(Washington, DC) On a week when I got an article rejected almost instantly and then participated in an editorial committee for a different journal that celebrated our rising rejection rate, I just have to plug the Journal of Universal Rejection. Arguably the best journal in the entire universe, it rejects all submissions as not up to snuff.

From the instructions for authors:

The JofUR solicits any and all types of manuscript: poetry, prose, visual art, and research articles. You name it, we take it, and reject it. Your manuscript may be formatted however you wish. Frankly, we don’t care.

After submitting your work, the decision process varies. Often the Editor-in-Chief will reject your work out-of-hand, without even reading it! However, he might read it. Probably he’ll skim. At other times your manuscript may be sent to anonymous referees. Unless they are the Editor-in-Chief’s wife or graduate school buddies, it is unlikely that the referees will even understand what is going on. Rejection will follow as swiftly as a bird dropping from a great height after being struck by a stone. At other times, rejection may languish like your email buried in the Editor-in-Chief’s inbox. But it will come, swift or slow, as surely as death.

The Oberlin College Cultural Appropriation Controversy is almost certainly getting more attention than it deserves because it reinforces critiques of political correctness in higher education. Nevertheless, it provides an interesting case to consider the general questions: What is cultural appropriation, and when is it bad?

Some Oberlin students criticized Oberlin’s dining hall’s bánh mì and General Tso’s chicken as cultural appropriations. These are wonderfully ironic cases. Bánh mì is a French baguette sandwich with ingredients popular in Vietnam. It is a direct result of French colonialism, a perfect example of a creole or hybrid cultural product. Without cultural appropriation, there could be no bánh mì in the first place. General Tso’s chicken has obscure origins but is most widely thought to have been invented in New York City by chefs of Chinese origin.

I start with the assumption that there is no such thing as cultural purity. We are all creoles, all the way down. We have been in contact with each other all along, naturally and inevitably borrowing, sharing, and stealing. Even supposedly “uncontacted” peoples deep in the rain forest have actually been in close contact with others for thousands of years. Claims of cultural purity and authenticity are almost always problematic, morally as well as factually.

And yet the critical students at Oberlin were making some valid points. To borrow a cultural product is to enter a relationship with someone else. That can be done respectfully and gratefully or rudely and exploitatively. In other words, it involves ethics. Also, it can be done skillfully–so as to produce an excellent product (possibly one never seen before)–or else poorly. In other words, it involves aesthetics. The Oberlin students are saying that their college dining hall’s Asian food has been borrowed disrespectfully and also poorly.

Those can be fair points, but we don’t often conduct such conversations well—for two large and important reasons. Because of positivism, we are not good at talking about ethics. And because we accept deep social inequality, we tend to overlook the material conditions of fine culture.

To the first point: We live at a time when science has enormous prestige, and science cannot address value judgments except to recognize that human beings form them for various reasons. Science suggests that there are two buckets: facts and evidence go in one; values, emotions, preferences and tastes, and personal identities go in the other. To say that Oberlin’s bánh mì are bad is not a factual claim, so it must involve emotion, preferences, and identities. That means that we cannot reason deliberatively with people who might hold different views of Oberlin’s bánh mì or of culture more generally. We can only express opinions that have strong emotional charges and that are linked to our identities. So to take a position on either side is to harm emotionally people who have different identities.

I would not dismiss the significance of emotion or identity. We must be sensitive of both. But we can also deliberate about relatively subtle, charged, and complex questions like food and culture. More than one perspective is valid, and each position can be supported with arguments and reasons. Opinions can change; the group can learn. Expressing a view is not necessarily a threat to other people; it can be an opportunity to reason.

In a positivist and relativist culture, scholars in the humanities and cultural disciplines are basically taught to suppress value judgments–yet certain strong values break through that screen because they are irrepressible and because political movements stand behind them. So even though value judgments are deemed to be culturally relative, it is wrong to be sexist, racist, or colonialist. I agree that those attitudes are wrong, but I see them as just the tip of a submarine mountain of ethical issues, all complex and all deserving of analysis.

