SUNDAY, 31 AUGUST 2025

I have a Mickey Mouse degree. Or I assume I do. Because if people find out I have a doctorate, they may look vaguely impressed for a moment. Until they ask me in which field and I reply ‘Theatre Studies’, after which I’ve had a few people literally burst out laughing, unable to contain their mirth. Eventually I learned to say ‘English Literature’, both in ordinary conversations and on my CV, since this was the umbrella department in which I studied both of my degrees, and this at least had the patina of age to impart a sprinkling of kudos. Even so, it probably remained inferior in many people’s eyes to a qualification in any field of science.

In this week’s blog I want to look at two ideas which permeate contemporary culture: that there are fields of academic study which are far more serious and important than others, and that studying a science subject requires a higher level of intelligence than studying any of the arts. I’ve taught English as a foreign language for more than twenty-five years with a wide range of students, mostly younger people preparing for university entry or already studying there at either a graduate or post-graduate level. This included two years based at a STEM university as a writing adviser. Nowadays I teach one-to-one part-time online with students from a wide range of fields. So I feel I have experience with all kinds of thinkers and I’ve known a lot of very smart people and I’m fascinated by the myriad ways in which their different minds work.

The majority of the non-native English speakers from Asian countries who I currently teach online are studying things like economics or computing or business. This is partly because parents there tend to be far more instrumental in deciding what and where their children study, and will understandably opt for degrees which offer a better guarantee of a future job. It is not only fields like art history or music that are hit by this but even the ‘pure’ sciences, which are shunned in favour of those that can be applied in terms of a career. But this is not merely an ‘Asian’ phenomenon – the same thing is happening in western countries. In the UK, for instance, where going to university can mean you end up with a debt that might run to six figures unless the bank of mom and pop can fund the bills, it is hardly surprising that most students on degree courses in any field of the arts are from the upper-middle-classes and that universities are closing down departments in subjects like philosophy and even traditional subjects such as history.

In the 1980s it became obligatory to sneer at new disciplines like Media Studies. I can partly understand this: the most visible face of the field, at least in the UK, was an obsession with Madonna and various soap operas. But I would argue that this dismissal of the subject was, and is, fundamentally misguided. The media is possibly the most important factor in constructing the everyday life we now experience in what has become a mediated world where so much communication happens through text and video and screens. Yes, the physicists may get to do all the ultimate stuff concerning the nature of the universe and the biologists may explain human behaviour by referring to evolution and genetics, but on one level their fields are less central to everyday life than the mass media. Media Studies does not only busy itself in the relatively obscure semiotics of Dallas and Dynasty, but also explores who owns the media, who controls it, who creates it, who has access to it: hard, statistical big data that can teach us a lot about the economic and political reality of the contemporary globe. For example, the internet and social media are probably among the strongest factors that have facilitated the emergence of global far-right politics, so in this sense studying them is more directly pertinent than exploring the mysteries of dark matter or black holes.

One good reason for having a high regard for science is that it rests on sturdy pyramids of knowledge and praxis. While I would question glib assumptions about ‘the scientific method’, since astrophysicists, botanists and chemists work in very different ways, I accept that it is generally much harder to wing it in science than in the arts and humanities. This is partly because scientists learn a solid methodology as part of their training and partly due to the collaborative nature of most contemporary science. In contrast, the Sokal hoax, which I discussed in another blog a few weeks ago, was a chastening moment when a top social science journal showed itself willing to print, without any peer review, deliberately confected pseudo-scientific claptrap which it didn’t understand simply because it sounded sciency and came from a reputable source. There were some in the humanities who criticised Sokal for his trickery, but in my opinion social science was caught with its pants down and should take the punishment. Most importantly, it should do everything it can to ensure that future good practice will prevent this kind of embarrassment ever happening again. Sokal did us a favour.

Sadly, this episode confirmed to many sceptics what they had believed all along: the arts were full of high-blown verbiage and trendy nonsense and anyone could thrive there as long as they learned the jargon and knew how to use it in order to obfuscate and make the banal sound profound. I would counter that this recourse to ‘theory’ is only one strand of academia in the arts, contested within the field itself at times, although I must admit that, judging from the papers I read from some of my online students, it currently seems de rigueur in many institutions. I suspect that some of this stems from science envy, a feeling that we must mimic its academic rigour by making our ideas hard to understand: something I personally regret and feel is counterproductive. But, as I will discuss later, I think it’s also because we are dealing a lot of the time with an inner, subjective world and elusive truths where language struggles to communicate and needs to be used with sensitivity and subtlety. The answer to this problem, though, is not to mimic some kind of alleged ‘scientific method’ but to use a different methodology which fits what we are studying, willing to admit its weaknesses but being proud of its strengths.

I think it’s fair to say that there is a general feeling that studying the arts is pretty easy: that the clever kids do the sciences while the bozos who can’t cope with maths do the arts. In a way, I’m an example of this. I’m good at arithmetic and can multiply reasonably large numbers in my head, but that was stuff I learned as a very small child before the fear crept in, and nowadays I only have to see a formula on a page or scrawled across a whiteboard for my brain to freeze over and cease to function. Most of the sciences require mathematics at a reasonable level and many people struggle at maths; whether this is due to a lack of natural ability or a self-fulfilling prophecy makes no difference. And even the social sciences require some familiarity with statistics these days as their fields become increasingly quantitative in nature. So if you can’t do maths, you’re probably wiser to stick to the arts. But that doesn’t make you stupid: it just means that your intellectual skills are likely to be unsuited to the study of a science.

