So as every year, the Institute of Higher Education of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China has published their highly acclaimed
Academic Ranking of World Universities, ranking universities all around the world based on alumni's achievements - Noble Prizes, highly cited researches, etc.
Something that has really bothered me has caught my eye. They were ranking many different fields separately, to see which university was best at which field. They had chemistry, biology, mathematics, economics. They had not at all looked at humanities, not one bit. It's like philosophy, literature, linguistics, history - as if all of those were not even worthy to be taken into account. Seeing the categories, it's obvious that these fields have just been ignored completely. In fact the actual ranking of the universities was based on their alumni's achievements in exact sciences and social sciences (and it seems like when they say social sciences, they mean economics).
There was once a time when humanities were at the very core of higher and basic education; as technology becomes more and more complex, I can see why exact sciences are so important to us; however, it seems like this past century humanities are progressively deemed unimportant.
I'm a student of linguistics and Arabic literature; the most common response I get is about my fields being "useless". I honestly don't see how any field could be useless. The purpose of academic studies is research, it's getting a better understanding of the world around us, it's enriching our lives with knowledge.
I'm sure the study of computer sciences is much more profitable than philosophy; however losing those important fields, to me, feels like a loss too great to bear.
Discuss this, ARWU and general disregard toward humanities.
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