Deliberately integrating the humanities into Georgia Tech University’s armada of world-class STEM-based programs is the future of pedagogy at the R1 Atlanta university—and perhaps for all of higher education, says Richard Utz, interim dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, in this installment of the “University Business Podcast.”
Higher education leaders, employers and college students continue to prioritize academic offerings that promise gainful employment and professional authority. Utz has championed Georgia Tech’s mission to break down academic siloes and ensure students benefit from an interdisciplinary education.
“The separation between all the disciplines on a campus is artificial,” he says. “It works for university researchers—not necessarily for its students and society.”
Georgia Tech’s Vertically Integrated Projects program invites undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as faculty across academia and research, to collaborate on multi-year complex problems. In the real world, this level of holistic collaboration is still sorely lacking, Utz declares.
“I don’t think what happened during the pandemic was a failure of science,” he says. “The vaccine worked. What didn’t work was how we were socializing the vaccine, how we were communicating it and how we established policies that would make it possible for it to be acceptable.”
Blending the humanities with STEM may be a viable way to spur student interest in programs that aren’t grabbing students’ attention, Utz says. Georgia Tech is in the process of finalizing a Russian minor for its aerospace engineering degree so that students are equipped to collaborate more closely with engineers of another space program superpower.
Colleges that cut humanities programs to tighten their budgets are failing to innovate. “If you cut certain subject matter out a higher education ecosystem,” Utz says, “you deprive the rest of that institution of that perspective.”
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