On October 12, 2018, at the “Opportunities and Challenges: Humanities and Arts Education in World-class Science and Engineering Universities Forum,” Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) President Chen Shiyi said that first-class universities must have first-class liberal arts education.
“SUSTech is a new school. Naturally, there is no liberal arts tradition like at other universities. Our humanities education is not likely to be very large and complete, like Beijing University, Fudan University, and the National People’s Congress.”
More than 100 education experts from all over the world discussed how to run liberal arts education in science and engineering universities. For SUSTech, a young university founded only seven years ago; the conference is more an opportunity to showcase and publicize the development of its liberal arts department.
Chen Shiyi knew the challenges facing SUSTech, so he asked Chen Yuehong, former director of the Chinese Department of Peking University, to be responsible for developing SUSTech’s Humanities Center. Chen Yuehong agreed with Chen Shiyi’s ideas and basically clarified the path that SUSTech should take: “small and precise, high level, distinctive, moderate scale, and outstanding advantages.”
Why has China shunned the liberal arts?
We asked Chen Yuehong why Chinese universities had avoided liberal arts education and prioritized science and engineering education. He talked about the developments over the last 50 years, and the national focus on modernizing the national economy. Since the development of the economy relied on high-quality science and engineering education, Chinese institutions of higher education examined models from overseas that would see the rapid development for the people. With sections of the so-called “Soviet model” and Western institutions combined, Chinese universities sought to create specialist universities. The progress of universities sought to improve China’s industrial state, so Chinese higher education has been at the mercy of the economic need of the nation. Consequently, the liberal arts have been left aside. It was not until the 1980s that universities really started to consider the liberal arts as a potential area of academic investigation.
Chen Yuehong expanded on his thinking as to why there was further marginalization of the liberal arts in the 1980s. He believes following the opening up reform of the Chinese economy in the 1980s; the market economy model may have been the reason why the liberal arts may have overlooked. In the final years of the 20th century, the road of modernization saw the considerations of the Chinese state and the Chinese people come together, as foreign capital and technology came into the country. As the market economy flourished, interest in this area saw funds flock to economic and management disciplines instead of the liberal arts.
Chen Yuehong believes that more important issues had become to emerge following the development of the Chinese economy. There has been a need for innovation in the Chinese economy, and now there is a desire to lead. At this time, it has been realized that education models lasting for decades have lacked an examination of the liberal arts. This has meant there is no ability to cultivate innovative scientific talents.
He believes that this is the reason why China has not yet had a Nobel Laureate. The Nobel Prize has never been about the short-term needs of a country, but the desire to innovate and to think outside traditional areas. Since the motherland has been moving from traditional industries to new industries, and from traditional forms of engineering to smarter engineering in the digital ages, there has been a desire to innovate, but the need has not been there. The pool of talent is enormous, but the knowledge base and the structural ability to truly innovate at a scientific level has not yet developed.
Chen Yuehong admits that this is a challenge for education in China. For such a long time, the liberal arts have been separated from science and engineering, as early as middle school, and it is more severe at the university level. While there is a need for innovative talents now, there is still a requirement for the logical development of a knowledge base and structural development of talents.
Chen reflected on his 28 years of experience at Peking University. The problem has traditionally been that the liberal arts departments would not speak or collaborate with scientific or engineering departments, as they believed that they had no common purpose. Those that studied the liberal arts believed that their knowledge of science and engineering effectively ended at high school. As a result, there was a lack of knowledge of each other’s academic disciplines. Effectively, everyone worked in his or her own academic island, separate from everyone else. This is where things have to change.
What can history teach us about this separation?
Classic historical works of science do not have this antagonistic separation between science and liberal arts. Chen Yuehong referred to the Ancient Greek and Renaissance beliefs of the important links between art and science. While the Ancient Greeks determined some knowledge as “useless,” the belief of what was deemed useless then and now are very different things. Looking at the Renaissance, people think of Leonardo Da Vinci as an inventor and engineer, but also as an artist. At that time, there were no inter-disciplinary studies; there was just “knowledge.” History does not separate art and science; they were always intertwined.
When we look at the missionaries from Europe to preach in China, they were not merely religious scholars, but also navigators, mathematicians, doctors, painters, watchmakers, and astronomers. They had to be generalists covering a wide range of academic disciplines, but this model of thinking no longer exists in China. Chen Yuehong questions the distinction between the liberal arts and science. He believes that the distinction reflects national demand, and modern countries create “ideal knowledge” within a complete and systematic structure.
How to join the disparate “academic islands.”
Chen Yuehong bemoaned the separation of liberal arts from science and the cultural separation of academic disciplines into “academic islands.” He admitted that there are reasons for that, mostly through their invisible chains of contempt for the other and similarities around knowledge bases. In the end, the demand for each other will return, but that will take time. As a liberal arts scientist trying to build a liberal arts center in a science and engineering university, Chen Yuehong has to remind himself that he could not merely build his own fortress. He had to get into the science and engineering buildings to truly understand them.
He talked about artificial intelligence (AI) as a popular topic that crosses a wide range of topics. While scientists and economists have a lot to talk about when it comes to AI-related crises, there are plenty of opportunities for liberal scientists. They are opportunities around the history of algorithms and recent breakthroughs in technology. There are ethical and moral discussions that liberal scientists will be able to take the lead on, as well as legal arguments, just to mention a few. Ultimately, it is up to each liberal scientist to examine the cutting-edge of science and engineering to see where there are opportunities.
