I noticed that two of the top five are engineering schools. It's been years ago, but I spent my first two years at an engineering school, and my second two at a liberal arts school. HUGE difference.
In basic terms, at an engineering school there is one correct answer. You do a bunch of calculations to derive that one correct answer. In liberal arts school, there is little to no math and a whole lot of conjecturing. We are told that there are no wrong answers. In reality, there are LOTS of wrong answers.
With what I've said, one might think that engineers are more inclined to see one right answer, and then proclaim that anyone who disagrees is wrong. One might think that the liberal arts student, with the 'no wrong answer' mentality would be tolerant of any idea. But that's just not the case. I think people who make their living in the world of physical reality have a healthy respect for considering all possibilities. Failure to consider even one of a multitude of possibilities could get people killed. Engineers try to think of EVERYTHING.
Liberal arts majors have the luxury of being able to believe whatever they want, untested by reality. Still, I don't know why both the schools and the students can't be more tolerant of other ideas. I think it is that their ability for rational assessment is limited. To such schools, they desire an emotional attachment to an idea. That's how they relate to each other. Their ideas are more than that; they are beliefs. It seems that what they believe is less important than that they all believe the same thing, and thereby emotionally connect.
I think that you have identified a real problem, but are wrong about the root cause. There are plenty of "liberal arts" majors in which there are one, or a very limited few, right answers. I am currently learning Greek and Latin; I promise you, there are many, many wrong answers in such a class. Often, there are strict rules to abide by that produce a single right answer, as there would be in the sciences; while I can't speak to other subjects, I have noticed that interest in languages and interest in math go together more often than one would naïvely expect, as have my professors in both subjects.
This also isn't limited only to languages. From having taken classes in history and philosophy, I can tell you that while there are many more cases of competing potential interpretations, there are still a whole lot of ways to be flat-out factually or logically wrong, and to be penalized accordingly. Maybe it's different in something like gender studies, but I'm sure that even then you can read and interpret the text in a way that is obviously incorrect.
If this wasn't the case for you, the issue was not the liberal arts themselves, the issue was the loss of rigor and self-confidence that the humanities have suffered over the past few decades. They are not (at least, many of them are not) inherently subjects that lend themselves less to serious thinking than STEM subjects do, and I would argue that when done well, they are much better training to understand the social and political aspects of our world than the sciences are, since they directly engage with those topics. The problem is that nowadays, they are rarely done well, and in a lot of majors, your experience will vary dramatically based on how much you self-impose rigor, either by holding yourself to a high standard in general or by seeking out professors and subjects known to hold their students to one.
I spent the first two years of college as an engineering major, the second two years as an English major. I've seen both sides, and they are very different from each other. I'll stick with my point.
In science and engineering, being wrong is generally easily recognizable. When you build a bridge and it collapses and people die, you were wrong. Period. No excuse excuses it. WHY you were wrong needs to be carefully assessed, so that it never happens again.
In the liberal arts, if you make a convincing argument, you get credit. But it's generally touchy-feely. Different people can have differing points of view, and all be respected. Or not. We've seen economists completely screw up our economy, and they don't lose their job of their stature. Education is in the toilet. I was a grade school teacher for six years in the 1970s. I have a master's in educational administration. Education is in the toilet. And don't get me started on politics. Politics has always been a gathering place for the worst among us, but it's even worse now.
After I left teaching, I became a contractor. Nobody cares what your opinion is, they want to know "Can you do it, and how much will it cost." If you get the job, you do it per plans and specs, and you get paid what you agreed to do the job for. If you screw anything up, you fix it at no additional cost, or you don't get paid. Nothing touchy-feely about that.
Is there really just one answer to how to build a bridge? No. But there are few answers as to what will work best for the least money. The liberal arts are nothing like this. I guess, to sum up, I'd say that engineering is about understanding everything that is real. The liberal arts are about understanding what's in our minds. Certainly, understanding our own minds is important, but it's possible to be very, very wrong, and get away with it. Not so, in science and engineering.
Rad: I have a degree in ChE as well as my JD. So let get into this mess with additional supportive comment. Although causation of a bridge collapse may be due to errors in design, the materials might not have been up to spec, constructors may not have followed instructions or conditions may have exceeded design limits. But your point is well made, wherever the failure occurs it can be identified and party at fault stuck with damages. So, the engineering student is forced to think logically (mathematics require it in the engineering field notwithstanding some weirdness in physics and electronics areas). [Try to visualize the squqre root of minus one] .While some semblence of logic might pertain in the liberal arts, it is not a requisite.
