I teach a “useless” class at a prestigious university.
I should clarify … I co-teach a useless class at a prestigious university.
I co-teach a class with a photographer from the visual arts department that defies traditional boundaries. Rooted in the natural sciences, our class is a unique blend of art and science centered around the captivating concept of visualizing nature. It attracts a diverse mix of students, each with their own unique perspective and academic background.
The class is not required for the degrees students seek—it is not useful.
The added frivolity of the class keeps me from offering more classes that give students the marketable job skills they need to succeed. This was made clear to me via a chain of university leadership messages that led to an office where I was told the difference between a useful and a luxury class.
What students learn at a university should feed into job skills—the knowledge should have market value. A class that blends art and science does not serve that purpose. Time would be better spent taking more practical courses.
Universities have adopted business models with enhanced entrepreneurial focus to help their customers succeed in the real world. Class time not spent developing marketable job skills is wasted. Once this was clarified, I saw how wasteful an art-science crossover class is.
In my useless class, students develop projects based on visualizing nature in the greater Houston area. Each student’s project covers an aspect of art or science. There is also at least one collective project. Specifics are left to the students. Class discussions revolve around crossovers between art/humanities and science/engineering. Project time is spent wandering the city the students live in.
The class burdens art students with conveying science information and science students using images for artistic expression. More focus on creative techniques would benefit art students, and using images to communicate quantitative information would benefit science students.
Mixing art/humanities and science/engineering students, having them do collective projects and provide feedback on colleague’s projects also lacks market value. Students may gain respect for other fields of inquiry, but that has no practical value. In the job market, skills are field-specific: Scientists produce science products, artists create art products, and feedback from one group to another does not occur. Class discussions of how the humanities and the arts interact with science may be entertaining, but if we keep an eye on the prize, they take time away from learning practical skills.
The impracticality of having students design their projects reflects how much time is wasted. Students need to do their legwork to set up projects (e.g., one student had to arrange flights with a charter pilot to do aerial photography over the Galveston coast; students often have to build cheap versions of visualization systems – elite education should provide students with the equipment they need to acquire job skills). This means that students are burdened with having to handle needless logistics. Dealing with logistics and setup may be of value for trade school-type jobs, but that’s not what parents pay university tuition for.
An added hindrance to the project model is that some projects don’t work out. Students must then adjust or present what they learned from a failed project. That is impractical for students who must focus on efficiency and productivity for success in the real world. For science students, failed experiments have no market value. For art students, trying visualization techniques that don’t work does not lead to artistic products.
Beyond impracticality and wasted time, the class develops traits that work against market success. Having students explore nature within their city can build empathy for nature and fellow citizens interacting with nature under variable personal needs. In the real world of private interests, empathy is a disadvantage. It is not listed on job ads that students aspire to. This makes the class not only impractical but harmful in the real world.
Impracticality, waste, and non-marketable traits are hardly what students and parents are paying tuition for. Universities have come to see this. They have come to focus on private-market job skills in the interest of student success within the private sector. Concentrating on market values goes beyond just the interest of students; it feeds into the betterment of society.
The ideals of education as a public asset and of art and science as public resources have charm in principle. However, the best way to serve the public, in practice, is for universities to train the next generation to succeed in the private market. The self-interest instilled in the students will feed back to benefit society as a whole.
University faculty need to adopt the new university model regarding education and their work. Science faculty must ask themselves how to efficiently translate their research into the market. Private profits will then naturally feed to allow for more marketable research. Arts/humanities faculty need to ask how the products they produce can get into the private sector where they can be appreciated; if the private sector is unwilling to place value on the products, then that needs to be a lesson learned. As faculty ask these questions, they will also see what values they must pass on to students.
In being asked to ponder the questions above, it has been made clear that art-science crossover classes do not teach practical values and should be viewed as sideline projects (it is better to farm them out so faculty can focus on marketable research). It should likewise be clear to anyone who looks at the societal problems we may be having today that the way forward is for universities to focus more exclusively on marketable and, therefore, practical knowledge.
