STEM and the Humanities: Towards a Holistic Alliance

I had the chance of working on this interview/podcast in 2024 as the inaugural one for University Business Magazine new series, ushering in convos that would soon include the likes of Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), Thomas Ehlrich, president of Indiana University, Ozlem Kilic, inaugural dean of the University of Tennessee’s College of Emerging and Collaborative Studies, and Antonio Flores, president of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities. Despite of the federal government extravaganza this spring, the fundamentals I tried to address regarding "Why STEM needs the humanities—and vice versa," haven't really changed. Sincere thanks to UBM's Alcino Donadel for the opportunity to have this convo.

Here is a transcript (thx to Turboscribe) moderately edited for 'misreadings', for those who prefer reading to listening (at least to the first 30 minutes):

(0:06 - 0:45)

Georgia Tech, one of the nation's premier STEM R1-tiered universities, is a magnet for the bright and shiny, state-of-the-art degrees that scream gainful employment and professional authority. But on this episode of the University Business Podcast, Richard Utz, Interim Dean of its Liberal Arts College, peels back the curtain at Georgia Tech, examining how administrators encourage holistic learning, blending tech with language, AI and policy, research, and the humanities. Utz challenges higher education leaders to imagine what we lose if we forget about the classics in the sole pursuit of tech competency.

(0:46 - 1:14)

I'm your host, Alcino Donadel. Thank you for tuning in. So, I think I just want to start off and ask, you know, how did you find yourself in the position at the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Tech? And what did you, what was your perspective on the position, just knowing that you're walking into a predominantly STEM-based university? So for me, that was actually something that I purposely thought, you know, I thought about it for some time.

(1:15 - 3:10)

I was the product of a typical English department environment, and those environments are great, but I did feel that the development of, you know, how we know and how we learn at university was going in a different direction, and that that direction was actually in a way better represented at technological universities and universities of science in some ways. So I felt, you know, for me, the best place was at an institution where, so I came from an institution where the English department was the largest teaching unit at the institution, and I went to a place where we have schools like literature, media, and communication all together in one unit, and some people might say, well, that's not as good as if you have a department of literature, a department of, you know, a communication department of media, but actually, I thought that conjoining these different areas was actually an advantage because it makes people collaborate on these matters that are really, really important and sort of overcome the disciplinary boundaries, which, you know, when I was educated, there were even courses specifically on how to work in one citation system as opposed to another citation system, like Chicago against Modern Language Association, against Modern Humanities Research Association, and, you know, in the end, these were all sort of ways to demarcate one another from each other instead of what, which is what our students need, come together and bring these different methodologies to bear on, you know, whatever, you know, whatever complex issues there are. So for me, moving to Georgia Tech was a really, was the right thing to do at the right moment in the history of education.

(3:11 - 9:26)

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And can you tell me a little bit about the opportunities that you, that you had? We've, I briefly covered, you know, what really sparked a lot of our collaboration and conversations, how I covered the, the event held at Georgia Tech last year that talked about, you know, integrating some of the humanities with STEM-based curriculum. How did, how did you go about kind of helping, you know, organize that event? Was there a lot of synergy already on campus between different departments? How did you, were you able to organize that? Yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't really that hard to do.

There's a lot of openness at Georgia Tech, you know, and that may sound surprising, right, when you're in the smaller area over here on campus, whereas there are so many engineers, so many computer scientists, you know, scientists on our campus. But actually, I've encountered a lot of collaborative spirit on this campus and, and a lot of respect for the role of the humanities and social sciences. Now, it's true when you're sitting in a meeting where, you know, the College of Engineering is represented and the College of Liberal Arts is represented, you know, there's, there's a difference in the, in the, in the weight class that we're talking about.

But in, in a way, it wasn't really hard to convince our colleagues that this was an important topic. So, you know, the executive vice president for research was there. The provost was there.