I take your point about majors that are solely focused on interpretation. However, I would like you to respond to my points about subjects that, like history, are a mixture of discovering facts and interpretation, or, like language, are a matter of learning and applying formulas in order to understand more about the world. These seem qualitatively different from a subject such as English, particularly in the case of languages, where there are very clear objective metrics of success and failure.
I love history. And have read a lot of it. Mostly about the Greeks and the origins of democracy. Since you are a Greek scholar, for fun and amazemen you can read in the original Greek the story of the Ten Tousand: Anabasis by Xenophon. Wish I could read Greek! They had some notable playwrights and philosophers. I am sure that you are familiar with Socrates. Did you know that he fought in the battle of Platea? Put a end to Persian invasions. He was so proud that he (reportedly) had his patticipation carved on his tombstone. And Plato’s discourse with Socrates as he is dying from the hemlock juice is something I will never forget. And “The Frogs” …sigh. More fun than the Ode to Joy” in German. Even with Beethoven’s tune.
Frogs is hilarious. I'm still relatively early in my study of Greek, so I haven't read much unadapted yet. I'm in my first seminar, on Plato, and we're just starting Euthyphro. I think the most striking Socrates moment to me is when he says in the Apology that he is essentially resigned to his fate because he sees that the city has tired of him. Probably the most depressing part of the whole thing, at least in my view. I haven't read much Xenophon, but that sounds fascinating; I still remember a snippet of Aeschylus' Persians that we read in my introductory Greek course. It was the Greeks' war cry, and it was beautiful.
Victor: I envy your pending scholarship. Learning is so satisfying. And exciting. I read The Frogs to my elder son when he was about ten years ago. You know, still in the age group that would snicker when the master wet his pants. Or toga. Or whatever the Greeks called it. He still likes to read history. I gave him my sets of Bruce Catton’s study of the Civil War, Winston Churchill’s WWII, and the only volume I could find of Churchill’s WWI saga.
So interesting! I went to a state school with a huge STEM emphasis. Most of my friends were in some STEM degree. I graduated in 2018, so maybe a bit before culture wars took off in full force. But it was very open. I had a variety of political opinions in my friend group—conservatives voting for trump and Hillary Stans all hanging out.
I think your point is apt about lots of wrong answers. When you study science and math, you get used to hearing “no, that’s wrong” and seeing where you went wrong. With more subjective areas of study, it’s all about how you can argue for something that feels right and there’s not really the self doubt of “oh I need to check myself because it’s easy to go wrong”
I think a university is big enough, and with enough departments that people can self-segregate to the degree they desire. Those that wish to comingle their political beliefs can do that. Or not, as they desire.
As we have both pointed out, in math and engineering there is little room for philosophical opinions. Correct answers are what count. Liberal arts, the direct opposite. They can't be bothered with facts.
See jabster's Kipling poem above. Kipling put it quite eloquently, over a century ago.
Christopher Rufo deserves national praise, support, and celebration for his efforts in bringing about such positive results in many states such as Florida, Tennessee, Texas, Alabama, and others.
I'd love to see the bill of particulars FIRE is challenging as well as evidence of Rufo's alleged "free speech chilling." Any illumination on either account from you?
The high ranking of Florida State University is perhaps undeserved. Though the faculty, administration, and students may be supportive of free speech, the state legislature has literally made a list of forbidden topics for faculty to broach in the classroom. More recently, all courses with the words "climate change" in the title were required to be revised. I would argue that the free speech ranking should take into account censorship enacted by state legislatures as well.
If you look at the definition of the Liberal Arts you will see that they include mathematics and the physical sciences. This is because you need at least a basic understanding of those subjects to understand reality. The vast majority of people who claim they have a Liberal Arts degree really don’t. What they actually have is a Humanities degree with no real full Liberal Arts background. They don’t understand reality because they have never been taught it.
Every liberal arts major should have to take one semester each of chemistry, biology, physics and math past the level of Algebra II. Statistics would help. Also a semester of formal logic. Then we might get politicians that can get a grip on what the real world effects of their proposals would be, and, as was once said was the point of a liberal arts degree, “what’s rot and what’s not.”
