Posted in the dunk tank because I expect to be dunked on.
So I got in a discussion with a friend that someone they knew was hardworking because they were doing a degree in music theory on a PhD track while also juggling multiple jobs. I was impressed with all the jobs this person was doing, but I said that music theory as a degree is absurd and most liberal arts degrees are related to professional bullshitting (re: writing useless essays about a specific quality of something) than they are about something socially useful so I didn't find that aspect impressive at all. In my eyes, the socially useful thing about a music theory degree would be applying this idea to make good music, or to teach others about it. Notably, music theory is not about engineering a stage for good acoustics, nor is it about building instruments. It leads to nothing tangible, but rather is a sort of meta-analysis of music as a whole. Its possible to receive a music theory degree while making bad music. And bad music and good music is wholly subjective, its possible to put on a very musically skillful display and have no one like it, or not be interesting enough that a good swath of people enjoy it.
Compare this to, say, an architecture degree. There can be artistic expression in architecture, but its incredibly important to put people through a degree program for rigor to avoid architectural deficiencies which can kill people. The point here is that any sort of rigor drilled into someone in a music theory PhD pipeline has questionable benefits, and is likely a waste of time and labor. However, it is possible that it would be useful to have music theory certifications that are relatively quick, cheap, and potentially free to get to help teach musicians music theory to improve their art, maximizing social benefits. And I think that is something that can be applied to a lot of liberal art degrees.
Maybe this is colored by the way my grandma taught me about Socialist Czechoslovakia. There were benefits for artists, but people could only get free/subsidized degrees if they went to do something very practical such as architecture, engineering, science, and so on. Which is why so much socialist art is baked into something practical, like housing.
This is rank anti-intellectualism. Art and undirected, non-practical research are valuable for their own sake and the repression of avant-garde art in the name of a functional society was one of the more significant mistakes of AES. Also, universities are already in the process of reducing every degree to a job preparation program while cutting any investment in the humanities, so you're just preaching the status quo here.
Art and undirected, non-practical research are valuable for their own sake and the repression of avant-garde art in the name of a functional society was one of the more significant mistakes of AES
Can you actually explain what effect this had on society? Its one thing to say 'promoting engineering bad' but you really have to explain the value of committing human resources to studying to do art / research art vs. actually doing art full time. If you have people studying to be architectural engineers for instance, ostensibly this reduces unsafe environments, and directly impacts efforts to reduce poverty.
For starters, there's no hard difference between creating art and theorizing it. Arnold Schönberg was one of the greatest composers of the 20th-century and he also wrote multiple (incredibly technical) textbooks on music theory. Bertolt Brecht was a socialist intellectual and writer of theater plays (who once antagonized the cultural functionaries of the GDR by standing up for a play deemed insufficiently patriotic). I cannot put a dollar value on his work but I am sure that socialism has to free humanity from the relentless pursuit of maximum efficiency in every aspect of society. And given that even in Western states, a minuscule amount of public funds is sufficient to support an incredible number of universities and PhDs, I find it hard to believe that that is an inefficiency we could no longer afford under socialism.
I am sure that socialism has to free humanity from the relentless pursuit of maximum efficiency in every aspect of society
So I don't disagree. My point is that in a transitionary state there are limited resources and we MUST maximize efficiency or people will die. And I also think its unethical to waste people's time on minutiae that doesn't actually impact the field or improve social outcomes in any way. Its possible that a good musician could write a treatise on good music, but why do you need a PhD to understand the treatise? Is it insufficient for someone to get a short certificate to say they know how to read musical treatises and teach them to people? To me, this just seems like gatekeeping to say you need 10+ years of study to understand or research something in a degree that isn't mission critical.
The first point is an empirical matter. Maybe after some wars and revolutions, there really will be no resources left for anything except immediate survival, but that seems too far from our current world to speculate about. The second point is the kind of problem studied by the disciplines you would like to see defunded: How does understanding relate to teaching? What are the prerequisites to understanding a technical text? How much can they -- or education as a whole, to cut to the chase -- be standardized? Suffice to say, there is no checklist of the knowledge you need to read a difficult text because it is less a matter of knowledge and more one of education, community and time. And that's precisely what a PhD (ideally) gives to a person: not the permission to understand, but the ability to.
