

Why Do They Hate Us? - jedwhite
http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Do-They-Hate-Us-/124608/

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jedwhite
I majored in Computer Science and English at school. I don't tell people about
the English part so much. But I would argue that Language and Literature has
been every bit as valuable to being a good programmer in a media age as
Properties of Algorithms. That's a micro-symptom of the issue that's well
expressed in this article.

~~~
baddox
I find that hard to believe. What from your Language and Literature studies
have been valuable to you as a programmer?

~~~
kemayo
The ability to communicate well, especially in writing, is important unless
all you ever do as a programmer is work alone, never interacting with others
or contributing to them. You'll use writing skills to communicate your ideas
to your peers and management, and to document your code coherently.

An English degree will do more to teach you about communication than a Comp.
Sci. degree. Unless you go on to graduate-level work, in which case you'll
probably learn the art of writing completely incomprehensible literary
criticism. (e.g. How To Deconstruct Almost Anything:
<http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html> )

~~~
philwelch
You can learn to write well without learning it in school, though, and you can
learn to write well in school without studying English.

Getting into arguments on the internet, for instance, is a usable way to
improve your writing ability. If you don't get your points across clearly,
people will misunderstand you and flame you, which is both more immediate and
more incentivizing than writing class papers and having them graded. Then you
learn to anticipate how people will respond to how you write things and how to
get your points across better.

But even in school, if you take something you're interested in that requires a
lot of writing, like philosophy or history, then you get practice writing
about something you care about, often in a certain style which is useful
later. History, supposedly, is great for learning how to pull together
different facts into a coherent picture while philosophy, in my experience, is
good for learning how to write about tricky subjects clearly and logically.

If you enjoy writing about whatever people in English classes are assigned to
write about, it may be worthwhile. Your school was probably better than mine--
I've known more than one English major who was a terrible writer.

~~~
kemayo
I entirely agree with you. Going to school is far from the only way to learn
about a subject, especially if you're just doing it because you feel that it's
what you should be doing. If you're just putting in the hours because you
think you need it to get a job, you're probably not going to get much benefit.
Ideally this would result in you not getting the degree... but that's
apparently an unpopular position.

Ultimately it comes down to practice. A humanities degree at a decent-ish
college should force you to get that practice at communicating in English in
order to graduate. Conversely, a science degree should force you to learn a
lot about how to communicate in the specialist terminology of your discipline.
But going out and spending four years starting a business would probably be at
least as good as both of these, if you're motivated.

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philwelch
It's arrogant how he confuses anti-intellectualism with anti-academicisim.
It's dishonest to ignore somewhat sharper criticisms (is it really a
worthwhile intellectual pursuit deserving of public funds to write up even
more analyses of Walt Whitman?) and brand your opponents as anti-intellectual.

He also characterizes this article ([http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Do-All-
Faculty-Members-Real/25...](http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Do-All-Faculty-
Members-Real/25897)), "Do All Faculty Members Really Need Private Offices", as
"anti-faculty", though my reading of the article doesn't lend itself well to
this interpretation. (Let's take as given the obvious joke here.) Even on the
surface level of treating private offices as symbols of prestige and status,
it's rather disingenuous to claim one's profession is under attack by the mere
suggestion of abandoning their private offices when many if not most white
collar workers don't have private offices in the first place.

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drblast
I like writing programming languages. No, I _love_ writing programming
languages. However, I don't expect that people would ever pay me to do it
because there are so many people passionate about it that it gets done for
free.

I believe I would feel the same way if my passion were English literature. The
barrier to entry is so low that if that's your thing, after some initial
training you can accomplish whatever it is you want to do absent the
assistance of a highly-paid professor.

I don't understand why you would eschew the monetary value of something in one
breath and then complain with the next that nobody is willing to pay you to
teach it. If you're that passionate about it, screw the money and do it
anyway. Either that or what you have is a hobby, not a profession.

Or maybe I'm wrong and society is lacking that final breakthrough
deconstruction of Proust before we all happily move forward toward
enlightenment. But I doubt it.

~~~
sophacles
So you write programming languages as an aside from your job of negotiating
deliveries of livestock feed?

Or are you maybe actually getting paid for your programming language work in
the form of useful contacts, better reputation, better experience, and so on
which increase your salary?

I'd place money on the later -- so you don't do it for free, you just don't do
it for _direct money_. I doubt you would write programming languages nearly as
intensely if you were the aforementioned negotiator. The reward would be less
and you would instead be going for drinks with clients and otherwise
networking, it is a hobby people like that also ends up in professional
payout...