The, the associate vice provost for, for interdisciplinary research was there. So, so really, I didn't have to work very hard because the goal at Georgia Tech is very often collaboration in bringing, bringing different disciplines together. We, we even have, you know, seed grant competitions where it's required that you have people from two or three different colleges together working on the project.

So, one of the issues has always been that the liberal arts are included downstream in, in grant applications and not upstream. But when you have it as an actual prerequisite for getting a seed grant that you include people right at the inception of a project, that makes us an equal partner. And that's something that I incredibly enjoy so that it doesn't feel like, oh, we're at the end of our project.

Now we need a good communicator to come in and help us or a good narrator or, or, oh dear, our new ABET accreditation guidelines stress that we need an ethics course. So, let's get an ethicist in there and, and take care of that. No, but so there is an ongoing, what I call, prefer to call integration, right? So, it's not just bringing one person together with another person, but there is a deliberate integration of the STEM disciplines with the liberal arts.

Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit about what the advantages are of including some of these humanities-based, language arts-based, English-based professionals further upstream in the collaboration process? Well, I mean, one, one simple, I mean, you, you, you know, about the issues and, and, and of employability and, and and, and salaries. And of course we know that the data is, is really very different from what the general conversation about this is.

You've indicated, you know, you've done some research recently on, on English studies and, and, and, and how that is actually much more, has much more of an ROI than, than, than the general public seems to think. And even people in higher education seem to think, but I think, you know, if, if, if you look at, so if you want to change a little bit about that narrative, right? I mean, it is a fact that over the entire arc of a career, the liberal arts actually often ROI that is just as good in many cases, even better than what happens with our colleagues in, in colleagues in engineering. So the difference is that STEM majors have, or are getting employment even before they graduate or right after they graduate.

And then they have relatively higher starting salaries, but we also know that the earnings advantage of the STEM majors fades around the age 40 because of the high skill turnover field in STEM. And so you may have a computer science or engineering major who roughly doubles their starting salaries. So by the age of 40, they may be at, I don't know, 125,000.

Now, if you compare that to a social science or a history major, they, because they actually, after graduating with their undergraduate degree in the liberal arts, they, they go on, get additional degrees. They end up in high paying jobs in management, in business, in law, and their average salary, according to one estimate is, is actually at about 130,000. So above the engineering salary over the arc of the career.

So, you know, how does Georgia Tech deal with that sort of information? Well, so one of the ways in which we, we, we thought we could mitigate the difference between the initial employability and, and the beginning salaries in, in humanities and social sciences graduates at Georgia Tech is all our majors actually earn bachelor of science degrees. And what's important about this is this is not just a cosmetic move, you know, adding an S instead of an A to the B, but their, their students curricula, you know, even in fields like history, sociology, economics, policy, literature, language, media studies, they're all integrated with issues and skills in science and technology. And the students take many of their classes together with their STEM students in ways that unite both of the fields.

(9:27 - 11:32)

So, and then we're offering something that's, that's, that I would call bridge majors. So these are degree programs in which STEM and the liberal arts practices actually converge. So computational media is one of our biggest success stories.

You can take different threads within the major from one that's almost a computer science curriculum to one that's mostly in the liberal arts, but with foundational computing content. And believe me, the employers just dig this combination of skills because what they need is employees that are comfortable in both realms. And the other thing is that computational media attracts more women and students from underserved populations because they have kind of figured out that they want the best of both educational worlds.

And without some of the pigeonholing aspects of a pure computing or a pure liberal arts degree. Does that, does that make sense? Oh, 100%. I mean, I love the, the dynamism that Georgia Tech really prioritizes out of its students.

And that's such an important aspect. And, you know, when you look at, you know, some different, you know, academic cuts happening around the country, you know, this is a time of where, you know, universities have to be really conscious about their budget decisions and whatnot. And you see that some universities are, you know, cutting English majors, you know, from their, from their curriculum.

