Humanities at Rice vs. UVa

lilapense
Mon, 05 Apr 2010 14:07:33 +0000

“Still, the faculty and resources in most of the humanities at Rice are simply not as strong as in most of the sciences.”

This is something I hear time after time, and it usually comes from biased science or engineering majors who are arguing that humanities majors get less out of going to Rice. As a current political science major at Rice, I can assure you that the political science department is full of amazing professors, who just don’t get as much press because people are focused on lauding professors from the science and engineering departments. For example, Rice has Professor Ambler, who used to be the head of the Political Science department and is still around as a Professor Emeritus. He’s still teaching, is amazing, and you can take a course with him as early as the first semester of your freshmen year.

As for class size, I can’t say what the real numbers are off the top of my head, but most of the upper level poli sci courses seem to generally have around ten students enrolled, except in special circumstances where visiting professors are teaching a course.

As for TAs, there are few if any humanities and social sciences classes taught by them at Rice. Actually, that’s pretty much true across the board; even in science classes, the TA might lead labs or discussion sections, but almost ever class is taught by an actual professor.