…and from a somewhat unexpected venue. CIO.com is (in their own way) touting the value of a liberal arts education in computing. Maria Klawe, the author of the piece, feels that “career opportunities in computer science are at an all-time high” and:
We’ve got to spread that message among students from a rainbow of backgrounds, or risk becoming a technological backwater.
That “rainbow of backgrounds” is where the liberal arts enter the picture:
computing-related jobs are no longer an isolated component of American industries; IT underpins every function of the business community—market research, product design, finance, strategic planning, environmental issues—every aspect of doing and leading. That means these jobs are not only vital but fun. They require people who have strong technical knowledge but who also can work and contribute in a much broader realm. A recent New York Times article dubbed this kind of IT professional “the renaissance geek.” The leaders of Microsoft, Google and other companies have made their point clear: Give us more well-trained, well-rounded computer scientists!
Yeah – “renaissance geek”… Gotta love that!
The article goes on to provide several suggestions for how the business and academic worlds can work to encourage and develop this next generation of Renaissance Geeks. These include thinks like making a computing course a requirement for more undergraduates (and make sure they enjoy it), make connections to other departments/disciplines, and hire more female faculty.
UMM used to require all our students to take a computing course, but this requirement was dropped 6 years ago in the belief that the high schools were getting up to speed and providing our incoming students with the backgrounds they needed. I think there’s a growing sense on campus that they may not have worked out as well as we’d hoped, and I know our experience in Computer Science and UMM is that we’ve seen a much more homogenous group of students (white males with a strong leaning to the more stereotypical geek) than we did before the requirements changed. Making a change to the general education requirements like restoring this requirement wouldn’t an easy thing, though, and we run the obvious risk of entering into an unpleasant “Why is your field more important than my field?” sort of debate since (obviously) every discipline at UMM is crucial to being a well rounded citizen in the 21st century.
We’re doing a pretty good job on the business of making connections to other disciplines, in part in an effort to broaden our appeal in the wake of the aforementioned change of requirements. We’ve got interdisciplinary programs in media comutation (with Studio Art and Speech/Communications) and bioinformatics (with Biology and Chemistry), and a new faculty in Philosophy has started a conversation on a possible program in Cognition that will likely include us in some form. There’s more than can be done here, but I think the wheels are turning in a useful way.
And, finally, we’re rocking pretty hard on the gender diversity in our faculty as we currently have 3 of 5 being women, which puts us well ahead of most other programs.
I’ll wrap with this final quote:
At all levels, schools need to make computing attractive to ambitious students who have a fondness for technology but also want to fold in other skills and interests. These are the students who are going to be leaders and make a difference in the world, and they include women and minorities and the full cross-section of society.
Amen, sister!