What do you think about that? Do you think that they should be, you know, of course it requires a lot of expertise and really intentional program creation, but do you think that they can like take a page out of Georgia Tech's playbook and kind of integrate some of these, you know, values from the STEM fields into their languages? It's hard to say. The liberal arts at a place like Georgia Tech have sort of an advantage, which originally one might look at as a disadvantage. What I mean by that is, so we're not the biggest units on our campus, right? Again, I said, I was chair of an English department at Western Michigan at the time that was the largest teaching unit at that institution.

(11:32 - 24:19)

So, you know, when we caught a cold, the university sneezed, right? At Georgia Tech, that is not the case. And, but again, that's, that's, that's a more of an advantage because that means that we are actually, we were almost kind of obliged to niche in and connect and collaborate and seek out commonalities instead of just differences. There is such a, such an unfortunate discourse in the academy about, you know, who belongs in which area and they're compartmentalized instead of thinking about what the students actually need.

What I mean by that is, I'm a medievalist. Do my students need to become medievalists? No. Is, does it help them to encounter the way I approach textuality, the way I approach history, that way I approach, you know, society and culture? Definitely it does, but they don't need to become me.

So my goal in, in, you know, when I look at education really is that our students encounter complex problems in their future workforce situation, in society, you know, sustainability, any of these things, artificial intelligence. So what they really need is they need different methodologies, maybe one from sociology, one from engineering, one from biology. They need these different methodologies and apply them together to a complex issue to resolve it.

My best example, Alcino, is, is the pandemic. I don't think the pandemic was a failure of what happened during the pandemic, was a failure of science. The vaccine worked, we know it, but what did not work was how we were socializing the vaccine, how we were speaking and communicating about the vaccine, how we established policies that would make it possible for the vaccine to be acceptable.

So, so once again, you know, if we had approached now, the pandemic sort of chanced upon us, but we had been warned for many years that this might happen. And we weren't prepared because we all stayed in our little compartmentalized fields, instead of saying, we need communicators, we need social scientists, and we need people in, in, in medicine to work on this. Right.

And, and, and so an entity like the CDC found itself in a situation, right, where it was charged with communicating about these things, about socializing something. And when society clearly wasn't ready to accept these vaccines, at least, you know, many people in, in our country weren't, and in other countries weren't ready to accept these vaccines, and we weren't prepared for it. So again, I think what our students need is a diverse, many diverse ways of looking at the same issue.

There's something we have on campus, Alcina, I don't know if you've heard about this, it's called VIP, it's not very important persons, it's vertically integrated programs. And what that means is that this is not a class within a single discipline. This is a class in which students from all across campus can participate, and vertically integrate, integrated means that you have undergraduate students, master's students, PhD students, postdocs, faculty, academic faculty, and research faculty.

And they're all together in a multiple year effort to resolve a complex problem. So we have, so we, and again, think about this, this is, this is how you really learn when you go out into the, into the world and in a job situation, right? You may not have five different experts like you have at the university from different fields, really well educated, you may have a complex problem, and you are the one who are supposed to deal with this. So if you have learned through a vertically integrated project like this, how to bring in the right experts, how to bring a plurivocal point of view, different voices, you know, on the same subject matter, that's really how you resolve complex problems, wicked problems.

So we have courses like Arts and Artificial Intelligence, right? And you can see the friction that exists between the two, you know, our idea, our romantic idea of the artist who sits under a tree and creates a painting or something like that. And on the other hand, this machine, you know, this apparent non-human entity, right, that, that comes at this from something that just grabbed somewhere off, trawled somewhere off the internet, right? When in fact there are lots of human, there's a lot of human-computer interaction, we have a degree on that too, lots of universities have those, human-computer, that the computer can actually be an expressive medium. And so we have artists sitting in the same room with computer scientists working at this, and comparing what the artist does in their creative process together with what the computer scientist does when they create their programs and their algorithms.

Yeah, so I do have to, I mean, these are all such fantastic programs. One more time, you said VIP stands for Vertical Integrated, and what was the P? I think projects, not programs, I may have said that wrong. Vertical Integrated Projects, that's, no, that's fantastic.

