Arts vs STEM
Why are arts subjects (or humanities subjects) considered to be easier than STEM subjects, especially at a university level? The answer is pretty straightforward: it's because they are easier than STEM subjects, at least within the Australian universities. But why is this? Is it that these subjects are necessarily easier?
I find the answer to be more nuanced than most people give it credit for, especially given most people have a vested interest in this topic. It is important to outline that most people will overplay the difficulty of their endeavours to be seen as more impressive, it takes a degree of honesty to claim that something you have dedicated years towards is "easy". However, people may also contend that these subjects are easy to show their own capability. This is usually done when a degree is already seen as conventionally difficult — "oh I breezed through my maths masters it was so easy".
Why are arts degrees easy? It's because of a fundamental difference in what is being taught in STEM vs arts. They are functionally different epistemologies. Especially at the undergrad level, there are correct answers in stem. You are given a problem to solve, and you are given the tools to solve that problem by the university's education. I could smash out a textbook's worth of practise questions for physics, go to the back of the book and see whether I was right or wrong, then repeat ad infinitum.
Arts doesn't really work like this, you're not either right or wrong, 99% of the time you're probably wrong, but in a way that even the professor wouldn't be able to identify. This is because within most of arts there is no truth obligation. You are not obligated to be truthful. Because of the amount of variables within any sort of human societal interaction, much of what is taught in arts has no predictive capacity. A professor of political science is not expected to be able to accurately predict the impact of Trump's policies, while they may be more informed and have a better grasp of the different variables, they are being asked to determine something impossible for the human mind to accurately simulate.
Therefore in arts we are required to make our best, most educated guesses as to the truthfulness of any specific scenario. The problem with this, is that it is difficult to objectively quantify the quality of such a guess. In mathematics, there is a right answer, and we can use abstraction and symbols to solve for this answer. Anything not solvable by mathematics is relegated to philosophy and then compartmentalised into one of the many arts disciplines.
As such, cross university comparison is difficult because we cannot find any objective metrics to quantify the aptitude of arts students's guesswork. But it's pretty easy to see if one group of mathematicians is outperforming another (more nuanced than this but bear with me). So universities can get away with producing underqualified arts students. For STEM subjects universities can give out problem sets and ask students to go home and practise. Whereas in arts you are told to go home, read, and come back with an informed opinion. It's much easier to fake something that doesn't have a truth obligation.
This wasn't always the case though. In the past arts students were expected to be able to translate both ancient Greek and Latin and to have read many of the great western texts (which have since been demonised by left-wing academics). We have removed these quantifiable metrics through progressivism and now are left with a world of unfalsifiability.
I found throughout my degree that I could claim that there were superstructural reasons as to why things are the way they are and get away with it. Using Marxist metaphysics one could make claims such as "the poor pay of women in the workplace is due to the patriarchal standards which diminish women's capacity for independent economic movement, thus forcing them to have a reliance on men for active participation in contemporary capitalist society". This statement doesn't mean anything, and it's also unfalsifiable. How could you prove this statement wrong? Any pushback would be met with "but you don't understand" or "what about this example".
This is the core of what arts is right now, broad claims about hierarchies and discrimination, which have such vague wording that they are indefinite and cannot be argued against. It's not an effective avenue of truth seeking and causes other disciplines to be critical of arts student's capacity. It's also really easy to do, because you are not obligated to defend your position as it's too vague to be criticised. You are also able to dispute any criticism as "fascist-coded".
This is not a jab at the left itself, many of the points raised are important and not to be ignored, but we shouldn't dismiss rebuttals and counter-arguments either. By quelling any pushback we are diminishing the truth-seeking capacity of the arts discipline.
This is also obviously not the case for all arts subjects, but it is for enough that arts is carving itself a not-so-favourable reputation. Arts students are not building on past knowledge in maths, they're not getting somewhere. Instead we make unfalsifiable claims and dismiss criticism.
Perhaps a better methodology is through the prioritisation of predictability. We could expect students to make claims about political or social futures and see whether they were right or wrong, creating a sense of provability which would ground a lot of the claims made in these classes.
However, these degrees will in reality continue to diminish in both expectation and quality, becoming a shell of what used to be an important step in the cultivation of societal virtue. We can make arts degrees as difficult or as easy as we want, and we have decided to lobotomise them. Pushing non-arts students away from information and skills which are quite legitimate and important, but have been buried under a heap of truth and difficulty aversion.
