment has been a resounding success. The course is now part of the permanent curriculum at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Salmon fishing in the US
Because of its special nature and because of inadequate teaching resources, my elective course is limited to a small percentage (about 1.5%) of the engineering graduate and undergraduate students in one university. This is but a drop in the ocean, and I feel like a fish swimming against the current.
In Paul Torday's 2007 novel Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, which was made into a successful film in 2011, a Scottish ichthyologist is recruited to help realize a wealthy sheik's vision of bringing fly-fishing to the not so fish-friendly desert. Farm salmon have to be airlifted in from Scotland, radicals oppose the project, and the two protagonists—ichthyologist Alfred and financial adviser Harriet—seem destined to remain apart. Yet by the story's end, the salmon swim instinctively upstream to their new home, and Alfred and Harriet fall in love. The entire absurd and unachievable project is an upstream journey of faith to make the impossible possible.
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Torday's novel is fiction, but trends whose detachment from reality is just as quixotic are playing out in the real academic world. Several universities have recently attempted to implement a business model to replace the traditional academic model. Some university presidents have even written doctoral theses on how to administer an academy. Such leaders rarely rise through the ranks of teachers and scholars; they are career administrators. They typically hire a plethora of public-relations assistants, generate sexy but empty slogans such as "Quest for Distinction" or "Make It Real," and try to lead an unconvinced, skeptical faculty.
Meanwhile, the cost of tuition continues to outpace inflation at seemingly unrealistic and unsustainable rates. A few schools charge additional tuition for each credit that a student attempts above an arbitrarily defined threshold. The practice goes by the name of "market-based tuition pricing." Faculty and staff salaries have been frozen for the last few years, while administrators' compensations continue to escalate. As the average student-to-faculty ratio continues its decades-long stagnation, the average student-to-administrator ratio reaches new lows every year.
Making things worse are recent visions of the Tea-party-supported governors of Florida, Texas, and Wisconsin. Those governors would have the worth of a public-sector teacher be measured by how much tuition income he or she generates relative to the cost of retaining that teacher. Research does not enter the Excel-sheet equation. And of course teaching sparsely attended classes on Socrates, Descartes, or Rembrandt is an unforgivable sin.
In all those trends, "productivity" is no longer used to justify raising academic efficiency and lowering costs. Rather, it is a code for replacing the nuanced work of nurturing young minds with crude, assembly-line widget making. In that environment, securing the resources to inject a heavier dose of the humanities into STEM programs is like salmon fishing in the Yemen.
Just as we cannot prosper without STEM, we must not diminish the humanities. Students can learn a great deal during their formative years, and we shouldn't miss the opportunity to broadly educate them. Some students gravitate toward STEM to minimize their exposure to what they see as the book-reading, report-writing drudgery of the humanities. It is the academic's duty to show all students, whether they're STEM majors or not, how studying the humanities can enrich their lives.
Mohamed Gad-el-Hak is the Inez Caudill Eminent Professor of mechanical and nuclear engineering at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. You can contact him at [email protected].
