<p>I am a senior at Stanford majoring in the humanities. The academic culture here in regards to humanities is something I feel very strongly about. </p>
<p>In general, there is a lot of condescension from techies towards fuzzies. Perhaps they won’t laugh at fuzzies outright for their choice of major, but the attitude that many techies have is that the humanities are easy and useless. Most of my friends here are techies, and although they never insult me directly, I always sense this undercurrent of condescension from them. Sometimes, I feel pretty bad about it. When you do well and get good grades, but people always tell you it’s “because you’re a fuzzy” and all your classes are easy, it’s hard to feel a true sense of achievement. I know I should just believe in what I’m doing and not care about what other people think, but it’s hard when I’m surrounded by people who keep telling me that what I’m doing is worthless. </p>
<p>Not only is there condescension from techies towards fuzzies, there is condescension from techies towards other techies and fuzzies towards other fuzzies as well. Almost all engineering majors look down on MS&E, for instance. And some social science majors (mostly econ) look down on humanities majors because they perceive those majors to actually be useless (as in, unemployable). Basically, there is this notion of an academic hierarchy with majors ranked along a scale of techie to fuzzy: engineering majors like CS and EE are at the top, while humanities majors like English and philosophy are at the bottom. Natural science and social science are somewhere in the middle.</p>
<p>In short, condescension towards the humanities is a real problem here, and it’s one of the things I dislike most about Stanford. Not everyone thinks this way, but enough people do for it to be an issue.</p>