I was reading through the National Post this morning and came across this article entitled, "
Social Sciences' Serious Image Problem."
The social sciences are always seen as the flighty older sister of the academic family, eternally straining to be taken seriously for nailing down ethereal wisps of knowledge when their more serious siblings in the so-called hard sciences are gaining accolades for researching a cancer cure or genome theory.
But when 8,000 PhDs from 80 scholarly associations across Canada get together to swap ideas about everything from the Bonoization of Democracy to the Significance of the Sock, there will be no time for such an inferiority complex.
Among the thousands of academic papers to be delivered during the week-long Congress, which begins a week from now at Toronto's York University, are titles about education, aboriginal rights, environmental ills, and warfare. There will be lectures from such academic luminaries as David Suzuki, Stephen Lewis and even the Ethics Commissioner, Bernard Shapiro.
But the annual brains-fest, otherwise known as the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, will also feature papers with titles such as "Cheese as Class Indicator in the Retail Market," "A Reflection of the Sock in Society," and "Opening, Closing and Revolving: Studies in Doorology."
Such titles are sure to elicit some guffaws and even calls of outrage about misguided government funding, but the people who ply their trade in this world are accustomed to this derision. "It is a constant struggle," concedes Donald Fisher, education professor at the University of British Columbia and president of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. "There is that sense that this knowledge isn't as useful, it isn't as concrete, it doesn't contribute economically, it doesn't have that obvious benefit...."
"We've always suffered from that image. What sometimes seems arcane and particularistic and sometimes remote is, when you actually unpack it, very relevant."
This kind of research is a particularly tough sell in a climate that favours results over process, where measurable is better, and where speculation about aesthetics is always trumped by the pragmatic.
All I have to say is, publishing papers called Studies in Doorology, or Cheese as Class Indicator definitely doesn't help people consider social sciences as a so-called hard science.
I think social sciences definitely has an image problem. From experience, I know that a lot of my friends from university would take courses in social sciences to boost their GPA because those courses were considered extremely easy to score an 'A' in. This is a very attractive prospect especially students who needed to maintain a certain GPA.
Furthermore, our department had certain guards against this perceived artifical GPA inflation. Our graduation GPA would only count senior courses within our program, so social science courses would be omitted from the calculation.
I remember when I was talking with one of my professors about grad school, and I was concerned about my GPA while applying into grad school. I had taken some fairly difficult computer science courses and my GPA was obviously lower compared to other students that took easier routes. My professor remarked that if he had two students, and one student took Basket Weaving 101 and got an A+ in it, and the other student took Advanced Computer Networks and got a B+, he would take the Advanced Computer Networks student.
So, there is a definite bias against social sciences in academia, or at least in the hard sciences.
Guffaw!