Hi, PhD holder here. (Political Science)
Like other people have said, the point of a PhD is not just to be a teacher, nor is it even remotely something that engineers or architects would be likely to pursue. PhD is short for philosophiae doctor, or Doctor of Philosophy. The point of getting a PhD is to know how to best research and advance your field, whatever that field is, not to do something practical. That's what a Bachelor's is for.
If you get a Doctorate and then go back to working in industry, instead of being an academic, you done fucked up and wasted a ton of your own and other people's time and money.
Master's degrees fill the space in between, which is why things like an MBA (business administration) or an MLIS (Library and Information Sciences) are sought after for more highly skilled workers who do the more difficult, nebulous, or academic things attached to practical jobs like managing companies or cataloguing and understanding information.
Things like music and arts are exactly what you would pursue a PhD in to contribute to human understanding, and things like civil engineering, architecture, or editing copy are best left to those with a Bachelor's or maybe even an associate's degree.
If all you wanna do is teach, you can absolutely do that with just a Bachelor's and a certificate, but pursuing graduate studies as an academic is not about being a more effective lecturer, it's about every other part of academia.
... not to do something practical. That's what a Bachelor's is for
haha that hasn't been my experience
So true, all college degrees are for working a retail job. :amerikkka-clap:
My comp-sci and psych degrees have made me better at drinking myself to death on welfare.
In my experience once you have any professional experience whatsoever in tech you're going to have a pretty easy time picking up subsequent jobs. I'm sorry to hear you haven't been able to break in, but the last year or so has been unbelievably hot for tech workers. If nothing else, you can outright lie to say you have experience.
I’m sorry to hear you haven’t been able to break in, but the last year or so has been unbelievably hot for tech workers.
This is 100% fake fwiw. Tech recruiters are absolutely terrible at sourcing candidates, and their hiring process is incredibly time wasting and inefficient which is why they "can't find people".
Yes, I meant to discuss this, but the main thing is what is there to research about certain liberal arts degrees that you can't do with a certification? Is the rigor so important to this research that it makes it impossible to do otherwise?
the process of the PhD is to put together a committee of existing researchers in your discipline, have them collaborate to develop initial survey of existing scholarship in the topic of your research. after you do this background and extensive research of what has already been done and demonstrate some mastery of the knowledge, you identify the specific gap in existing knowledge and set to investigate it specifically under the guidance of your committee before developing a novel paper of your findings (maybe 50 pages?) to report back to your committee and the public and then spend a few hours defending your investigative process and articulating what you discovered, what it might mean to the discipline at large, and what are some questions or areas for followup/expanded investigation that you might pursue.
the amount of coursework in a PhD is minimal compared to research and inquiry.
as it was explained to me, a Bachelor's is meant to show you have a basic knowledge of the field. a Masters shows you have some additional specialized knowledge and how to conduct research into a topic within that field. a PhD shows you know how to identify gaps in understanding in a field, ask questions that haven't been asked, and investigate answers accordingly.
The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy
I'm a stem head and have resisted the PhD route, because i don't really want to be part of the R1 machine and have yet to meet many PhDs that I would want to mentor under. but I don't really see the problem with how it works on a basic level. it's a tiny minority of people and it's a process for knowledge production and sharing. it has flaws, it's inefficient. big whoop. that comes with the territory of asking questions no one has asked before.
bestowing any discipline as being "practical" and more worthy is reactionary and leads to a seige mentality of disciplines closing off from each other instead of collaborating, which is is the biggest crisis in the academy. there needs to be more interdisciplinarity in inquiry. the problems we have today are going to rely on solutions drawing upon several disciplines, but that happens less when disciplines are pitted against each other for resources by a political project with an agenda.
it's a classification the Carnegie Foundation awards every 5 years to designate level of research activity/"prestige", or more accurately, how much research $$$ passes through an institution. R1 is the highest, signifying "very high research activity". if you are going into academia and you work at an R1, the system is not going to care about your public service or your teaching record beyond lip service. you are there to get research grants and turn them into publications, or more insidiously, turn them into marketable intellectual property for the institution.
at the risk of sounding self-contradictory to my defense of the research professional development process in theory here, the R1 designation and the research professional development process, in practice, in the US is something i am ready to criticize 24-7. being part of the R1 machine, in my meaning, is an institutional and careerist devotion to investigation and knowledge production at the expense of knowledge dissemination through education and outreach.
