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How long will there be English departments? Every professional needs to be able to communicate ideas in writing. One would assume that in time English would be
by RodgerTheGreat 14y ago
How long will there be English departments? Every professional needs to be able to communicate ideas in writing. One would assume that in time English would be absorbed into other departments that applied it.
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoDamn it I came to make exactly the same comment. Writing English stories is just aiming at a different compiler in someone else's head.
- matthewowen 14y ago"Writing English stories" has pretty much nothing to do with what people do in English departments.
- Stefan_H 14y agoSo they finally got rid of those pesky creative writing classes, huzzah!
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoI doubt they sit around writing all day - but I am darn sure they do compiler anaylsis of the human brain.
- apl 14y agoI'm equally confused by his point about non-statistics departments doing more statistics than their "proper" counterparts. While that may be true, the bulk of cutting edge research in a given field always comes from specialists. I've never heard of substantial statistical advances arising in psychology departments (even though they're arguably one of the biggest "consumers" of statistics out there). It's a bit like trickle-down economics.
- stakka 14y agoI think you have to look 'up' the stream. Physics has given statistics some of the biggest ideas in the recent past. I think biology is relatively mathless unless it's *omics crap, and then again you have non-statisticians contributing to stats. Also plenty of CS stuff for stats.
- jamessb 14y agoThere are definitely other mathy areas: crystallography, biophysics, computational neuroscience, theoretical ecology, and applications of simulation methods like CFD and FEA to physiology, . . . But yes, most biological research doesn't require much mathematics.
- bromang 14y agocan you give some examples of statistical advances from physics?
- dbecker 14y agoEconometricians (based in economics departments) have contributed to the cutting edge of statistical knowledge.
- 001sky 14y agoFinancial econometrics, in particular, is among the most adavanced actual uses of statistics. This is also not all occuring in academe.
- disgruntledphd2 14y agometa analysis? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-analysis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-analysis Invented to look at telepathy, and Rhine was definitely a psychologist (though one the field unfairly tries to forget). That being said, I thought Glass was a psychologist but he was actually a statistician, so I suppose the modern form of meta-analysis was, in fact, invented by a statistician. Do psychometricians count as statisticians? If not, then quite a few more things were invented outside of statistics. Psychology: not just for innumerate touchy feely hippies (just mostly).
- johndcook 14y agoSome writing courses have been absorbed by other departments. Engineering departments, for example, may teach their own technical writing courses rather than going through the English department. When I was in college, I had a writing course offered through the physics department.
- aasarava 14y agoExcept that English as a subject is much less about writing English or the English language as it is about studying English literature and its reflection of (and impact on) culture and history.
- bluepaper 14y agoDepends on which English degree you study. I know those who've studied the literature and cultural impact side of things and those who've studied the language with a linguistics spin on it.
- 001sky 14y agohttp://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html Has an interesting history on the subject
- Legion 14y ago> How long will there be English departments? For however long there will be people willing to pay tuition to enroll in one. Really, that's the answer to all questions in that form. No matter how worthy of independence a study might be, it exists or fails to exist primarily on the existence of a body of students willing to pay money to sit in those seats.* * speaking purely in terms of undergraduate programs here