Government policy should be included in the rankings. I don’t think Florida schools should get top ratings, for instance, if the state is passing the STOP WOKE act (which FIRE opposed) and political appointees are interfering with academic freedom at places like New College.
Otherwise it sends the message that FIRE only cares about censorship when it comes from the left (right wing censorship are much more likely to come from elected officials), and that makes it more difficult to persuade left-leaning people (which is most people I know on campus) to take free speech seriously. I say this as someone who generally agrees with FIRE’s positions on free speech.
The rankings are based on whether students can, and feel as if they can, freely express themselves in and out of the classroom. The faculty and administration’s expression is not a factor except if they are restricting or punishing student speech.
I would suggest a curriculum that includes several lectures by each side, with the requirement that the students write a critique after listening to each. Attempts to disrupt would be automatc fail in the course. Or, if not in the particular person is not in thar class, automatic suspension or expulsion. We need to teach kids how to act in public.
My university--Mississippi State University--#10. Coupled with more than$300M federal grant $s. Let's hear some love for a great southern research university that welcomes free expression. Hail State!
I noticed that two of the top five are engineering schools. It's been years ago, but I spent my first two years at an engineering school, and my second two at a liberal arts school. HUGE difference.
In basic terms, at an engineering school there is one correct answer. You do a bunch of calculations to derive that one correct answer. In liberal arts school, there is little to no math and a whole lot of conjecturing. We are told that there are no wrong answers. In reality, there are LOTS of wrong answers.
With what I've said, one might think that engineers are more inclined to see one right answer, and then proclaim that anyone who disagrees is wrong. One might think that the liberal arts student, with the 'no wrong answer' mentality would be tolerant of any idea. But that's just not the case. I think people who make their living in the world of physical reality have a healthy respect for considering all possibilities. Failure to consider even one of a multitude of possibilities could get people killed. Engineers try to think of EVERYTHING.
Liberal arts majors have the luxury of being able to believe whatever they want, untested by reality. Still, I don't know why both the schools and the students can't be more tolerant of other ideas. I think it is that their ability for rational assessment is limited. To such schools, they desire an emotional attachment to an idea. That's how they relate to each other. Their ideas are more than that; they are beliefs. It seems that what they believe is less important than that they all believe the same thing, and thereby emotionally connect.
As Kipling wrote in "The Hymn of Breaking Strain":
The careful text-books measure
(Let all who build beware!)
The load, the shock, the pressure
Material can bear.
So, when the buckled girder
Lets down the grinding span,
The blame of loss, or murder,
Is laid upon the man.
Not on the Stuff — the Man!
But in our daily dealing
With stone and steel, we find
The Gods have no such feeling
Of justice toward mankind.
To no set gauge they make us —
For no laid course prepare —
And presently o'ertake us
With loads we cannot bear:
Too merciless to bear.
The prudent text-books give it
In tables at the end -
The stress that shears a rivet
Or makes a tie-bar bend —
What traffic wrecks macadam —
What concrete should endure —
But we, poor Sons of Adam
Have no such literature,
To warn us or make sure!
We hold all Earth to plunder —
All Time and Space as well —
Too wonder-stale to wonder
At each new miracle;
Till, in the mid-illusion
Of Godhead 'neath our hand,
Falls multiple confusion
On all we did or planned —
The mighty works we planned.
We only of Creation
(Oh, luckier bridge and rail!)
Abide the twin damnation —
To fail and know we fail.
Yet we - by which sure token
We know we once were Gods —
Take shame in being broken
However great the odds —
The Burden or the Odds.
Oh, veiled and secret Power
Whose paths we seek in vain,
Be with us in our hour
Of overthrow and pain;
That we - by which sure token
We know Thy ways are true —
In spite of being broken,
Because of being broken,
May rise and build anew.
Stand up and build anew!
I think that you have identified a real problem, but are wrong about the root cause. There are plenty of "liberal arts" majors in which there are one, or a very limited few, right answers. I am currently learning Greek and Latin; I promise you, there are many, many wrong answers in such a class. Often, there are strict rules to abide by that produce a single right answer, as there would be in the sciences; while I can't speak to other subjects, I have noticed that interest in languages and interest in math go together more often than one would naïvely expect, as have my professors in both subjects.
This also isn't limited only to languages. From having taken classes in history and philosophy, I can tell you that while there are many more cases of competing potential interpretations, there are still a whole lot of ways to be flat-out factually or logically wrong, and to be penalized accordingly. Maybe it's different in something like gender studies, but I'm sure that even then you can read and interpret the text in a way that is obviously incorrect.
