STEM's Empire

STEM rules everything around me

The Soviet Union aimed to be not only the world’s first socialist society but its first scientific society as well. Not only did this goal have an elective affinity with the ambitions and tastes of Lenin and other Bolsheviks, it also flowed directly from the Foundation-like idea of Leninism-Marxism—that a small group of (social) scientists could channel the inevitable course of history into desired outcomes, even from a perch in a relatively backward society.

Techniques and fads that promised a scientific lever by which to move the world appealed to that mindset. If one ignores the famine and the camps, at times early Bolshevik rule appears to be a sort of paradise for TED Talk types—a society enthralled by productivity nostrums that it seems like LinkedIn-Marxism. (“Number go up” could apply equally well to Gosplan’s endless charts.) It’s no surprise that Lenin, who once castigated “scientific management”—Taylorism—as a tool of capitalist exploitation soon changed his mind once the Revolution was underway. He embraced Taylorism and all of its variants, which quickly, if fleetingly, became inescapable throughout Moscow and other outposts of Soviet power. Exponents of scientific-materialist management theories rose to the summits of the new USSR, even if they would later fall from favor and frequently be met with the gulag or the purge under the differently-scientific aspirations of Stalinism.

Science remained a favorite means by which the Soviet Union could claim legitimacy, of course. Khrushchev turned to scientific advances as a means to demonstrate Soviet prowess and the superiority of the planned economy in realms as diverse as space exploration and smallpox eradication—both, it should be noted, with some real justifications. The vast amounts late Communism sunk into the space station Mir and the advanced space shuttle Buran speak volumes about the importance of such accomplishments for a state that, by the end, could not obtain accurate information on the value of its harvests and production—the chief material metrics of success for a country whose banner boasted the sickle and hammer.

The resources the Soviet system expended on what we would today call STEM contrasted with the dismal attention paid to the social sciences, particularly outside of (Marxist) economics. The Lenin Prize, an Iron Curtain equivalent to the Nobel Prize, represented STEM supremacy avant la lettre—and in its inclusion of arts in its remit even anticipated the bastardization known as STEAM.¹ No political science, no sociology, no anthropology (or, rather, ethnography)—despite the fact that Soviet ethnographers could and did produce excellent work when allowed.

The Soviet system could not produce social scientists of the same caliber as its physical scientists because social science represented a threat to a closed system. The presumption of pure social science is that truth must be checked and discovered, rather than calibrated against known doctrines. Such a position obviously contradicts orthodoxy of any stripe, whether materialist or spiritual. Researchers in such systems can clearly produce excellent applied work, and through esoteric dodges can even make narrow advances, but any encroachment of the social sciences on idea proclaimed and controlled by the powerful will meet with unyielding resistance.

The growing dominance of STEM instruction at all levels of U.S. education both reflects and produces a narrowing of the space open for social science inquiry under a system seemingly much different from the Soviet Union. This may seem like a leap, so let me guide you through my observations:

1. STEM, as a buzzword and as a bundle of practices, is all but inescapable. There are STEM schools and STEM pre-schools. There are STEM toys. I haven’t even bothered to spell out what STEM means because it is now a decades-old acronym (and one apparently invented by administrators at the National Science Foundation)

2. To question STEM is to seem like a radical or a crank. STEM has achieved a sort of commonsensical hegemony. One may assert that we need more STEM majors or STEM programs secure in the knowledge that few will disagree, and if one does meet with an objection it is easy enough to either placate the objectors (“STEAM”, you see) or to just steamroll them, because only the sentimental and the hidebound care about poetry or whatever. The way that occasional cuts to STEM programs (usually, it seems, to pure maths) are met with howls of outrage different to those elicited by the more routine cuts to humanities programs provides a sort of negative proof—even if such programs lose money, they should not be cut because they are part of STEM.