Marketable knowledge, business acumen, and entrepreneurial spirit will instill particular advantages in our students. It will entitle them to more tremendous personal success. That can only lead to greater societal good, can it not?
A Gallery of Impracticality: “Useless Results” from the Art-Science Crossover Education
EXAMPLE 1: The Largely Impractical
Aerial photograph over the Galveston Coast, TX. The image of the east beach jetty is from McKenna Mitchell’s project (Visualizing Nature: The Art and The Science, 2014). Human figures, which provide a sense of scale, can be seen on the right side of the image, upper third, near the land-water divide.
The project above required student work to arrange flights and handle logistics. Not only was time wasted on that but it was also wasted in the air. It’s more efficient to go to Google Earth and download aerial photos to do a coastal erosion analysis, a theme of the project. Time wasted on logistics and photography was taken away from the analysis, i.e., from learning analytic skills with job market value. Efficiency is also a job skill. The project taught inefficiency—impracticality stacked onto impracticality.
Impractical Minutia
Fluid drop photography from the project of Jackie Rios (Visualizing Nature: The Art and The Science, 2017). The drop photography was from the lab component of a visualizing fluid flow project. The field component looked at fluid flow within bayous and ponds within Houston.
Rather than train a student to use state-of-the-art laboratory equipment, the student had to build a cheap fluid visualization system. Better systems exist and are more efficient at getting photos like that above. The student said she learned patience by doing drop after drop after drop photos until one drop hit another mid-air, which took time. Patience is not a virtue in the modern world. Speed and efficiency in getting results out, and maybe even into the market, are far more critical. My science department was recently informed that faculty who publish only three papers yearly are falling behind in expectations. Science students need to be trained to meet those expectations.
The Impracticality of History
In Julia Casabarian’s Re-Photography project (Visualizing Nature: The Art and The Science, 2019), the student found historical images of Rice University and then returned to specific sites to re-photograph them. The old and new photos were imposed on each other to document changes in the environments of particular sites and changes in methods of visual documentation.
Universities were not always run on business models that focused on market values. However, times change, and universities need to change with them. Dwelling on history is not practical for any job skill beyond being a historian. Documenting historical change visually, as per above, may be fun but serves no job skills. One can also project forward visually, as the student did, and create pre-photography of what things could look like in the future (e.g., solar panel images laid over parking lot images). But such acts of imagination are hardly practical and serve no purpose. It is better to train the students to work for private market companies that can supply universities with the technology needed for the future.
The Impracticality of Place
Buffalo Bayou near its source in Katy, Texas, formerly known as Cane Island. The image is from a drone video by Conner Winn (Visualizing Nature: The Art and The Science, 2016). The full video (about 14 minutes long) tracks the path of the Bayou from source to sink at the Houston shipyard.
The project required the student to spend multiple hours outside of class flying a drone over Houston and its outskirts to track some running water and its interaction with the city and the people in it. The value of a connection to a place, to a town and its inhabitants, doesn’t serve the modern student at the contemporary university. The real value is in job skills that allow one to be part of the global economy. To be mobile. To have skills that aren’t tied to any particular place. One can add that having a student at an elite university have to wander the streets of the fourth largest city in America is not what parents pay tuition for. The video can be found here.
A Practically Useless Field Trip
A photo of someone shooting a video of someone taking a picture includes the photographer taking the photo of someone shooting a video …. From a Bayou Clean-Up project (Visualizing Nature: The Art and The Science, 2021).
A list of impracticalities associated with the project above:
1) All participants volunteered time;
2) No marketable clean-up products came off the project;
3) The video software aspects of the project – to find hidden trash – were explored with no intent of commercialization;
4) The section of the Bayou cleaned will only re-accumulate trash over time.
A short video documentation of the impractical project can be found here.