If this wasn't the case for you, the issue was not the liberal arts themselves, the issue was the loss of rigor and self-confidence that the humanities have suffered over the past few decades. They are not (at least, many of them are not) inherently subjects that lend themselves less to serious thinking than STEM subjects do, and I would argue that when done well, they are much better training to understand the social and political aspects of our world than the sciences are, since they directly engage with those topics. The problem is that nowadays, they are rarely done well, and in a lot of majors, your experience will vary dramatically based on how much you self-impose rigor, either by holding yourself to a high standard in general or by seeking out professors and subjects known to hold their students to one.
I spent the first two years of college as an engineering major, the second two years as an English major. I've seen both sides, and they are very different from each other. I'll stick with my point.
In science and engineering, being wrong is generally easily recognizable. When you build a bridge and it collapses and people die, you were wrong. Period. No excuse excuses it. WHY you were wrong needs to be carefully assessed, so that it never happens again.
In the liberal arts, if you make a convincing argument, you get credit. But it's generally touchy-feely. Different people can have differing points of view, and all be respected. Or not. We've seen economists completely screw up our economy, and they don't lose their job of their stature. Education is in the toilet. I was a grade school teacher for six years in the 1970s. I have a master's in educational administration. Education is in the toilet. And don't get me started on politics. Politics has always been a gathering place for the worst among us, but it's even worse now.
After I left teaching, I became a contractor. Nobody cares what your opinion is, they want to know "Can you do it, and how much will it cost." If you get the job, you do it per plans and specs, and you get paid what you agreed to do the job for. If you screw anything up, you fix it at no additional cost, or you don't get paid. Nothing touchy-feely about that.
Is there really just one answer to how to build a bridge? No. But there are few answers as to what will work best for the least money. The liberal arts are nothing like this. I guess, to sum up, I'd say that engineering is about understanding everything that is real. The liberal arts are about understanding what's in our minds. Certainly, understanding our own minds is important, but it's possible to be very, very wrong, and get away with it. Not so, in science and engineering.
Rad: I have a degree in ChE as well as my JD. So let get into this mess with additional supportive comment. Although causation of a bridge collapse may be due to errors in design, the materials might not have been up to spec, constructors may not have followed instructions or conditions may have exceeded design limits. But your point is well made, wherever the failure occurs it can be identified and party at fault stuck with damages. So, the engineering student is forced to think logically (mathematics require it in the engineering field notwithstanding some weirdness in physics and electronics areas). [Try to visualize the squqre root of minus one] .While some semblence of logic might pertain in the liberal arts, it is not a requisite.
I take your point about majors that are solely focused on interpretation. However, I would like you to respond to my points about subjects that, like history, are a mixture of discovering facts and interpretation, or, like language, are a matter of learning and applying formulas in order to understand more about the world. These seem qualitatively different from a subject such as English, particularly in the case of languages, where there are very clear objective metrics of success and failure.
I love history. And have read a lot of it. Mostly about the Greeks and the origins of democracy. Since you are a Greek scholar, for fun and amazemen you can read in the original Greek the story of the Ten Tousand: Anabasis by Xenophon. Wish I could read Greek! They had some notable playwrights and philosophers. I am sure that you are familiar with Socrates. Did you know that he fought in the battle of Platea? Put a end to Persian invasions. He was so proud that he (reportedly) had his patticipation carved on his tombstone. And Plato’s discourse with Socrates as he is dying from the hemlock juice is something I will never forget. And “The Frogs” …sigh. More fun than the Ode to Joy” in German. Even with Beethoven’s tune.
Frogs is hilarious. I'm still relatively early in my study of Greek, so I haven't read much unadapted yet. I'm in my first seminar, on Plato, and we're just starting Euthyphro. I think the most striking Socrates moment to me is when he says in the Apology that he is essentially resigned to his fate because he sees that the city has tired of him. Probably the most depressing part of the whole thing, at least in my view. I haven't read much Xenophon, but that sounds fascinating; I still remember a snippet of Aeschylus' Persians that we read in my introductory Greek course. It was the Greeks' war cry, and it was beautiful.
