Google: MORE HUMANITIES PLEASE!

Google did a big study to see what teams worked well and which ones didn't.

Turns out, STEM skills (by which they mean Technology and Engineering, not basic science or abstract math) are the LEAST important for success. Here's the post:

In 2013, Google decided to test its hiring hypothesis by crunching every bit and byte of hiring, firing, and promotion data accumulated since the company’s incorporation in 1998. Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view); having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas.

Those traits sound more like what one gains as an English or theater major than as a programmer. Could it be that top Google employees were succeeding despite their technical training, not because of it? After bringing in anthropologists and ethnographers to dive even deeper into the data, the company enlarged its previous hiring practices to include humanities majors, artists, and even the MBAs that, initially, Brin and Page viewed with disdain.

Project Aristotle, a study released by Google this past spring, further supports the importance of soft skills even in high-tech environments. Project Aristotle analyzes data on inventive and productive teams. Google takes pride in its A-teams, assembled with top scientists, each with the most specialized knowledge and able to throw down one cutting-edge idea after another. Its data analysis revealed, however, that the company’s most important and productive new ideas come from B-teams comprised of employees who don’t always have to be the smartest people in the room.

Or, maybe the "best scientists" are necessarily equivalent to "smartest."

More on this to come.

Captain America: Humanities Major

From The Mary Sue, Alysa Auriemma has a lovely essay about Captain America (in the context of the comic "Civil War") and a new masculinity. After opening paragraphs on toxic masculinity and patriarchy, she writes:

Captain America not only navigates masculinity, but he completely subverts and ultimately rejects our contemporary conceptions of what it means to be a man, thereby creating a new kind of masculinity that demands self-inquiry, emotional empathy, and innate goodness. It’s not enough to just say Cap is an example of non-toxic masculinity, because what Cap does is redefine the binary of maleness. He’s not just an emblem for what not to be; he’s a roadmap of masculine possibility. 

It's a good essay and you should read it. But here's my favorite part [My emphasis]:

Steve, The Art Student

Many of the male, human Avengers specialize in math and sciences: Tony Stark is a brilliant electric engineer, and Bruce Banner holds a doctorate in nuclear physics. But prior to getting transformed into Captain America, Steve Rogers was an art student who was really into comics and illustration and was planning on getting fine arts degree. This focus on the humanities correlates to Steve already subverting our expectations. We think of Captain America as this beefcake who represents the best of us. Perhaps the “best of us” doesn’t have to always focus on STEM (although the push for more women and girls to get involved and recognized for their work in math and science disciplines is welcome), but on the ways in which we can discuss, theorize, and imagine the world, as well, through arts education. This major literally illustrates Steve’s optimism and hope and points out a reason why Steve would volunteer for Operation Rebirth in the first place. He sees the world how it could be, which leads him to ultimately transform into Captain America.

That's right. Steve Rogers, whose path to heroism came from being good, is a humanities major.

Also he's my son's favorite (Image Descriptions: Three pictures of my son in various poses, wearing a Captain America shirt and Captain America swimsuit).

 

Medievalists in Public! (Writing about the Humanities)

Yesterday at The Conversation, Cecilia Gaposhkin, a medieval historian at Dartmouth, wrote a piece arguing that STEM are not distinct or in competition with the liberal arts. They are the same thing.

The idea that STEM is something separate and different than the liberal arts is damaging to both the sciences and their sister disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

Pro-STEM attitudes assume that the liberal arts are quaint, impractical, often elitist, and always self-indulgent, while STEM fields are practical, technical, and represent at once “the future” and “proper earning potential.”

First, let’s be clear: This is a false and misleading dichotomy. STEM disciplines are a part of the liberal arts. Math and science are liberal arts...

Advocates of STEM are missing the point. The value of a liberal arts education is not in the content that is taught, but rather in the mode of teaching and in the intellectual skills that are gained by learning how to think systematically and rigorously.

Gaposhkin concludes with a discussion of the specific ways in which a liberal arts education is necessary for an engineer or doctor to truly thrive.

Today, at Inside Higher Education, Paul Sturtevant, who works for the Smithsonian and runs The Public Medievalist, makes a similar argument about how to promote our worth in the public square:

There is a different unifying principle for most non-STEM disciplines -- among them English, history, politics and civics, languages and literatures, education, the arts, philosophy, psychology and sociology -- which I call the human disciplines. All of the subjects within human disciplines are fundamentally interested in people and with subjectivity. Our disciplines not only illustrate esoteric questions of the meaning and purpose of life but are also uniquely well suited to explore questions of how to live and work with other people. In practical terms, if the job requires being able to work with and understand people -- particularly those different from yourself -- these degrees can, and should, make you better suited for it. They promote empathy, and require students to regard problems, and people, with complexity and the understanding that no single answer is right.

These kinds of jobs exist in all walks of life and include CEOs, kindergarten teachers, judges, advertisers, curators, coaches, social workers and many others. They form the linchpin of our society. They not only drive our economy but also make our country a better place to live by having good, well-trained people doing these jobs.

In my heart, I fear that making instrumental arguments about the humanities is a losing game. If we try to play the "gets you a better job" - even if it's true, which it is! - we're going to lose the rhetorical fight to defend the humanities. People - from Barack Obama to the random parent who comes looking at my college - just don't believe it. 

But it is true. People who learn a set of technical skills without the critical thinking, intellectual curiosity, and systematic analysis to expand those skills as circumstances change, are merely being trained for yesterday's job. I'm so pleased to see two colleagues making that case in public.