From my experience as a teacher of university students, especially one-to-one, I suggest that there are two broad types of intelligence active within academia and not many people can do both. I know I’m in danger of stereotyping, but the first type is mostly found in the sciences, or at least in Kuhn’s ‘normal science’. It is founded on empirical evidence, focused and goal-oriented, able to meticulously follow procedures, good at maths and propositional logic, usually metaphysically materialistic, and often not very interested in questions that cannot, at least in theory, be definitively answered. The second type gravitates towards the arts and the softer social sciences such as psychology, struggles with the kind of logic that the logical positivists excelled in but feels perfectly at home with uncertainty and things which are difficult to define. It uses general abstract reasoning more than empirical evidence or big data, and tends towards a facility with language rather than numbers or symbols. Its practitioners are happy to spend hours in thought or discussion which end up without a conclusion and often with no clear progress at all.

We tend to assume that the former type of intelligence operates on a higher plane than the latter, but in my experience this is not necessarily true: the two kinds of thinking are simply different. For example, when I was working in the STEM university, a student came to me and asked me to look at the English in a paper she had written as part of her course, which included a list of questions she had made for a survey in her project. I was shocked when I read her survey questions to find that she had used a very small sample, hadn’t considered the need for some type of control group (this specific survey required one), made no attempt to randomise her respondents according to age or gender or any other potentially significant factors, made no allowance for confounders, had several ‘leading’ questions which were effectively worthless because there was too much potential bias in the way they were framed, and so on. She was a highly intelligent person and yet she was making basic errors which no one in the social sciences would make because her background training in hard science had not required her to think about these things. She came from a field where she studied and measured inanimate reality and had never had any need to do this before.

Another example is a one-to-one student I regularly teach who, judging by the kind of conferences he is invited to, is a bit of a whizz-kid in AI research. His papers are therefore very difficult for me to fathom and I often need him to explain in everyday words what something means when my intuition for grammatical structure detects a possible red flag suggesting there may be a problem with the language. I don’t know to what extent this is due to the nature of the content of the material or to the way his brain works (I don’t think it is a problem of the level of his English because it’s generally good), but he finds doing this incredibly taxing. For example, perhaps he has used an active verb and I suspect that he should be using a passive one or vice versa because I suspect that any causality is working in the opposite direction, and therefore I need to know who or what is the agent performing the act, but if I ask him that question he will often simply repeat what he has written as his explanation. He seems to lack the ability to step outside of his mental framework and intellectual background to imagine himself in the position of a layperson who has no knowledge of his field.

I know these examples are anecdotal, and I admit that I could also come up with examples where my student can do both things well, but these gaps in ability to do something which most ordinary people would find easy suggests to me that ability in maths or formal logic does not always equate with what we might call everyday intelligence. People are just different, I guess, and this is true even of the very gifted: compare the breadth of Feynman’s thinking and approach with Dirac’s dismissal of anything that had no mathematical or empirical base, for example, or Rutherford’s famous comment that ‘all science is either physics or stamp collecting’. My argument, which I accept I cannot prove, is that this split in way of thinking generally mirrors the division between students who choose the arts and those who opt for the sciences, probably due to a natural inclination which is then fine-tuned by years of training and practice until there is an enormous gap between the two.

On a linguistic level, students in the sciences often have an easier task when writing a paper because the range of language required to produce a lab report is much more restricted than topics that deal with human behaviour or things like complex aesthetic theory. Often my online students send me a paper that they have written in their mother tongue and then used AI to translate, and ask me to cast my eyes over it to check there are no serious issues. If the student is working in the hard sciences or sometimes the social sciences, the report is almost indistinguishable from something produced by a native speaker. I compare this with the much harder task of another student of mine who is studying for a PhD in Film Studies. This is not merely a matter of knowing and using the jargon of critical theory: she has full control over words like ‘hegemony’, ‘ideology’, ‘archaeology’, ‘rhizomatic’, ‘intertextuality’, and so on. The problem comes with the other general words around them which are common in everyday discourse, where a choice between two words which are close to being synonyms to a non-native speaker can end up creating a significant difference in meaning to a native reader. It is easy to mock the jargon such as that I listed above and say that all the student in the arts needs to do is to learn and mimic it, often without really understanding it, but this is far from enough: the student also needs an overall sensitivity to language since he or she is often trying to express subjective feelings and ideas for which language, whatever its limitations, is the only tool we have available. In contrast, the jargon in a scientific field usually has a firmness where meaning is very clear, even if the phenomenon is not yet totally understood (e.g. ‘gravity’, at least from what I have read but any physicists can correct me if I’m wrong about this).

One thing that worries me at times is that some people working in the sciences seem to have no interest in the larger effects on society of what they are doing, perhaps because of a general disregard for abstract theory that can be neither proven nor falsified. For instance, on a couple of occasions I have asked my AI student about the social consequences of his work and he doesn’t seem remotely interested: creating an AI which is a functional advance on the current AI is all that concerns him. People often talk about the myopia of people like me with a background in the arts who know almost nothing about the sciences, but the reverse is also sometimes true. Snow’s ‘two cultures’ still exist, made worse in a world where cross-disciplinary thinking has become less common and more difficult due to increased specialisation.

We have mostly moved on from a world in which what was measured in IQ tests functioned as a standard for assessing intelligence, with concepts instead like multiple intelligences which take into account things other than mathematical, logical, linguistic and mental rotational ability. But even if we were to limit intelligence to these cognitive components, each of them is essential to good thinking while unlikely to exist in equal measure within one mind. There is a case for vocational studies being separated from academic ones, perhaps, but there should be no ‘Mickey Mouse degrees’ judged purely by the subject matter that they teach. The sciences and the arts should support each other and not become yet another binary opposition in an increasingly fractious world.