Victor: I envy your pending scholarship. Learning is so satisfying. And exciting. I read The Frogs to my elder son when he was about ten years ago. You know, still in the age group that would snicker when the master wet his pants. Or toga. Or whatever the Greeks called it. He still likes to read history. I gave him my sets of Bruce Catton’s study of the Civil War, Winston Churchill’s WWII, and the only volume I could find of Churchill’s WWI saga.
So interesting! I went to a state school with a huge STEM emphasis. Most of my friends were in some STEM degree. I graduated in 2018, so maybe a bit before culture wars took off in full force. But it was very open. I had a variety of political opinions in my friend group—conservatives voting for trump and Hillary Stans all hanging out.
I think your point is apt about lots of wrong answers. When you study science and math, you get used to hearing “no, that’s wrong” and seeing where you went wrong. With more subjective areas of study, it’s all about how you can argue for something that feels right and there’s not really the self doubt of “oh I need to check myself because it’s easy to go wrong”
I think a university is big enough, and with enough departments that people can self-segregate to the degree they desire. Those that wish to comingle their political beliefs can do that. Or not, as they desire.
As we have both pointed out, in math and engineering there is little room for philosophical opinions. Correct answers are what count. Liberal arts, the direct opposite. They can't be bothered with facts.
See jabster's Kipling poem above. Kipling put it quite eloquently, over a century ago.
Also the Gods of the Copybook Headings.
And Yeats “The Second Coming”: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre…”
Awesome work, great summary!
Christopher Rufo deserves national praise, support, and celebration for his efforts in bringing about such positive results in many states such as Florida, Tennessee, Texas, Alabama, and others.
Huh. You know he's also chilled free speech and is being challenged by FIRE?
I'd love to see the bill of particulars FIRE is challenging as well as evidence of Rufo's alleged "free speech chilling." Any illumination on either account from you?
Nope. I'd have to Google the specific details
I understand. Much easier to make allegations unsupported by any evidence but wholeheartedly endorsed by your tribe. You go, Steven!
The high ranking of Florida State University is perhaps undeserved. Though the faculty, administration, and students may be supportive of free speech, the state legislature has literally made a list of forbidden topics for faculty to broach in the classroom. More recently, all courses with the words "climate change" in the title were required to be revised. I would argue that the free speech ranking should take into account censorship enacted by state legislatures as well.
Those have nothing to do with the freedom of students to speak as they please, which is the point of the rankings.
I am curious whether Governors and state legislatures played any role in the public universities that improved, or were the reforms self-initiated?
If you look at the definition of the Liberal Arts you will see that they include mathematics and the physical sciences. This is because you need at least a basic understanding of those subjects to understand reality. The vast majority of people who claim they have a Liberal Arts degree really don’t. What they actually have is a Humanities degree with no real full Liberal Arts background. They don’t understand reality because they have never been taught it.
Every liberal arts major should have to take one semester each of chemistry, biology, physics and math past the level of Algebra II. Statistics would help. Also a semester of formal logic. Then we might get politicians that can get a grip on what the real world effects of their proposals would be, and, as was once said was the point of a liberal arts degree, “what’s rot and what’s not.”
Government policy should be included in the rankings. I don’t think Florida schools should get top ratings, for instance, if the state is passing the STOP WOKE act (which FIRE opposed) and political appointees are interfering with academic freedom at places like New College.
Otherwise it sends the message that FIRE only cares about censorship when it comes from the left (right wing censorship are much more likely to come from elected officials), and that makes it more difficult to persuade left-leaning people (which is most people I know on campus) to take free speech seriously. I say this as someone who generally agrees with FIRE’s positions on free speech.
The rankings are based on whether students can, and feel as if they can, freely express themselves in and out of the classroom. The faculty and administration’s expression is not a factor except if they are restricting or punishing student speech.
I would suggest a curriculum that includes several lectures by each side, with the requirement that the students write a critique after listening to each. Attempts to disrupt would be automatc fail in the course. Or, if not in the particular person is not in thar class, automatic suspension or expulsion. We need to teach kids how to act in public.
My university--Mississippi State University--#10. Coupled with more than$300M federal grant $s. Let's hear some love for a great southern research university that welcomes free expression. Hail State!
--John Bickle, PhD
Prof. and Shackouls Honors College Faculty
Mississippi State U.
The Full Report link is incorrect... it's pointing to the 2020 report.
Thank you, this has been fixed!
Greg, this is super cool, thanks for sharing. Can you define what is meant by a “Warning” school? I didn’t see this defined in the full report