Steamed up over STEAM
Stop making excuses for the liberal arts.
Historians will trace the decline and fall of the Liberal Arts to the exact moment when STEM became STEAM.
— — If there are any historians left to tell the tale.
For most of human civilization the liberal arts brought meaning to the daily grind of existence. Music to give voice to our emotions. Visual arts to capture time. Philosophy to organize our thoughts. History to channel the lessons of our ancestors. Dance to free our souls.
Over time, schools of philosophy and the great universities emerged to celebrate and systematize our search for meaning. Supporting the humanities required no more justification than breathing demands an apology.
But today the Liberal Arts are on the run- crumbling in the face of a multi-pronged attack across both practical and partisan fronts.
The Arts may feed our soul, but not our stomachs. Survival always comes first. Today, the path to riches runs straight through business or technology programs. Even though studies indicate
the advantage for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) majors fades steadily after their first jobs, and by age 40 the earnings of people who majored in fields like social science or history have caught up.
“common sense” dictates we cut out the middleman, skip the English essay, and go straight to the bank. Or so the vast majority of students and their parents believe:
English language and literature — a major that used to account for a third of all humanities degrees — has been particularly hard hit. In 2020, there were only about 37,000 college graduates who had majored in English, down a third from 55,000 in 2009. History is seeing a similar collapse, down 35 percent.
By contrast, students are increasingly gravitating toward majors in business, engineering and health-related fields. More than 430,000 college students graduated with business majors in 2020, up 60 percent over the past 20 years. Engineering majors have more than doubled during this period.
The Humanities thrives on questioning authority- and authority is not always amused. Decades of antagonism are coming to the boil. Liberal Art’s budgets are being cut, departments closed and tenure revoked. State universities discover their governor is trying to warp its mission from teaching students to think, to training students for jobs.
On the right, cries to defund woke English departments rise in parallel to movements defunding the police. On the left, conservative or hot-button political speakers are preemptively censured and denied a podium, even on supposedly liberal campuses. Arcane elitism runs rampant. The ivory tower grows taller.
No wonder the Liberal Arts sought cover in the powerful arms of Science/Technology/Engineering/Math. Big-sister STEM protecting little sister arts “A” from school-yard bullies under a cloud of STEAM. Drawing strength in numbers and a chance to tap an alternate funding source. Arts purely as a utilitarian good in service to the useful sciences.
Don't get me wrong. I am an engineer and entrepreneur who views the world though the rational lens of cause and effect. I support STEM initiatives to combat the lazy perception that these fields are nerdy and inaccessible, and in so doing, engage new voices and perspectives. But at some point, if we tag a few more letters onto the alphabet soup of blessed domains (e.g. medicine and sports now vie for inclusion), we say nothing by including everything. Diluting the original tightly focused mission of STEM programs.
STEM alone is a “necessary but not sufficient” guide to living. My lodestar remains the scientific method, the great intellectual creation of humanity complementing the emotional resonance of the Arts. Where biology teaches us how to develop a vaccine against smallpox, the ethics and moral insights of the Liberal Arts provokes us to care deeply about society, and to vaccinate our friends as well as our enemies.
So you can make a case for synergy. But once the Arts surrenders its autonomy, the Humanities are doomed to second class citizenship. Which is why I object to STEAM. Let’s fund the Liberal Arts without apology. Raise the stature of human deliberation and celebrate emotional creativity as its own public good. Encourage our children to wrestle with the hardest questions imaginable. Even those with no practical applications in sight.
To be human is to nurture our souls as well as our minds.
