On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 05:54:09AM -0700, Rishab Ghosh wrote: > > one problem with top posting is that it's harder to notice when some things > are missed out... in this case, i did say "parts of" the humanities :-)
fair enough. so too parts of engineering are totally insular and unable to explain their ideas to outsiders. To say nothing of physics, chemistry, mathematics or biology... and so on. > > the insularity of some parts of the humanities was apparent in all the > explanations provided for the professor who exploded... she was addressing > people who were not in agreement with her ideas or her method of analysing > them, who were not steeped in her disciplinary literature etc. the point of > the author of the linked article was that engineers have to do this all the > time. > Some engineers. I buy the explanation in this case, but I can just as easily imagine an engineer doing the same thing. Or a humanities professor not doing it. It's the generalization to humanities vs. engineering that sucks. > perhaps you misunderstood what i meant about commercial interaction? the most > insular academic will get a salary affected by market pressures. indeed, the > distribution of this income may have nothing to do with "connection to > reality" in terms of explaining ones ideas to "outsiders". although perhaps > those who write bestsellers are able to do this. > perhaps I did... I think there is no correlation between those who can explain their ideas to outsiders and those who earn top salaries. Quite the opposite would be my hypothesis. It probably makes more sense to speak in terms of career stages. Untenured faculty are punished for writing best-sellers or books that popular audiences like, I can provide dozens of examples of people who didn't get jobs, didn't get promotions, or didn't get tenure because their work was perceived as too applied, too popular, not theoretical enough, in both science and the humanities. It is true, engineers, and architects and designers, are a different ballgame, because they are often professionals first and academics second... so I guess it depends on how you draw the lines around the "academic" world vs. the professional world-- what would "professional" humanities designate? If there were such a thing, perhaps the comparison would be fair. cheers, ck
