The other day at the Wednesday lecture-lunch thing, I happened to sit down across the speaker and not know it, and the guy was the chair of the new interdisciplinary program training people in the intersection of biology and physics.
Anyhow, he asked at one point why humanities ph.d.s take so long compared to the sciences, and that his wife is an anthropologist and he asks her this all the time and he still doesn't understand, and all I could come up with off the cuff is the huge research histories in many fields, and that newer research doesn't invalidate older stuff, oftentimes, and you kind of have to know it all.
I also said that 70% of time was spent learning other languages (which is very time intensive, to gain proficiency).
Later, I realized I should have asked 2 things:
1) Which living and dead languages had he studied, and at which levels?
2) Had he taken a college-level history course?
I never established what his level of knowledge was, and if I had asked that, I could have quickly broached issues of the different languages needed in different fields, how long it takes to learn them, etc., as well as how history at the college-level is not just "dates and facts" like you may have learned in high school or in an intro history course in college.
I think this bothered me so much, because science people (and econ people!) can be very chauvinistic when it comes to other fields, and it really really sucks when they get into high administrative posts, since they don't understand other fields and don't usually understand that they don't understand, which is something humanities people don't usually do - on the contrary, they'll recognize the importance of the sciences and support them, whereas scientists won't do the contrary.
And, usually scientists really really suck at critical thinking skills, too.
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4 comments:
very insightful -- and true!
I brought this up at a pedagogy colloquium the other day, where a paper was presented about how the values that the humanities inculcate are "critical thinking" and "attentive humility". It's that last that scientists really lack, but when I brought that up, people jumped all over me for generalizing about scientists, and said that the scientific discovery process is just as creative as the humanities one, etc. It's no wonder humanities prof fuck themselves over in communicating with scientists.
Also -
Humanities people have this idea that if they just formulate an idea the right way, people will suddenly see the light! They don't usually try breaking things down. Very impractical and naive, and again, they get fucked over because of it.
No one said that scientists weren't creative, at least top ones. It's rather that their capacity for deep thought doesn't beyond their work. The sociological problem is that they think it does!
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