unnamednewbie13 wrote:
Re: stem vs arts, again. Having taken stuff from both sides, anecdotally the majority of snobbery is coming from the stem side of the field. plenty of haughty comments about "soft subjects" overheard while taking electronics, but I don't remember a single moment where we exchanged snide quips about the IT guys or whatever on art class break.
I think sometimes people fire back at the stem snobs, who in turn can't process it. "art snobs!"
it's probably the case that, sociologically speaking, most first-time university students go into the STEM. most upwardly mobile families, or people who want to 'get on', recommend their children go to a technical school/polytechnic/take something like engineering. ever since the sort of new deal-era onwards there has been a consistent push in the american culture to produce engineers and scientists, and so on. almost akin to how soviet russia imagined a caste of technocrat-scientists running ultra-modern machine cities with wild names like Magnitogorsk, or something. cold war. a 'the jetsons' future. etc.
so there has definitely been a valorization and push for it. the country 'needed' engineers; it was a useful job in the era of america's historical development and ascendancy, and has been accounted with relatively high-status ever since.
access to the arts and humanities, and jobs in the arts/culture industry/museum and heritage sector generally, has belonged to a tiny WASPish cadre. it's very 'coastal', including their best schools, unlike the industrial centres or large research campuses in the rust-belt/mid-west (where's the purdue of humanities? berkeley?). the sort of promotion of STEM and the taking-shape of this 'engineer' stereotype is coeval with the development of the modern research university, i.e. large grant institutions with heavy scientific/medical research activity. so there's a separate university culture away from those colonial-era originals and the ivies, with their distinctly neo-classical and european feel, their private clubs and divinity schools.
but i think it's a bit of a stretch to ever claim that the people from new england sending their kids to liberal arts colleges or the tisch school or vassar or whatever-the-fuck have spent their time making jokes about engineers. for what point? it's the post-1950s generations of 'modern' STEM graduates who have the giant chips on their shoulders.
Last edited by uziq (2020-09-29 11:44:00)