And I mean, these are such wonderful programs, I bet the students really are, this is very nutritious programming and, and, and, and different experiences for them to undergo. And it, of course, is going to be so, it's going to be such a shining point in when they're speaking with their employers on their, about their resume and whatnot. Exactly.

And, but, so how does Georgia Tech go about talking about this with the public? Do they, do they market this kind of, these kind of, especially with the liberal arts programs, do they, do they market this kind of integration and whatnot? So, so, so we obviously do, but here is where the issue comes. And, and, and I'm glad I'm talking with somebody who's employed by a place called University Business. The university is a form of business.

And, and so when you come up with a new and pretty revolutionary idea, you know, some other universities do these VIPs also, but we're among the leaders in that field. So when you create that, obviously that needs to fit in somehow with all this, these other regulatory and disciplinary boundaries that already exist at a university, right? So for example, what we haven't resolved yet, if a faculty member participates in one of those VIPs, how does that count towards their workload, right? Because, you know, this is a, it's a workload issue. You take on additional responsibility.

Does that mean you're no longer doing something that's part of the regular degree program in any of the schools that you, that you're employed in? And we haven't really resolved that yet. So currently, so the idea is so exciting, Alcino, that most of our faculty members do this as overloads. You know, as important integrating programs are, how does that counterweight against what they're already doing? Exactly.

And also the ways in which we are organized, right? So, so we have, you know, we obviously, we, we, we organize people according to fields, according to, to interests, to research subjects, you know, we do all of that. And then comes an idea that actually needs input from all of these different units on campus, or many of them anyway. And somehow that doesn't fit our neat organizational structure that we built since the 1890s, you know, where the knowledge economy was very different from what it is today, right? That in, in, in the late 19th century, which is when the modern university was founded.

The idea was there was so much knowledge coming in from many different sides that universities decided, okay, we really have to get this organized, right? So the people in medicine are over here, the people in the humanities are over here, the, the people in social sciences are over there. And that seemed like a good solution at a time when we were still organizing all this new knowledge. At this point, what's been happening is that we're actually returning to a more holistic thinking of education.

As I said before, our students do not need another Richard Hoots. Maybe one in a thousand might want to, you know, move forward with, with the career plan that, that I had. Everybody else needs something different.

Knowledge is widely available now. So it's really about curating the knowledge that the role of the professor has changed, not as somebody who simply stands up there and imparts, you know, what they have learned over 20 or 30 years. The students have access to that information.

The question is, how do they get to the information that is relevant, right? So there, there are all these things that are, that, that are happening. And it's really glorious because the research also shows that connecting the humanities and the social sciences and the arts with STEM disciplines actually has measurable, positive outcomes. So you look at the 2018 report from the National Academies.

That's not necessarily always a progressive institution, right? They also have their history and, and the way of thinking. 2018, they published a consensus report that's called branches from the same tree. That gives you everything in a nutshell.

There is the separation between all the disciplines on a campus is artificial. It works for university researchers. It doesn't necessarily always work for society and for our students, right? So now please don't get me wrong.

I'm not saying that we don't need academic disciplines where we focus on specific issues and learn how to be specialists. Before we can have interdisciplinarity and integration, we need disciplinarity because there's no inter without the disciplines, right? So I'm not saying we should drop those, but when we teach our students, we need to find ways that really integrate these really, really smart methodologies over in physics with some of the ones that we know work in the humanities and the social sciences. So again, to come back to the National Academies, you know, there were, there's a report from the Academy of American Medical Colleges, I think, or American Medical Colleges.

What that says is that including the humanities, arts, and social sciences with medical education. So you educate your doctors. If you integrate these disciplines, almost every measurable outcome goes up.

And, you know, everything from visual spatial recognition, to empathy, to resilience, and our medical doctors, those are the things they need, and they are telling us in their education that that's what they need. A simple writing assignment, for example, there are lots of, and again, this is all founded on research, a simple reflective writing assignment about patients increases the empathy that doctors feel for those patients, and the patients respond in kind, you know, because they realize they're no longer just a number, they're an actual human being. And so medical outcomes, you can go in every single field, engineering, computer science, the results are absolutely incredible.