~~~
drblast
It's closer to the former. My job is managerial and has nothing to do with
writing code. There is not a single person at my office who knows, or cares,
about my hobby.

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julius_geezer
"So "hate" is not too strong a word, I think, for how nonacademics feel about
us."

Only in the sense that "hate" is not too strong a word for how New Englanders
feel about the New York Yankees: the hate is valid for the duration of
conversation over beers or one call to the sports talk station. I think about
"professors", oh, five minutes a month if I'm preoccupied with higher
education.

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dnewcome
Alas, if anything I ever wrote commanded criticism akin to that in comment #59
by voralex I think I could die happy.

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tlb
His argument conflates all kinds of professors. Public opinion isn't nearly so
negative about medical research faculty, because they make an obvious
contribution to society. It's less obvious how professors of literature
contribute, or what would go wrong with the world if the government stopped
funding them.

~~~
cma
<http://i.imgur.com/qhf9C.jpg>

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yummyfajitas
Another reason why they might hate you:

 _...see parts one and two of my column "On Stupidity"..._

 _...professors were worthy of some respect: We were gatekeepers, and we could
help you._

~~~
jbooth
That's some pretty impressive use of ellipsis there.

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rflrob
"Moreover, it takes, on average, about 20 years for professors to attain
tenure"

I'd be curious to see the source of that statistic, and what exactly it's
including. For instance, is the PhD process part of those 20 years, as well as
postdocs? Also, is there a difference for the sciences vs the humanities?

~~~
stevenbedrick
I don't have the stats, but anecdotally I can report that that time
emphatically does _not_ include the PhD process, and almost certainly doesn't
include post-doc time. There is probably a big difference between the sciences
and the humanities here- my guess is that it's longer for humanities than
sciences, but I could easily be wrong about that.

~~~
jayp
I do.

At many/most well-known US research universities, a tenure-track position in
Engineering (and possibly, Sciences too) is up for evaluation after six years
from start of hire. The exact term may vary from institute to institute, but
is six for most of the top universities. At that point, they either give you
promotion (i.e., tenure) or a one-year notice (i.e., fire you).

Note that this is not "full" tenure, this is technically a promotion from
Assistant to Associate Professor. However, it is still tenure, and you can
keep the job for life. It doesn't have the prestige of a full tenure. Full
tenure is likely to follow, if you keep similar pace, in 3-5 more years.

In summary, tenure can be had in as little as 6 years after completing PhD for
professors in Engineering. But, those are probably the 6 hardest working years
of their life. Makes the PhD almost feel like a cakewalk.

~~~
crystalis
To generalize from a few anecdotes, the Humanities professors that "do"
something can get their Association card in as little as 5 years. (e.g.,
notable book, visible research, department responsibilities...)

~~~
billswift
In other words, "20 years" is for a layabout?

~~~
enjo
I can't imagine there is a school in existence that would let someone flounder
about for 20 years without tenure. Even lower level schools generally make a
tenure/fire decision at year 5.

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c1sc0
Has our society become so utilitarian that we can't even spare the change for
paying a few people to work on things that previous generations have
considered worthy of pursuit? (a.k.a. The Arts) Sure, producing more widget
workers for the foobar factory sounds good at first, but won't we all end up
in wage slavery like this? I am a great supporter of 'useless' cultural
pursuits, if only because that is what makes us human. Without culture, we're
no more than monkeys with tools.

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artsrc
> courses must be prepared

Why does every professor/university need to prepare their own courses?

~~~
Lewisham
One could view this as a by-product of the research university vs the teaching
university.

A research university is supposed to be a place where experts at the bleeding-
edge of their fields congregate. That expertise is expected to trickle down to
their undergraduate teaching, and so the argument goes that only they are
qualified enough to prepare those courses. I think this is all largely
unwritten and largely unsaid, but undergraduates would be pretty unimpressed
if they were getting standardized lectures.

A teaching university isn't bound by that sort of expectation, so one could
imagine that courses can be more homogenous without penalty. Lots of textbooks
provide "sample" slides to use, and if you're teaching out the textbook
anyway, you may as well use the slides you're given. Having had no experience
at a teaching university, I can't make any claim as to whether this happens
with any regularity.

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Xipe
He should of teached people to write at least if he'll call himself a
"professor". LOL