Here to engage in some light dunking:
- First, the liberal arts are significantly more expansive than you seem to think. Maybe you mean the arts? Even there, I'd disagree, but there's absolutely a great deal more research to be done in philosophy, history, religion, and other humanities, and that's without expanding out to include the other liberal arts: the social sciences and math.
- Second, there's lots to research in the arts, still. For instance, there's space for trying to rectify hegemonic western musical theory with other music theories. Music theory is about better developing the conceptual tools available to composers and creators, and as instrumentation and technology change, more areas open up for exploration. I don't know as much about other artistic fields, so I can't speak to them as well.
- Third, actually, we should just disassemble the traditional university altogether. There is something fundamentally wrong with the conflation of teaching with research, and the result is the tierification of schools such that a small portion of those who wish to be researchers first get to be serious researchers, and the "best" schools often have professors who are crap teachers. Teaching university and postgraduate studies should be a respected and valued skillset in and of itself. The model of academia, wherein exploited postgrads who want to do research are pushed into classrooms for a pittance, and anyone who wants to teach first and foremost is pushed out of the top tier altogether needs to be destroyed and replaced with a system that values both teaching and research and doesn't falsely conflate the two.
For instance, there’s space for trying to rectify hegemonic western musical theory with other music theories. Music theory is about better developing the conceptual tools available to composers and creators, and as instrumentation and technology change, more areas open up for exploration.
:this:
:doubt: socialist countries gave free degrees only based on practicality, and i dont consider them reactionary
I got a doctorate in guitar of all things. I dreamed I would be a college guitar teacher because my mentor was and he meant a lot to me at a young age. I came to my last year and realized I didn't want to be a college teacher, and instead o graduated and taught 3rd to 8th grade guitar. I enjoyed it for a few years but Covid really affected my perception of education. I then went hard on releasing music and now make a living from Spotify and YouTube. It's easy for my to be pessimistic about my education and the time and money poured into it, but I think I learned some valuable skills.
Its good youre making a living doing art! And I think the skills can be important, but the length of the degrees and more importantly the cost is what makes me feel it is a capitalist innovation. If you could just distill the useful skills into a certificate that took 6months-1year to finish, wouldn't it be better because then you could focus solely on art? Obviously, some degrees this would be dangerous to do, but with some degrees I feel it makes perfect sense.
100000% agree. It was an artificial hurdle I just went through for a certification for a job that I eventually realized wasn't for me.
I don't really understand what you're getting at here. Socialist transition requires the elimination of poverty, the elimination of poverty can only be done by material means, therefore engineering and other practical degrees were highly valued. Similarly, I don't see the value in spending 10+ years in a degree only to teach rudimentary stuff, and neither did any socialist system. The option was there, but it was never subsidized. Sometimes, to preserve culture, there were things like helping boost art from minority cultures in order to attract tourism. But that hardly requires a PhD
Some of my point is: what makes it so worth it to spend 10+ years of study to help with research in liberal arts? Why not just have a certificate and hit the ground running?
So you are saying a field that is less worthy studying, and could be best pointed towards something else. So we are now on the same, anti-intellectual team?
I don't entirely agree with you but I think its a good point to bring up and its certainly an important discussion to be had. Especially because we do not live in some kind of Fully Automated etc future. We will need practical real world solutions to help us get there.
However, I'd also caution that pursuing functionality over everything else causes us to lose a bit of ourselves. Part of the magic of humanity (at least to me) is that we can do things that serve no purpose except to ourselves. Art is often the euphemism that gets used for those pursuits.
I think the idea of being taught by someone who just got a bunch of certificates (hurdled through some standardized tests I assume) is super depressing. Should you need a PhD in ethnomusicology to be a middle-school band instructor? Probably not. But I'd much rather be taught in higher education by someone who's intensely studied their field and then built upon it, given the opportunity.
