Not a week goes by without new laments about the decline of the humanities and social sciences. Many of these op-eds blame the utilitarian popularity of the STEM disciplines for declining enrollments and diminishing support for the traditional liberal arts.
My experience is different. I know I can find support for the value of the liberal arts among the leaders of the very STEM disciplines whose popularity my colleagues decry. Two consensus reports by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) determine educational programs that integrate learning experiences in the humanities, arts and social sciences with science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine lead to improved educational and career outcomes.
When STEM disciplines integrate the humanities and arts, learning outcomes include critical thinking, resilience, self-efficacy and other valuable traits, such as “recruitment, learning and retention of women and underrepresented minorities.” A second NASEM report recommends the integration of the social sciences with STEM “because nearly every major challenge the United States faces … requires understanding the causes and consequences of people’s behavior.”
At my institution, the units in our liberal arts college have accepted this invitation for integrative collaboration because we realize our students need holistic learning models to tackle the complex global issues they confront. Instead of the merely performative inclusion of the social sciences and humanities in STEM curricula (like the proverbial “ethics module” to satisfy accreditation), we create the kinds of integration in which the liberal arts aren’t ancillary, but partners at healing the hyper-specialization and fragmentation of the academy. Here are three examples:
Increased communication
Our institution’s computing programs were once mostly focused on teaching subject matter expertise, but students lacked the ability to communicate about and critically reflect on their products, processes, and skills. After program assessments and alumni feedback, faculty from the colleges of liberal arts and computing chose a fully integrated model for the two-semester computing capstone course in which students not only develop a software solution to a real-world problem, but simultaneously acquire the professional and technical communication skills needed software industry.
The course is taught by and apportions equal teaching time to a computer scientist and a technical communication faculty. The inclusion of a liberal arts perspective empowers students to graduate with an increased awareness of the cultural and social implications of computing.
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Scaffolding plays out of mathematical equations
Dr. Faisal Alamgir, who works in material science engineering, has also found liberal arts colleagues to be valuable partners to enhance his teaching. Knowing scientists will often have a need to parse their research to stakeholders outside their specialty, and the level with which students can communicate what they learn is a valuable reflection of the depth of their understanding of the material, he challenges them to translate complex mathematical equations into plain English, and then to elucidate them further in short plays, historical biopics, and other creative genres.
For one of his classes, he teamed up with liberal arts postdoc Franziska Tsufim, whose scholarship and teaching practice include multimodal rhetoric and “sense-making” among students. Tsufim and Alamgir scaffolded the plays, and the students ended up creating playbills and performing their staged equations.
Balancing AI with ethics
Our most recent collaborative venture between the liberal arts and STEM is a brand-new undergraduate minor in Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, specifically created to foster problem-solving in engineering, humanities and social sciences. All students learn how to describe and discuss current national and international ethics and policy frameworks relating to AI/ML, but the program then offers engineering and liberal arts tracks that apply AI/ML methodologies to students’ specialty areas.
Course requirements are wide-ranging, balancing STEM courses with courses on AI and Ethics and Policy, Machine Learning for Economics, Philosophical Issues in Computation, Language and Computers, Science, Technology, and International Affairs, and Race, Gender, and Digital Media.
I realize liberal arts disciplines at traditional universities may not have my institution’s history of collaboration with STEM units. However, the range of the above partnerships (and more than one third of all our degrees include STEM integration) should be encouraging to colleagues in the humanities and social sciences everywhere. Integrating academic fields needs a deliberate effort, including the incentivizing of cross-college collaboration and support for hybrid achievement models when it comes to promotion and tenure.
However, the future of the liberal arts may well depend on aligning ourselves in productive partnerships with STEM disciplines. We have more friends in STEM than we think, if only because our disciplines are, as Albert Einstein once opined, “branches from the same tree.”
