Its just Silo Wars. I guess Wall Street Journal thinks using that as a title could come off as too click-baity.
Essentially, where do you house the CS department ? Inside the College of Arts & Science ? Inside the School of Engineering ? Or a separate autonomous School of Computing ?
This is how it plays out in reality - when I was a CS grad student, the department was part of A&S. Since Math is also Arts & Sciences, they had a huge influence. You could take Math courses instead of CS & get a degree in CS! So I did exactly that - took a graduate course in Graph Theory, PDE & Numerical Analysis from the Math department, & got out with a CS degree. Then I went to work for Sun Microsystems, where colleagues were surprised that I didn't know the difference between a raw socket & a tcp socket - shouldn't that be taught in school ? Well, I had skipped Computer Networking, Computer Graphics & Compiler Theory entirely by taking my 3 math courses. So that's what happens if you stick it into A&S - the Math faculty has too much influence.
3 years later, the CS department, now funded by NASA & the FBI, decided to move from A&S to School of Engineering. My advisor quit over that decision because he believed CS is part of Math. But then, other people joined & now Robotics, IoT etc gets taught - because engineering.
What's happening recently ( you can tell I live in a college town :) is that CS has gotten so big, its essentially eating up all the departments. So PhD students in EE, Math , Mech, Chem etc take 3 CS courses in the last semester - because, who wants to be an engineer/mathematician/etc when you can work at Google ? So those departments are like - get CS out of this place, let them have their own school so they don't pollute our students. I have several faculty kids who took this route - got the funding from EE, Mech etc but ended up working for Google after. So there's some justified backlash.
It's the classic liberal arts argument, applied to CS.
> None of the deans I spoke with aspires to launch, say, a department of art within their college of computing, or one of politics, sociology, or film. Their vision does not reflect the idea that computing can or should be a superordinate realm of scholarship, on the order of the arts or engineering. Rather, they are proceeding as though it were a technical school for producing a certain variety of very well-paid professionals. A computing college deserving of the name wouldn’t just provide deeper coursework in CS and its closely adjacent fields; it would expand and reinvent other, seemingly remote disciplines for the age of computation.
> [...] CS departments have been asked to train more software engineers without considering whether more software engineers are really what the world needs. Now I worry that they have a bigger problem to address: how to make computer people care about everything else as much as they care about computers.
dxbydt|1 year ago
Essentially, where do you house the CS department ? Inside the College of Arts & Science ? Inside the School of Engineering ? Or a separate autonomous School of Computing ?
This is how it plays out in reality - when I was a CS grad student, the department was part of A&S. Since Math is also Arts & Sciences, they had a huge influence. You could take Math courses instead of CS & get a degree in CS! So I did exactly that - took a graduate course in Graph Theory, PDE & Numerical Analysis from the Math department, & got out with a CS degree. Then I went to work for Sun Microsystems, where colleagues were surprised that I didn't know the difference between a raw socket & a tcp socket - shouldn't that be taught in school ? Well, I had skipped Computer Networking, Computer Graphics & Compiler Theory entirely by taking my 3 math courses. So that's what happens if you stick it into A&S - the Math faculty has too much influence.
3 years later, the CS department, now funded by NASA & the FBI, decided to move from A&S to School of Engineering. My advisor quit over that decision because he believed CS is part of Math. But then, other people joined & now Robotics, IoT etc gets taught - because engineering.
What's happening recently ( you can tell I live in a college town :) is that CS has gotten so big, its essentially eating up all the departments. So PhD students in EE, Math , Mech, Chem etc take 3 CS courses in the last semester - because, who wants to be an engineer/mathematician/etc when you can work at Google ? So those departments are like - get CS out of this place, let them have their own school so they don't pollute our students. I have several faculty kids who took this route - got the funding from EE, Mech etc but ended up working for Google after. So there's some justified backlash.
cbarrick|1 year ago
> None of the deans I spoke with aspires to launch, say, a department of art within their college of computing, or one of politics, sociology, or film. Their vision does not reflect the idea that computing can or should be a superordinate realm of scholarship, on the order of the arts or engineering. Rather, they are proceeding as though it were a technical school for producing a certain variety of very well-paid professionals. A computing college deserving of the name wouldn’t just provide deeper coursework in CS and its closely adjacent fields; it would expand and reinvent other, seemingly remote disciplines for the age of computation.
> [...] CS departments have been asked to train more software engineers without considering whether more software engineers are really what the world needs. Now I worry that they have a bigger problem to address: how to make computer people care about everything else as much as they care about computers.
beej71|1 year ago