Humanities in STEM?

Should we subject STEM students to a general education?

Last month Conrad Bastable had the misfortune to be a main character on Twitter (X now I guess?) for his take on humanities classes for STEM majors. His claim was that forcing a substantial portion of a STEM degree to consist of humanities (and presumably social science given some of his examples) is unfair to students. The result, he claims, isn’t that students are more appreciative of the arts or better people. Merely that they have to take longer to graduate, and at great expense.

As someone who has taught social science to STEM students for over a decade now, I think I have some insight to offer on this. Never mind that his argument seems to be predicated on the tuition of MIT. Yet MIT only graduates about 3500 STEM students per year out of the nearly 200,000 degrees awarded in the US every year. And never mind that, while the tuition at MIT is very high, (he cites $60,000/year at “these schools”), the average tuition for those degrees at state schools is under $9000. Presumably he wouldn’t argue that someone at “these schools” somehow teaches a different, better thermodynamics of differential equations than state schools. Never mind that he is just straight up wrong that humanities and social science majors don’t have to take STEM classes. Never mind that his claims seem to emanate from all too common and always fuzzy and baseless sense of superiority that some engineers have over the humanities and social sciences.

I say never mind all of that because, at the end of the day, I think he’s right.

Does that mean that I think I’ve wasted a decade of my life doing useless teaching for STEM students who, as likely as not, don’t particularly care about what they could learn from me? No. First, because STEM students actually do seem excited and eager to expand their education beyond what is required for their major. Second, because I have spent those ten years learning how to teach those classes better. The fact of the matter is that tacking on humanities and social science classes to a STEM curriculum just doesn’t work. It is worse for student learning, and doesn’t accomplish any of the goals about making more well rounded, appreciative, or ethical engineers that its proponents tout.

Of course, inevitably the end of the semester comes around and students often have to choose between giving their best to my class and giving their best to the class that is required for their major. I don’t blame them for making the pragmatic choice. But that brings me to the first major issue with the “tack-on” approach: as much as Conrad Bastable complained about the credit load for humanities, STEM majors already often require huge numbers of classes to graduate. Moreover, many of those classes artificially inflate the workload by requiring massive amounts of busy work for the sake of “weeding out” students from the major. Weeding out (1, 2, 3, 4), pedagogically, doesn’t serve any useful purpose other than to make life harder for students and lend a false air of prestige and rigor. I am not, then, surprised that the general education courses fall by the wayside as students are fighting for their academic lives in courses that are quite literally designed to make them fail.

But the second issue, and the more directly relevant one, is that making courses that give students a more well rounded education and courses that contribute to their major don’t have to be mutually exclusive. I teach courses that use history to show how technological invention has changed and help my engineering students understand their place in society from a historical perspective. I teach my students how engineering and society interact using insights from Science and Technology Studies. I teach aerospace students about the deviation spiral through the Challenger disaster. Nuclear engineers learn how designing for efficiency rather than people can lead to disaster by studying Three Mile Island. My engineering students learn about social science directly in the context of how it impacts their work. 

My students have given presentations in conferences for professional engineering societies that include material from my courses. They have impressed in interviews because of what they have learned about their fields from my courses. Why are my classes considered “general education”? They aren’t general. They are courses designed to help my students understand the breadth of knowledge required to do the job of an engineer.

Engineering is more than just math, and yet for some reason engineering departments teach mathematically heavy classes while humanities and social science departments teach not-math. The dichotomy is entirely made up, and yet we often just accept that it's appropriate. But when we think about it, we know that engineers don’t just do math all day, or sit around doing material studies, or any of the things they do in their engineering classes. They will work for companies or governments, and navigating those institutions to do their work might be made easier by knowing about garbage can organizations. Those institutions impact what they design. Some of them will be in positions to run those institutions. For example, if they are trying to add nuclear power to a utility’s portfolio, they ought to know that public perception isn’t just dependent on technical performance, but about what kinds of risks people find acceptable and whether they feel experts are trustworthy.

When I say that classes should be integrated, I don’t just mean that humanities and social science classes should be offered in their engineering departments. That's still just as tacked on. After all, the social considerations that engineers face aren’t just tacked on to the job they do. They are a fundamental part of it. The same should be true of their courses. Civil engineering courses about structural design should have the math necessary to model dynamic systems like wind turbines. But they should also teach about how the Danish came to dominate the wind turbine industry by incrementally scaling up their designs. They might professionally benefit by knowing that, in comparison, the better funded Americans failed trying to use complex mathematical models. Both should be in the same course. After all, in practice both will be in the same design, in the same jobs.

This isn’t my idea, of course. Many people in STEM and who study education have argued before me that humanities and social science should be integrated into STEM courses. It is through this integration that STEM students learn a wider variety of problem solving techniques. They learn to be better collaborators on the job. And, most importantly, they learn how to, in the course of their careers as engineers, also work as better citizens, seeing now more clearly how their work impacts civic life.

Conrade Bastable is right. When we force engineering students to take a bunch of social science or humanities classes we are being unfair to them. They aren’t learning the things we hope they learn. But that doesn’t mean we should just accept that STEM majors should be filled with exclusively technical classes. When we integrate social science and humanities material with their STEM courses, the students get a better education that is more relevant to their interests and their futures. It makes them better engineers, and it makes engineering better for everyone.