Many of us who teach college level computer science have been happy with the latest news about computing and IT related jobs. With the promise of fast growth in these job areas through at least 2018, we can expect to see our enrollments increase. And hopefully this will be the end of the spate of CS department closures that has been the response of some colleges to the current tight economic situation.
At the same time, those of us who teach CS in liberal arts colleges sometimes have to argue vociferously for our place at the table. We’ve been challenged by colleagues and administrators. How dare we bring something so “vocational” into the liberal arts setting?
A commentary in the Christian Science Monitor
(http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2011/0725/Liberate-liberal-arts-from-the-myth-of-irrelevance)
argues for the value of a liberal arts education. One key point: employers want to see analytical thinking, teamwork, and communication skills. These are all things that we focus on at liberal arts institutions, particularly the smaller colleges. Another key point: students need to graduate with “transferable skills” so that they will be able to adapt to a changing job landscape.
I would add to this my own view that it is precisely CS students and those students who have experience with applications of computing in their own disciplines who are best prepared to adapt to the technology driven developments we will continue to witness in the coming years and decades. They will be well prepared to offer up innovative solutions to difficult problems. Consider disease spread, drug development, and the push to digitize medical records. A biology student who has experience with computing, who has taken courses in visualization, modeling and simulation, and bioinformatics will better understand and contribute to progress in these areas than will the student whose curriculum has remained static. The medical researcher whose undergraduate exposure included computing will be well equipped to collaborate with the computer scientist whose undergraduate exposure included bioinformatics. The interdisciplinarity, cross-fertilization, and critical thinking that are hallmarks of a liberal arts education will create graduates who are ready to embrace technology and utilize it to advance a host of fields.
Valerie Barr
Computational Thinking Task Force Chair
I definitely understand your situation here. From someone who did his graduate work in CS but his undergraduate work in Philosophy and Political Science (although this was some time ago), I could easily understand these ingrained attitudes. But, from someone who is comfortable in “both” world-views, I think many of these discussions are counter-productive and a distraction from the more pressing problems. That being said, some of this is unavoidable push-back. I surmise that many “humanities” departments have felt marginalized in the narrow discussions of “STEM” —not the mention the politics of funding!
Try this: algorithmic language is the new lingua franca, algorithmic thinking is the new vehicle for the world’s imagination … it just hasn’t appeared to in the United States because the US has been in a state of abject denial for the last twenty years. This does not mean that we all have to embrace Kripke, but we might all read and carefully consider Minsky.
All right … a little humor here.
All kidding aside: to discuss one “school” at the exclusion of the other is a grave misunderstanding and a graver disservice to our mission as “educators.”
Cheers,
Tom R