When I was writing my book about Dante, I first encountered the view held by certain scholars that cultural appropriation is intrinsically bad. For instance, it was intrinsically problematic that Byron appropriated Dante’s medieval Italian culture for liberal nationalism. My response was: let’s think about when and why various forms of cultural borrowing are good or bad for various people. That is to reason about ethics, which is countercultural for many scholars. (Aaron R. Hanlon has a good response to the Oberlin controversy, calling for a distinction between “appropriation,” which should be value-neutral, and “expropriation,” which is bad and requires a critical argument.)

The second issue is inequality and the material conditions of successful borrowing. The dining hall staff of Oberlin College may not have been given the support they would need to do a good job providing Asian food–or original, “fusion” food. That would take experience, support, and time. Absent those supports, it’s possible that they should stick to what they know best (which will not be culturally pure or authentic, but simply a list of recipes of miscellaneous origin that are familiar to them). Or it’s possible that someone should help them try new things. But it definitely takes resources to engage well with any unfamiliar culture.

In many a Yuppie household (such as mine), people frequently dine in fine restaurants that serve foods from around the world, occasionally travel to distant lands, attempt to learn other languages, and have rows of cookbooks from many cuisines that they use to cook their own food. For instance, we were able to spend the winter break in Guadeloupe, and last night I cooked Chicken Colombo, which is a Guadelopean fusion dish strongly influenced by South Asian indentured workers. Meanwhile, in many families, the adults cook what they learned from their own parents. I remember chatting with a bunch of working-class immigrant high school students from Hyattsville, MD who were amused (more than offended) that Yuppies cook food other than “their own.”

The differences between these two kinds of households may depend in part on personal tastes and proclivities and on local cultural norms. For instance, Mexican/Asian fusion cuisines are famously widespread in San Bernardino County, California. But there is also certainly a socioeconomic aspect of this difference. I cooked Chicken Colombo last night because we could afford to visit Guadeloupe. One reason we visited that island is that we have had opportunities to learn French. And we were comfortable eating food unfamiliar to us because our neighborhoods have long been full of diverse restaurants. These are forms of material support.

I don’t know anyone at Oberlin, but I can imagine two kinds of hypothetical characters: a Yuppie student who despises the college’s bánh mì because she grew up with better ones, and a working-class immigrant student who is offended that the college serves “someone else’s” cuisine because she hasn’t had an opportunity–yet–to sample and cook foods from around the world. Material inequality is relevant to both perspectives. Without sufficient resources, it is simply harder to make something ethical and creative out of a cultural interaction.

The expectation is widespread that colleges should provide pathways to prosperity and success for individuals–and also make the distribution of wealth and power in the whole society more fair and equitable. Higher education seems to have that potential because it does promote upward mobility for individuals. Even if you are born in the bottom fifth of the income distribution, if you attain a college degree, your chances of staying in the bottom fifth are only 1 in 10.

But the results at the national scale are disappointing. Only a few (14.5%) of children born in the bottom quintile complete a four-year degree. The pressure for higher education to promote economic mobility better comes from various quarters–conservative governors angry that college degrees aren’t aligned with employers’ needs, technocratic liberals in the Obama administration trying to push down college costs, and campus activists demanding that student populations be representative of the national population in terms of race and social class.

The pressure is understandable, and much of it is valid, but we must squarely face the reasons that higher education does not promote mobility if we want to improve results.

College graduates represent the upper strata of society. About 40% of US adults hold college degrees, and they increasingly fill the top 40% of the slots in the whole socioeconomic hierarchy. That is why it is good advice to an individual student to complete college. Four-year colleges intentionally prepare their students to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, business leaders, and teachers, not bus drivers, receptionists, or construction workers. That’s what they offer; that is what they’re for. It means that the alumni body, almost by definition, will not represent the socioeconomic profile of the country.

The alumni could, however, represent the racial and gender diversity of the country if race and class were decoupled. And the alumni could come from economically representative backgrounds. Half of college students could be raised in homes below the median income, even though, as alumni, they would occupy the top 40% of the socioeconomic scale. That would imply a great deal of upward mobility, and it’s one criterion of justice (justice as an equal chance to succeed).

