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Instead of reading challenging books and simply exploring the resulting thought trails with their teachers, the liberal-arts kids where learning the techically correct usage of "always-already" and "subject position" the way we had been learning... Kirchoff's laws of circuits.
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On the flip side, engineering was shifting to the equivalent of a "great books" pedagogical model. The challenging and integrated capstone design course model that emerged ~1998-2000 thanks to cheap computers had undergrad seniors doing the equivalent of tackling Ulysees at 22.
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Since I finished undergrad in 1997, just before this kicked in, as a grad student, 1998-2003, I *taught* students who were in the new mode, but I myself was not steeped in it (and a bit envious). I could do the math/theory better, but they could *build* and were more "liberated."
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And across campus, the liberal arts kids who thought they were learning about the nexus between knowledge and social justice (was: liberation pedagogy, "critical" anything) were getting increasingly trapped... I didn't recognize this event till ~2006 or so when it became obvious.
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One reason I'm still a tech supremacist in 2021, after 5 years of tech backlash is that I still believe engineering is pretty much the only true liberal art. It's the only robust path available to trigger a virtuous cycle of genuine agency and knowledge in yourself.
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Unlike every other discipline (except perhaps fine arts), it is primarily mediated by material interactions with reality itself, rather than interactions with social/mathematical *models* of reality.
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Also extends to the experimental sciences. Any discipline with a lab or studio locus attached. This is not a naive "see with your own eyes/do with your own hands" position. It's about how your mind is transformed by short-circuiting the symbol layer of civilization even slightly.
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"reality has a surprising amount of detail" ... and those details will set you free :D yeah, kinda a version of Hegelian-slave ethos, with all the problems, but there's a germ of truth there...
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And to add a final twist... my late advisor was a black guy... born in Congo, raised in Belgium, devout Cathloic, and a kinda Luke Cage energy to him, except on the mathematician-philosopher end of the spectrum. He would have had... interesting thoughts on current events...
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Fascinating guy. Very private in his views, and would mostly stick strictly to the business of getting me done and out the door with a PhD, but would occasionally let revealing glimpses of his thinking on broader matters out. Very formative influence on me.
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