Fluff Heads Versus Nerds? – The Annual Debate
Fluff Heads Versus Nerds? – The Annual Debate As college girls in the late 1970s, we were wont to think we had it all figured out at eighteen. So pardon the broad brushing: humanities had the better-looking boys, the better conversationalists and the more interesting lives. STEM had the ones who would eventually make the money. What they actually did, or how they did it, we saw little sign of. But yes, if they managed to “escape” to the US… By our third year, our taxonomy had become a little more nuanced. As a former student of the humanities, I can say there was a prescribed canon, a prescribed reading list and, very often, a prescribed interpretation. What mattered was knowing the answer; much less often were students asked to question the premise. Deep, nuanced discussion was surprisingly rare. Books remained on syllabi for decades. There seemed to be an instinctive fear of introducing something new: another school of thought, a contemporary text, an uncomfortable...
