TITLE: Computer Science is a Liberal Art
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: September 20, 2012  8:09 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
Over the summer, I gave a talk as part of a one-day conference
on the STEM disciplines for area K-12, community college, and
university advisors.  They were interested in, among other
things, the kind of classes that CS students take at the
university and the kind of jobs they get when they graduate.

In the course of talking about how some of the courses our
students take (say, algorithms and the theory of computing)
seem rather disconnected from many of the jobs they get (say,
web programmer and business analyst), I claimed that the more
abstract courses prepare students to understand the parts of
the computing world that never change, and the ones that do.
The specific programming languages or development stack they
use after they graduate to build financial reporting software
may change occasionally, but the foundation they get as a CS
major prepares them to understand what comes next and to adapt
quickly.

In this respect, I said, a university CS education is not job
training.  Computer Science is a liberal art.

This is certainly true when you compare university CS education
with what students get at a community college.  Students who
come out of a community college networking program often possess
specific marketable skills at a level we are hard-pressed to
meet in a university program.  We bank our program's value on
how well it prepares students for a career, in which networking
infrastructure changes multiple times and our grads are asked to
work at the intersection of networks and other areas of computing,
some of which may not exist yet.

It is also true relative to the industries they enter after
graduation.  A CS education provides a set of basic skills and,
more important, several ways to think about problems and
formulate solutions.  Again, students who come out of a targeted
industry or 2-year college training program in, say, web dev,
often have "shovel ready" skills that are valuable in industry
and thus highly marketable.  We bank our program's value on how
well it prepares students for a career in which ASP turns to JSP
turns PHP turns to JavaScript.  Our students should be prepared
to ramp up quickly and have a shovel in the hands producing value
soon.

And, yes, students in a CS program must learn to write code.
That's a basic skill.  I often hear people comment that computer
science programs do not prepare students well for careers in
software development.  I'm not sure that's true, at least at
schools like mine.  We can't get away with teaching all theory
and abstraction; our students have to get jobs.  We don't try
to teach them everything they need to know to be good software
developers, or even many particular somethings.  That should
and will come on the job.  I want my students to be prepared
for whatever they encounter.  If their company decides to go
deep with Scala, I'd like my former students to be ready to go
with them.

In
<A HREF="http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/09/20/how-long-will-there-be-computer-science-departments/#comment-235458">
   a comment</A>
on John Cook's timely blog entry
<A HREF="http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/09/20/how-long-will-there-be-computer-science-departments/">
   How long will there be computer science departments?</A>,
Daniel Lemire suggests that we emulate the model of medical
education, in which doctors serve several years in residency,
working closely with experienced doctors and learning the
profession deeply.  I agree.  Remember, though, that aspiring
doctors go to school for many years before they start residency.
In school, they study biology, chemistry, anatomy, and physiology
-- the basic science at the foundation of their profession.  That
study prepares them to understand medicine at a much deeper level
than they otherwise might.  That's the role CS should play for
software developers.

(Lemire also smartly points out that programmers have the ability
to do residency almost any time they like, by joining an open
source project.  I love to read about how
<A HREF="http://vocamus.net/dave/">
   Dave Humphrey</A>
and people like him bring open-source apprenticeship directly into
the undergrad CS experience and wonder how we might do something
similar here.)

So, my claim that Computer Science is a liberal arts program for
software developers may be crazy, but it's not entirely crazy.
I am willing to go even further.  I think it's reasonable to
consider Computer Science as part of the liberal arts for
everyone.

I'm certainly not the first person to say this.  In 2010,
<A HREF="http://cs.geneseo.edu/~baldwin/">
   Doug Baldwin</A>
and
<A HREF="http://max.cs.kzoo.edu/~abrady/">
   Alyce Brady</A>
wrote a guest editors' introduction to a special issue of the
ACM Transactions on Computing Education called
<A HREF="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1731042">
   Computer Science in the Liberal Arts</A>.
In it, they say:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
In late Roman and early medieval times, seven fields of study,
rooted in classical Greek learning, became canonized as the
"artes liberales"  [Wagner 1983], a phrase denoting the
knowledge and intellectual skills appropriate for citizens
free from the need to labor at the behest of others.  Such
citizens had ample leisure time in which to pursue their own
interests, but were also (ideally) civic, economic, or moral
leaders of society.

...

[Today] people ... are increasingly thinking in terms of the
processes by which things happen and the information that
describes those processes and their results -- as a computer
scientist would put it, in terms of algorithms and data.
This transformation is evident in the explosion of activity
in computational branches of the natural and social sciences,
in recent attention to "business processes," in emerging
interest in "digital humanities," etc.  As the transformation
proceeds, an adequate education for any aspect of life demands
some acquaintance with such fundamental computer science
concepts as algorithms, information, and the capabilities and
limitations of both.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

The real value in a traditional Liberal Arts education is in
helping us find better ways to live, to expose us to the best
thoughts of men and women in hopes that we choose a way to
live, rather than have history or accident choose a way to
live for us.  Computer science, like mathematics, can play a
valuable role in helping students connect with their best
aspirations.  In this sense, I am comfortable at least
entertaining the idea that CS is one of the modern liberal
arts.
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