There's a million different problems with academia intrinsically, and then academia struggling to stay relevant under late-capitalism, but this proposal just feels like something Mike Rowe would advocate for.
-- naive undergrad (isn't it obvious?)
stem brain stem brain hackernews engineeroid stem brain :farquaad-point:
We need bread but also roses. There's more to life than grinding utilitarianism.
I'm not saying get rid of music, I'm saying get rid of liberal arts degrees in favor of certifications
What is the practical difference between a degree and a certification?
Certifications are generally faster to get and don't require a ton of prerequisite courses. You can be a plumber or highschool teacher, for instance, off of a certification.
So, before college degrees became nothing more than a prerequisite for getting a job that paid more the starvation wages, the idea behind the liberal arts was to provide someone with a well rounded education in a variety of subjects. Not to produce a technical expert who was good at one thing, but to produce a person who knew a little bit about a lot of things and had developed the skills to pursue further education. Whether you think that's valuable comes down to whether you think a good general education improves people in a good general way. I think it does, and I think literally every single person should be able to get a free four year degree in whatever they want because the end result will be a much wiser, much smarter society. And every single person should be able to follow up with graduate courses in whatever they want because people who understand history will make better political decisions than people who don't, and people who understand art theory can meaningfully contribute to discussions about what mural to paint on the side of the building, and people who understand musical theory can teach kids not just how to play an instrument, but break down the mathematics and theory behind music in a systematic way. And so on and so forth. A liberal arts education gives you context to so many things you would otherwise never learn. It's a running joke that engineering degrees and other highly technical fields produce the dumbest smart people in the world, because they're taught how to do a specific task but never taught why to do that task, or how that task has been done in the past, or what the consequences of that task might be.
. And every single person should be able to follow up with graduate courses in whatever they want because people who understand history will make better political decisions than people who don’t
So I think your argument is generally well reasoned but I wanna point out this. Its possible to have someone 'understand' history but a lot of this is propaganda. Honestly with history degrees I have an even more negative opinion of them than a music theory degree. Its a bit like a degree in economics in a capitalist system, it is merely being rigorously taught apologetics for capitalism. Obviously, in a socialist society one should teach history for propaganda purposes to reinforce the socialist system, and the actual study of history would be looking for ways to do this. I see it as no different from being a propagandist, which I do consider socially useful for a socialist society.
My history professors were crusty old African Marxists and angry Jewish socialists. One of them met Thomas Sankara. There are lots of bad history teachers, but the solution to that is good history teachers, not refusing to learn history. Hell, look at the war in Ukraine. To even begin to understand what is happening and why you need to understand the entire Cold War, and WWII, and the history of Ukrainian Fascism, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a dozen other things. Having a skilled teacher of history makes learning these things much easier than if you were to try to bumble through it on your own with a library card. A professional historian will reveal questions that you would never think to ask, and provide context and depth to events you'd otherwise never have heard of.
The discipline of studying how history is written is called historiography, and one of the first things I learned in historiography is that every single author of history had a bias and an agenda. No one wrote things down "as they were", everyone was trying to achieve something. So you can never just trust that a source is absolutely accurate in what it's saying. You've got to look at other contemporary sources, other documents, archeological evidence, and all sorts of other things. And then you try to piece together something like the truth from all these different sources. For me, this was a complete game changer. History went from being a list of facts in a dry old text book to a series of mysteries that had to be investigated critically. It's entirely the reason I broke out of capitalist propaganda and became a socialist. Learning history, and how to evaluate history, helped me realize that not only were the narratives I was taught in highschool wrong, they were deliberate lies. And studying history gave me the tools to recognize those lies, study where they came from, and read between the lines of those lies to try to tease out the truth.
And I want everyone to have the benefit of that. I think it's really valuable, and I think if we took full advantage of automation and structured the economy on socialist lines everyone would have plenty of time to study whatever topics they found interesting.
Oh, and one more thing; I don't think the current educational model in universities is particularly good. I think teaching professors should be allowed to teach and research professors should be allowed to do research, and that if a professor does want to teach they should have to learn some pedagogy. I don't really like the "Teacher talks students listen" method of teaching, and I find the socialist model of teaching used by communists in rural areas of China or Vietnam really inspiring.
