@andrew_41: Aside from the fact that Shulevitz’s argument is “only half-unserious,” I wonder how representative a sample “SF authors I read” might be. Then there’s the matter of the role played by the humanities in the education of writers who come out of “science, engineering or programming.” And what of the readership? Just tech nerds? That’s not what I’ve observed in the decades I’ve been involved in SF culture. (And exactly where, I wonder, does a self-taught writer find the materials from which to learn? Do they spontaneously generate from the cultural matrix?)
In any case, the whole matter of evaluating a branch of education according to how many dollars its graduates generate is a kind of economic reductionism, which is one of the pathologies of the current corporatist worldview, akin to the narrow notion that the only duty a corporation has is to increase value for shareholders.
The humanities have never, at least in my lifetime, received the kind of support that engineering and the sciences have. I entered college on the heels of the post-Sputnik panic that resulted in buckets of money getting dumped into the educational system, and some of that slopped over into non-science fields. On the other hand, research in the humanities does not demand the kind of funding that the sciences do–we didn’t need to equip labs or employ armies of post-doc assistants. The biggest expense for, say, an English prof would be travel funds for attending conferences or (even more pricey) salary replacement for time off to actually do research and writing instead of grading stacks of essays. These days, even those crumbs have gotten scarce.