   

3. Non-STEM disciplines must continually validate and justify their existence in ways that never occurs to STEM participants. If I were to assert that political science majors demonstrably out-earn biology majors, for instance, you’d think I was stark raving mad—but no, it is so. Political science majors similarly out-earn chemistry majors, and all three pale before econ majors.² Yet even economics is not STEM, although it’s probably the most STEM-adjacent social science, and as such has no acronymic umbrella to shelter it.

4. STEM provides politicians a useful education policy equivalent to “get-tough” attitudes on crimes. Discursively, STEM is the real education, not the soft stuff, and protecting STEM wins plaudits (although funding it is apparently less easy.) As one indicator, it’s easy to find White House announcements about STEM and diversity or asides about how STEM fields are critical to national security, but much harder to find any such announcements about, say, social sciences. Tellingly, even Dr. Alondra Nelson, a rare social scientist in a senior science role in the White House, was billed not as a social scientist but as someone who studies technology development.

STEM (and business) dominates contemporary U.S. higher education, and seems likely to do so for the future. “Learn to code” has become a meme, and even an ironic counter-meme, but the notion that skilling and re-skilling for contemporary work means greater instruction in STEM skills is no joke.

STEM’s empire has come even at the expense of more foundational skills, such as guaranteeing that students can read and write. STEM focus has at least the possibility of provoking more inequality: all the STEM diversity initiatives in the world can’t disguise the fact that accelerating STEM preparation often means leaving the unprepared to fend for themselves. Even when STEM evangelists recognize that they need to handle soft skills and people management, they are more inclined to re-invent the wheel, or fail to do so, on their own rather than consider whether a more balanced approach might be useful.

What sorts of alternatives am I gesturing toward? To be more specific, we don’t have room in standard curricula for developing important co-curricular—and curricular!—skills like running a meeting, refining options, increasing resourcefulness, managing others’ feelings and emotions, and so on. These are “soft” but they are also the hardest nuts to crack, and they are just as essential to human organizations doing STEM as they are to human organizations doing, say, manicures. Indeed, the scale of Big Science these days means that such “soft” skills are not anathema to science but rather they play a much larger role, given how much of STEM requires teamwork, coordination, focus, and other managerial tasks.

Yet all of this is merely technical. The real point is more profound. Students who have learned since preschool to identify planets and atoms are not introduced to similar vocabularies for understanding their society. “Interests”, “institutions”, “identities”, “norms”, “structures”, and the like are in fact real terms with real (if contested!) meanings that correspond to real phenomena in the world.³

Please bear in mind that I’m not talking about the value of the humanities. You may be eager to read this as yet another “oh the humanities!” plea. Don’t. This isn’t about the humanities. This is about the social sciences: the systematic study of and organized understanding of human activity and behavior, something as hostile to the spirit of humanistic inquiry as the study of electrons.

The consequence of social science neglect is that students don’t know how to conceptualize conflict or behavior in societies in any but the most childish ways. That’s a shame for a democratic society. In giving people tools to deconstruct and understand, one also gives people tools to challenge and reform.

One might imagine that there’s a conspiracy afoot to deny people empowering knowledge, and, sure, maybe some folks want the techniques of social science to be kept for the Inner Party. But hostility to the study of human society runs deeper and likely didn’t need to be invented. There’s really not that much support for a hoarding explanation, to boot. Quite a few university trustees seem to be actively hostile to the notion of these sorts of studies for anyone, including themselves. It’s more likely that this is just a response to annoyance at being challenged and lobbying to pay lower wages for STEM workers.

Or, to finally bring us back full circle, it’s a calibration of institutions back to the tastes and preferences of one class—not, in this case, a revolutionary one, but the alliance of sensible centrists and C-suite denizens who define so much conventional wisdom. That’s not a coalition that Lenin would have dealt with (well, you know what I mean), but functionally it serves the same role: progress and productivity are fine, but challenges and critique are not.

1.

It should be noted that at least a few Lenin Prize recipients probably deserved a Nobel as well—or, to put it another way, any Nobel laureate before the fall of the Wall should have a Roger Maris-style asterisk next to their record.

2. This sort of data will not change anyone’s mind, of course.

3. Critical realists can write their own damn essays.