Learning history, and how to evaluate history, helped me realize that not only were the narratives I was taught in highschool wrong, they were deliberate lies. And studying history gave me the tools to recognize those lies, study where they came from, and read between the lines of those lies to try to tease out the truth.
FIVE BIGGEST LIES IN HISTORY
GO
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Remember the Maine
Haymarket Affair
Gulf of Tonkin incident
Dreyfus Affair
Sorry that they're all American or Eurocentric I'm sure there are some great deceptions in Chinese history but I'm just not that familiar with it.
does a phd in history help you teach it, though? seems like it helps you become a good historian but teaching is a different skillset that requires background in the subject, yes, but way more specialized training in pedagogy and effective communication. we devalue teachers by assuming anyone who's really smart in one specific field is qualified to teach it.
I totally agree that teaching professors should be trained in pedagogy, and I think the way we currently do things where professors are not required to have any training at teachers is a huge disservice to students. The best professor I ever had taught kindergarten, grade school, and high school before he became a professor. He didn't have a PhD and he knew how to communicate his teachings better than any of the dozens of other professors I had.
the socialist model of teaching used by communists in rural areas of China or Vietnam
how do they do it?
No disrespect meant but I strongly disagree with everything you've said in this thread. But more than anything else, there's a huge disconnect in this whole discussion: the US is a place of extreme abundance, much more so than socialist Czechoslovakia.
I wanted to write more but I have to go, but really my take boils down to this: if your country is in crisis, then yes you need to focus on building infrastructure / food supply etc. But the US is rich as fuck, if we stopped spending money on wars we could basically fund every professional musician with a living wage without even noticing.
And on that note, many musicians thrive in the academic environment. Music PHDs are filled with bullshit you have to deal with, most music PHD people I know would agree, but they would also agree that they're only bullshit because of capitalism and all its loopholes. In a country of abundance such as the US, everyone should have the right to educate themselves in whatever they want. We can afford it, basically.
There's simply no sense in your kind of austerity politics in the modern west, neither is there ever going to be a political path forward for it.
Disclaimer I am saying this as an overeducated musician, so feel free to dunk on me for that.
But the US is rich as fuck, if we stopped spending money on wars we could basically fund every professional musician with a living wage without even noticing.
But why would you do that? There is poverty in America, and even if we have houses to give people that are empty, there are other forms of poverty to address. It is not a simple thing to solve, that is why it has never been solved, and it requires a lot of science and engineering to fix.
And why does there need to be a PhD program? I keep asking and no one explains. Why spend 10+ years to study music rather than actually making it which is a social good? Studying it does not produce anything, unlike say an architectural program, where studying architecture can produce safer housing.
But why would you do that? There is poverty in America, and even if we have houses to give people that are empty, there are other forms of poverty to address. It is not a simple thing to solve, that is why it has never been solved, and it requires a lot of science and engineering to fix.
I'm a bit confused by this - aren't we both in agreement that poverty in the west is primarily a policy choice? That's what radicalized me to begin with, at least. That this poverty is totally unnecessary. So I disagree, it's truly not as complicated of a thing to solve as it's made out to be.
Why spend 10+ years to study music rather than actually making it which is a social good?
I'm glad we at least agree that music is a social good. My personal view is yeah, I don't need 10+ years of study, 4 is enough for me. But I do know music PhDs, and they all make incredible and unique music, fueled by the research they did. The studying was part of the production process, in shaping them to be the composers they are now. I don't know how to explain this to you. Some musicians just need 10+ years to truly flourish as the musicians, teachers that they are. Also, music research isn't just people studying Bethoven, there's so much more going on. Just because you don't consider it a public good doesn't mean it isn't helping to advance the arts.
I think there's still some disconnect here - what exactly is your view of music in your socialist utopia? Because in mine, we first reorient productive capacities to the public good instead of for profit - and then we have some sort of large organized workforce of musicians who have some degree of freedom in their labor. Is this not your image?
