Simplicius wrote:There is a problem with this - namely, that the kind of academic writing and communication used by the humanities suffers when used outside the academy, at least as far as my experience goes. The dense style, combined with the occasional need to aggrandize simple ideas, pad papers, or simply refrain from making strong statements, makes academic writing often unpleasant to read, and ill-suited for technical and other 'purposeful' fields.
We should be careful to draw a distinction here. For one, I can't agree that the humanistic style (if we can actually divine one style) is necessarily dense. As for its usefulness outside of the university...well, the entire journalism industry stands as a counter-example. Humanities also includes history, fiction writing and study, etc.; all these have their areas for popular consumption (biographies, novels, pop science books).
Now I work in application development. I don't publish in journals and my audience isn't limited to my colleagues (although I'd argue that using narratives there also helps scientific readers more rapidly penetrate an article). I write documentation and contribute to user guides, and our readers range anywhere from execs to your run of the mill data entry types. I have to consider how the narrative organizing literature we produce will play with the guy sitting at his desk with a bunch of risk models and our app.
If humanities departments were willing to recognize the support nature of their subjects - background information useful to a number of non-technical fields - and applied themselves as such, a humanities education at the bachelors' level would be actually useful. But because they insist on some kind of lofty status, they reduce themselves to nigh-irrelevancy, and a student who wants to apply his history education is on his own.
I'll admit it's entirely plausible that a humanities education doesn't translate into job opportunities as easily as a scientific/technical one, and from there it's tempting to reason that scientific/technical fields are inherently more purposeful. But once again, we can't deny that there are large sectors of industry that rely on writers to express not only technical, but non-technical ideas to non-technical people. Journalism, literature, marketing and advertising, these are all huge billion dollar enterprises that obviously feed some demand. You might even lump all the humanities together as a foundational component of public intelligence.
To borrow a humanities cliche, I'll close with a quote:
Charles Bennett wrote:Theoretical computer scientists, like their counterparts in physics, suffer and benefit from a high level of intellectual machismo. They believe that they have some of the biggest brains around, which they need to think about some of the hardest problems. Like mathematicians, they prove theorems and doubt the seriousness of those who don't." (2)
