1) I don’t need a ‘controversial tweet’ prompt for this one: Conventional academic admin divisions (science, humanities, social science) are not only obsolete but reinforce harmful stereotypes and misunderstandings across the disciplines and in the general public.
2) One of the most pernicious of these is that it’s only ‘humanities’ in peril, while ‘STEM’ has everything going for ‘it.’ Whereas the reality is that basic science is also not a corporate priority.
3) This leads on one hand to scientists trading on ‘STEM’ cachet with likely diminishing returns in most ‘STEM’ fields, and on the other hand ‘humanists’ blaming or resenting ‘STEM’ for a problem the vast majority of us across disciplines actually share:
4) Namely, staffing and resource allocation in higher ed aren’t driven by the pursuit of knowledge for the public good, but by narrow corporate agendas like very specific notions of job training, etc.
5) Another bad idea reinforced by traditional academic divisions is that the pursuit of knowledge is a competition among people looking at things through different, non-compatible lenses, so eg there becomes ‘science thinking’ or ‘humanities thinking,’ and these are BS.
6) The nature of an object of study constrains how best to study it, but doesn’t also therefore require *competing* understandings of a thing from multiple angles, or fundamentally different ‘ways of thinking.’ It’s logic and evidence all the way down.
7) It’s more complicated than that obviously, but my point is that there are actual fields that study epistemology, history of knowledge organization, history of the disciplines, etc., and the tripartite admin division structure doesn’t follow from what we know about knowledge.
8) So resist the urge to make truly difficult epistemological and staffing and labor advocacy issues in higher ed feel easy by defaulting to assumptions about ‘STEM,’ ‘humanities,’ or (as they like to say when squeezed in between) ‘EMPIRICAL social science.’ Solidarity. /end
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