And that's why our faculty at Georgia Tech and in other places increasingly realize we have to go back to looking at education as a holistic enterprise, and not simply as a disciplined enterprise. That's good for us to become smart and educated, but even those areas really would profit from, I mean, our students know it. So at Georgia Tech, we don't have a languages requirement.

(24:21 - 25:58)

I mean, you talked about budget cuts, and that it's usually English and languages that get cut. So we don't have a language requirement, but more than 50% of our students take languages at Georgia Tech. Oh, wow.

So apparently they know something that the general public doesn't really understand, which is languages, intercultural competency, right? I mean, if you want a job with a major firm in Atlanta, and most of these firms have global connectivity, if you want a job with them, they'll actually hire you instead of somebody else if you bring a second or third language to that job application. So they may be hiring you as somebody who does, I don't know, public relations communication. But if you bring that language, there's actually some data that says that if you speak a second language fluently, your opportunities at getting a job increase by more than 50%.

So our students know that. So we have our colleagues in aerospace engineering. They've come to us and they said, well, we're really highly ranked.

What can we do to give our students even more of a leg up over their competition? And they realized, well, which country has the largest space program except outside of the United States? Well, that's Russia. So what if our students were to learn Russian, the language, and Russian culture so that they understand why their space program over there looks different from ours and how to compete with that. And so we're in communication with them about creating a minor, which would be called EROS, right? Aerospace Engineering and Russian.

(25:59 - 29:59)

That's a very interesting, fascinating idea. I mean, yeah. One way to completely level up in that kind of field is to integrate your understanding of it with the second, most prominent country that's also in this study as well.

Absolutely. And what it also does, and I just have to say that and be honest and transparent about it, Aerospace Engineering has a thousand undergraduates at Georgia Tech. If 2% of those undergraduates decide to add the minor in Russian, I don't have to worry about the future of Russian in Georgia Tech.

So are we therefore ancillary to Aerospace Engineering because we just supply this language and culture component? No, we're not. What we're creating is better learning, better opportunities for both Russian as a subject matter or aerospace engineering. So both sides.

I think we spoke, we mentioned some time ago what happened at West Virginia University with Latinx there, right? And I'm thinking, obviously, my first response was kind of dismay and disappointment that a flagship state university would do this. And I'm still disappointed and dismayed. At the same time, I'm also wondering, we don't have a constitutional right of language instructions in higher education.

It doesn't exist. So I'm also asking, what did the folks in these areas do at these universities where languages were cut? Did they reach out to other subject matters? Did they take some of those steps? And I'm not saying they did anything wrong, but if you stay in the path that's existed since the late 19th and 20th century, I mean, education is evolving. Everything about education is evolving.

So aligning yourself, partnering up with other groups. Now, just imagine what they did in West Virginia. So they cut languages like Chinese and Russian.

Go to the State Department website, and you'll figure out that those are called critical languages for the State Department. So there are jobs out there. So you're cutting these languages.

Universities are ecosystems. They're a marketplace full of ideas. If you cut certain subject matter out of that marketplace and out of that ecosystem, it has an impact on everybody else on campus.

Because students in the languages, when they take classes with other students from other areas in general education, they bring their expertise, their way of thinking to these other classes, right? If you cut that out, you deprive the rest of the institution of that perspective. And that is really, really troublesome because higher education, as I said before, all these plans about integration, well, it doesn't work if the subject matters don't even exist at a university anymore. Richard, this has been such a wonderful conversation.

I really feel like we could talk for another hour. Is there anything that we haven't been able to touch on so far that you wanted to, just to wrap up our conversation? I think that for me, a focus that there's a lot been a lot of discussion about student success recently in the academy. I think this is something that everybody's aware.

And there's a lot of criticism of that. And I'm actually on the other side of this now. I don't worry about…. [Turboscribe only transcribes 30 minute videos]