The Australian government’s proposed fee restructuring for universities will have disastrous consequences for the humanities. But it’s bad news for STEM education, too.
How do I know? Because I’m an Australian teaching the history of science to STEM students in a major public university in the United States, and I see first-hand how desperately science undergraduates need training in culture, politics, and society.
They come to my classroom as future geneticists without having ever heard of eugenics. Future doctors without any understanding that medicine can cause pain and injustice just as adeptly as it can give relief. Future engineers who have never had a forum to voice their concerns about how technology can erode our rights as citizens.
As it stands, Australian STEM students are even less exposed to these discussions because, unlike the US system, Australian universities usually do not require students to cross-enroll in humanities credits. This was the case when I was a science undergraduate at the University of Queensland, and I was funneled into science-only courses.
I was never taught that biomedical sciences are social systems — that therapeutic innovation can be racist, sexist and classist. Not once in my science degree did I learn how evolutionary theory was born on the assumptions of white supremacy, and how this racism still reverberates in 21st century institutions. Never was I made to appreciate that our abusive relationship with the environment is at once a scientific, economic, historical and philosophical problem, and that intelligent policy is only created through consultation with experts from all these fields.
I only learned about these things when I stumbled into a humanities elective. Taking this first humanities subject was transformative, and it made me a better scientist. Engaging in discussions about race, class, and gender truly reoriented my engagement with the sciences. Not only did I become better and more creative in my biology classes — who knew that a history class could help me better understand and challenge theories of heredity? — but I had an eye to how science was situated in society.
I saw science for what it is: plonked in a complex social milieu, bigger and more complicated than just “facts” and “data”.
Like me, many science students in Australia stumble into humanities classes and make these same realisations. Some of them do what I did: declare a dual degree in Science/Arts, and continue thinking deeply and compassionately about how STEM works in our world.
Under the new government plan, this fortuitous act of stumbling into a humanities class will occur less often, and less easily. As the door to Arts subjects is closed to science students, so too is an opportunity for enrichment.
Australia’s plan to restructure funding at universities is touted as an investment in the sciences, but it is actually a heavy blow. The next generation will be less equipped to operate in a competitive international marketplace, and less able to adapt their science-making to the increasingly complicated world that demands their attention and expertise.
It takes more than just a science degree to educate future scientists. They need the humanities, too, to train them in a type of critical thinking that cannot be found in a laboratory.
Patrick Walsh is an Australian PhD student in the history of science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He holds a masters degree from the University of Wisconsin, and bachelors degrees with honours from the University of Queensland.
Thank you for a great and informative article, Patrick.
Such a pity that those who are meddling in universities do not appear to understand how important the study of humanities WITH science is, especially to those who wish to work in scientific fields.
Bravo!!
Thanks Patrick, this resonates with my working life experiences too as someone educated in both humanities and STEM and worked in fields using mainly one or the other.
However humanities to me is about finding and questioning new and old ideas. Your line about evolution “…evolutionary theory was born on the assumptions of white supremacy, and how this racism still reverberates…” suggests to me you’ve drunk the post modern kool aid and accepted it as holy writ. To reduce one of the most important scientific discoveries in such a way apparently without question doesn’t reflect well.
Thanks for reading mark e smith. On your point about evolutionary theory & white supremacy, I’m referring to the well-document scientific racism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Charles Darwin’s own work considers the “superiority” of white people, esp. Descent of Man (1871). For a recent historical analysis of this, see Evelleen Richards (2017), Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo25338514.html
Your article almost reads like an explanation of the reasons why the government has defunded the humantities!
“geneticists without having ever heard of eugenics”
“Future engineers who have never had a forum to voice their concerns about how technology can erode our rights as citizens”
“therapeutic innovation can be racist, sexist and classist”
“abusive relationship with the environment is at once a scientific, economic, historical and philosophical problem, and that intelligent policy is only created through consultation with experts from all these fields”
The free market rules all. There is no room for ethics, no room for experts, no room for people who might suggest the market encourages destructive, anti-social activities. If people are educated in these things, they may very well criticise the government’s policies for their effects. These are discussions the government doesn’t want to have.
The physical sciences and their offshoot engineering, have answered some extremely difficult questions about our place in the universe. They have also given us technology and things that make our lives easier and in some cases more interesting. The understanding of our place in the universe and our understanding of the origins of the universe are a tour de force. It is incredible that a small monkey of dubious origins could research and understand these things over a period of what is, in universal time an instant.
The issue of relevance to the human condition of things like the understanding of the origin of the universe, black holes and dark matter and dark energy are however another matter.
Science and engineering answers a lot of difficult questions, but many, if not most of them of them are irrelevant to human survival and happiness. Personally, I love the science of cosmology, quantum mechanics and computer software, but I don’t hold any illusions about the importance of these things in the human experience. You may question this and propose that science has given us the ability to stamp out smallpox, some cancers and that it has prolonged our lives through agriculture and all of the sciences that underpin this.
The problem with this thinking is that many of these human disease and nutritional burdens have been caused or greatly exacerbated by technology. The bubonic plague which killed millions of people in unspeakable agony and despair is an e3xcellent example. It is thought that this plague was spread by trade using ships to move goods and the invention of the metropolis, which through people together requiring them to use common contaminated resources. The development of ships and cities were developed using crude scientific and engineering knowledge and hit would not be drawing a too long a bow to say these caused the problems.
Eventually it was scientific inquiry which determined the proximal causes of these diseases and for a short time, in the historical sense, they have protected a small percentage of the human population from their ravages. But, and there is always a but, the proximal (close in) causes were managed by the application of large amounts of energy to pump sewage and clean water around the cities to keep them segregated. It turned out that the use of coal and oil as the energy source for these endeavors was not without problems which are now obvious to everyone except for Big Carbon, Scott Morrison and Donald Trump.
As science has been able to appear to solve seemingly difficult problems in the past, these people assume with no basis in fact and with no historical precedent beyond the last hundred years that these solutions are feasible now.
The physical sciences are good at answering the small questions of decent human survival, but by their very nature they are virtually useless at answering the big, relevant questions. It is the humanities, philosophy and to a lesser extent the understanding of human nature through psychology that are capable and have been shown over millennia to answer the big questions of human existence. Additionally like all technological answers they become obsolete, beyond their use-by date.
At present there are billions of dollars being spent on the ITER project which is designed to explore hydrogen fusion as a practical energy source. Very few people know of it in spite of the fact that it is at least two orders of magnitude more difficult that putting a man on the moon and as many times more expensive. If it works it will be the precursor of unlimited energy. I hope it is successful as I love science, however as a person who would like my children to have a decent life, it is a huge gamble that will probably fail. This project is a complex risky solution to a small part of the human problem.
It’s not science and technology we need to concentrate on its the humanities. That doesn’t mean we abandon the physical sciences, but rather to acknowledge their limitations and the types, magnitude and relevance of questions they answer and what they don’t.
The humanities are also a hell of a lot cheaper.
I re-read this after posting and saw an error:
“Additionally like all technological answers they become obsolete, beyond their use-by date.”
I was not alluding to the solutions the humanities come up with. They are for the most timeless. It is the technological solutions that inevitably have a use-by date. Human nature is a part of our DNA and whilst it is subject to epigenetic influence is basically unchanged since we were hunter gathers 100 k years ago. It is human nature that the humanities explain.
I need a good editor to unscramble by utterings.
Thanks for this article. As a High School History Teacher, I know this issue all too well as so many students are funnelled into STEM subjects because “jobs” without any consideration that a more rounded education actually has genuine benefits.