I’m a bit confused by this - aren’t we both in agreement that poverty in the west is primarily a policy choice? That’s what radicalized me to begin with, at least. That this poverty is totally unnecessary. So I disagree, it’s truly not as complicated of a thing to solve as it’s made out to be.
It actually is complicated, actually. I implore you to look into China's poverty alleviation efforts. There are many kinds of poverty and each adjustment can only help in a certain way, and there are some forms of poverty that you need to be very careful when solving, such as geographic poverty, because you could accidentally do genocide with that one by separating endangered culture groups into smaller divisions. For example, China straight up gave people free condos in a better location once, the people used to live in literal mud huts. Huge improvement. However, this did not solve their poverty because they were still practicing things like farming and manufacturing in ancient ways that cannot be produced to scale. So you need to re-educate people that have no framework for learning that was developed from childhood. And this sort of thing is absolutely applicable to many parts of the West, and don't act like it isn't.
Like I listened to a Chinese guy explaining to other rural Chinese people about the benefits of toothpaste and they greeted him with skepticism. The education issue is dire in many places. So we're talking wounds that can't be mended easily for an entire generation of people.
Word thanks for that perspective. That's interesting I really should read about China's poverty alleviation efforts. My first instinct is to think anything negative I read about AES poverty eradication is a minute detail / side effect that US friendly media harps on, outweighed by the actual experience of the masses. But yeah obviously it's more complicated how I made it out.
Still, I can't help but feel you're under some capitalist realism thinking. It seems like we both want 'bread' but we disagree on how many 'roses' we could get if we were in power. Anyway good talk.
when I studied engineering we were taught how, how it's been done in the past, and that it's bad to kill people through negligence/murder
I'm not touching the whole music theory part of this because it's not something I know much about. But I have an advanced degree in social work and I wish so hard that that hadn't been required. Most of the classes I took were useless anyway, and social work Master's programs are really upfront about the fact that the majority of the useful instruction social work students receive is on-the-job internship experience. Really, gating it all behind a Master's degree feels like a way of gatekeeping who can be a social worker more than anything else- rather than paying for school and doing unpaid internships, it should be paid apprenticeships with some workshops to learn history and theory.
Trust me, many of the people in STEM in PhD programs or even tenured faculty are fucking useless or kind of dumb too. Academics as an institution are very flawed. I wouldn't lay any of the blame on a "liberal arts degree." There are absolutely brilliant people who do good work studying art, and there are racists. The system is setup for the racists, but on the other hand, I'm sure the analysis of indigenous music by indigenous academics is for example a worthwhile endeavor.
So while thats true, at least PhD programs in STEM are used for research papers on x. Like, if you try to read anything in a medical journal it'll be difficult to find something written by a non-PhD.
What's dumb is that for the research a lot of PhDs are forced to teach in the West, which gives the impression that the PhDs in STEM are incompetent. In socialist countries that is not common from what I've heard
Like, if you try to read anything in a medical journal it’ll be difficult to find something written by a non-PhD.
I think that's probably much less true in medicine than elsewhere in STEM, since MDs regularly publish or participate in research, and research is more likely to be performed by non-PhD techs and researchers. But anyway, it's true that a lot of "liberal arts" research is done by masters students.
Anyway, the teaching skills of PhDs isn't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the complex social institutions that "choose" faculty members and how it does so. The researchers that can get the most citations is not the set of researchers that care the most about performing novel and groundbreaking research or guiding research towards what will help people the most. Lots and lots of perfectly well-credentialed clout chasers; lots of people turned away from academia that would have been able to be incredible researchers if only allowed to do so on their own sociocultural terms. My point is simply that many brilliant researchers will be in "liberal arts" categories of study (which are flawed categories anyway) and many poor researchers will be very successful in STEM.
:grillman: i dont care what they're called it just shouldnt be so got dang expensive!
I know people who study music (not music theory I don't know what music theory is) and they work very hard with the aim of getting professional jobs in orchestras and there are people who studied STEM who are complete dipshits that are in no way practical or interested in practicality (see silicon vally and :cryptocurrency: )
I'm mostly thinking about things for a socialist transition. Obviously, capitalism will make everything bad