Chen Yuehong also talked about the development of driverless cars. He considered the ethical issues around the responsibility paradigm of a collision involving a driverless car. He also spoke of how technology will change the ethical and responsibility matrix. Chen referred to a lecture given by technical experts by Huawei, who said that in a 5G era, driverless cars would be able to react far faster than they would under the current 4G systems, so the collisions would not happen. He pointed out that this creates a new problem, as ethical problems of old become false propositions. If liberal arts scholars do not keep up with current technology and cutting-edge breakthroughs, their developments in liberal arts become obsolete far more quickly. It is essential for liberal arts scientists to understand the technology around them, to become better scientists.
Why study ethics?
Studying ethics is important, but it should not be everything. We cannot be the final arbiter of every ethical decision, but you should be able to bring your knowledge to help assist others in order to develop technology better. In this way, technology can be developed in a better way for society. Chen Yuehong looked back at AI, pointing out that there’s no reason to say what will happen to humans’ decades into the future as a result of AI. He said it’s better to look at the current situation and talk about what is actually happening with the applications of AI technology.
For example, are the currents applications of voice and facial recognition being used appropriately? While it is agreed that these technologies make our lives easier, the risks are also great, particularly around the violation of our privacy. Similarly, there is a lot of discussion and use of big data, but nobody really knows how the algorithms work that interprets that data. People can even examine the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or drone technology from a liberal arts perspective. While many would argue that it provides benefits for express deliveries and potentially for flying people from place to place, what would life be like if there are hundreds of thousands of tiny drones filling the skies dropping packages on thousands of balconies?
What is SUSTech doing in the liberal arts?
Chen Yuehong was using ethics as an example of one research direction for SUSTech’s Humanities Center. He is aiming to promote the creation of a humanistic, legal and ethical discipline system for AI while promoting human-centered values for technological progress. The School of Humanities and Social Sciences at SUSTech is also working to develop a large dialect phonetic database in its Speech Laboratory. Such a database could be used by police to work out where suspects are likely to come from, in order to solve cases.
There is an ongoing investigation into the relationship between science and fantasy, and between science and human imagination. Three hundred years ago, science fiction could become a reality after one hundred or two hundred years. However, these days the gap can be as little as ten years. Chen Yuehong cited the works of Liu Cixin, whose three pieces of fiction referred to scientific developments such as the detection of gravitational waves and quantum information technology, both resolved within ten years of the publication of his works. Science fiction research is, in Chen’s mind, a wonderful combination of literature and science, as it requires researchers to investigate the depth and breadth of human imagination, as well as writing science-fiction works. This was the reason behind the creation of the Center for Science and Human Imagination, which seeks to find the best way to combine science and imagination. Chen aims to create further interesting institutions that link the “academic islands,” further breaking down artificial barriers and creating more opportunities for interdisciplinary studies.
It was important to Chen Yuehong to point out that more than half of the professors, associate professors, assistant professors and full-time lecturers in the SUSTech Humanities Center have backgrounds in both science and the liberal arts. Chen himself studied geological exploration. Liu Yang, who teaches science fiction writing, has a Ph.D. in physics. Professor Tang Keyang, who graduated from Harvard School of Design, has studied precision instrument casting but also studied literature at North University and ancient Chinese art in Chicago.
Humans are also capital
We questioned Chen Yuehong on people’s assumption that the liberal arts are of “no practical value.” He bristled at this comment, calling it very one-sided. In this day and age, the liberal arts cultivate national spirit and quality, but also reflect a nation’s capital and productivity.
He pointed out that a product may be worth 10 yuan but can be sold for 20 yuan if it is transformed into a good. If that good is a high-quality good, it could be sold for 100 yuan. With a brand name attached to it, that good could be sold for 2000 yuan, and with a globally recognized brand name, it can be sold for 10000 yuan. Once that brand name is associated with it for a long time, it becomes a cultural relic, which has even more value or could be thought of as priceless. South Korea and Japan call their cultural relics cultural treasures, which can be sold for tens of millions of dollars. In modern society, the price of goods is closely tied to cultural values, so how can anyone say that culture is not inherently tied to capital and productivity?
A perfect example is the Harry Potter franchise. While J.K. Rowling wrote 7 novels, it has spawned movies, cartoons, TV series, online games, and numerous other products, what is the actual value of Harry Potter? We know that hundreds of millions of dollars have been generated from box office ticket sales, but what is the cultural value?
Chen Yuehong argued that a university’s liberal arts education could not be examined as improving people’s spiritual quality. In an age of AI, society lives in an age of productivity and an era of capital. Apple defeated Nokia, but not on the basis of it being a mobile phone. Steve Jobs designed the iPhone as a fashionable consumer good, which resulted in an entirely new direction for smartphones around the world. Why else would Huawei now team up with Leica to have two lenses in their phone? There is no practical or necessary purpose for a telephone to have multiple cameras. The human desire for products requires a deep understanding of human knowledge, so people who understand humans are of vital importance. As Bourdieu said, this is “cultural capital,” and you have to learn and use it!
Background:
Chen Yuehong, former professor of the Institute of Comparative Literature and Comparative Culture of the Chinese Department of Peking University, vice president of the Chinese Society of Comparative Literature and a member of Peking University’s State Council. He studied at Peking University for 28 years and served as the head of the Chinese Department of Peking University (2012-2016). He is currently a professor at SUSTech, dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and director of the Humanities Center.