The barriers, however, are serious. One obstacle is that we don’t have an expanding middle class. Adjusted for inflation, the median US family earned $54,000 in 2014, about $4,000 less than in 1999. If families in the middle are becoming worse off, then upward mobility for some implies downward mobility for others.

That zero-sum model is an oversimplification, but there really are only so many jobs for lawyers, doctors, engineers, and corporate executives. Families who already stand in the top 40% will fight tooth and nail to keep their own kids in that tier instead of trading their spot with someone from further down the hierarchy. They will spend whatever they must on housing, k-12 education, and extracurriculars; apply whatever pressure they need on their alma maters; and take full advantage of their social networks to keep their kids ahead of the median. They may value both racial and socieconomic diversity as educational assets, but not to the extent that they are willing to give up a spot at a top college to someone else’s kid. And it is highly implausible that raising their consciousness about injustice will change their behavior. I can think of no comparable outcome in human history. People at the bottom of hierarchies do achieve change by obtaining power, but not by making the people at the top feel bad.

We might think that by investing in human capital, we could expand the middle class and make space for more people above a real income of $54,000. To some extent, that is both possible and important. But my sense is that left-of-center economists are now criticizing the human capital thesis. Yes, individuals who have more valuable skills, more elite social networks, and more cultural capital will beat out the competition for desirable jobs, which is why a college degree predicts high earnings. But raising the proportion of people with college degrees–as we have done–does not make the society more equitable, because other factors are increasing inequality. Prime suspects are deregulation, capital mobility, and monopoly power.

Finally, at the individual level, a person must move a long way from the levels of financial, human, social, and cultural capital available at the bottom of the economic hierarchy to reach the levels that are expected for candidates for great jobs. It is implausible that you can move nearly far enough during four years that start at age 18. To the extent that higher education is a path to upward economic mobility, it is near the last mile of that path. Colleges and universities compete for applicants from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds who have already received unusual support from families, community groups, and k12 schools. Colleges can play a useful role by a) being aggressive about finding these applicants, the ones who are ready to move the last mile, and by b) serving such students well. But they are not going to get disadvantaged kids 80% of the way. They offer too little, too late.

These are reasons that higher education is unlikely to make more than a modest dent in the inequality problem. To address that problem in a serious way, we need different economic policies. In a different political-economic climate, colleges and universities could do their jobs (educating students and producing knowledge) with less injustice. Given the reality, I believe our top priority is to understand the inequality problem better and to make the knowledge that we produce more politically significant. I don’t mean only economic research and policy advocacy but also normative inquiry, cultural critique, social experimentation, public dialogue, and a range of other research-related activities. Meanwhile, we must deal with an unjust context as ethically as we can, which means handling matters like admissions, hiring, and retention thoughtfully  while also acknowledging the inadequacy of these responses to the underlying problem.

[PS: I read later today that “colleges themselves are responsible for about 5 percent of the variation in students’ earnings later in life,” which reinforces my argument here.]

Here is a model for a new kind of college that I think could compete well with the available choices today, put beneficial pressure on the whole market, and avoid the “institutional isomorphism” that makes so many of our colleges and universities similar to each other. In a sentence: It is a co-op college in which the faculty and students jointly produce scholarship and learning at low cost. The college is organized democratically, but not because democratic values are intrinsically superior or identical to intellectual values. (I have argued against those claims here.) Rather, the organization of this college is democratic and participatory because it is a common property regime. That form of economic organization can be highly successful, but only when all participants feel that they have a voice to match their obligations.

I’d suggest these features:

Location: It would be a commuter college (no dorms) in a large metro area with a shortage of high-quality existing slots for undergraduates. Los Angeles is an example. The facilities could be relatively cheaply reconfigured buildings, such as a former school.

Business model: The sticker price would be $11,000. With a student/faculty ratio of 10:1, that yields $110k per professor, which is plenty to cover salaries and benefits plus facilities and a small support staff for maintenance, IT, and accounting. (The mean associate professor’s salary in English is $62,000; in the natural sciences, $67,590). These numbers would compare favorably to UCLA–which I respect deeply–where the average student pays $13,723 and the student/faculty ratio is 17:1. I envision a student body of 1,000 and a faculty of 100.

Professors’ responsibilities: The teaching load would be two courses per semester. Faculty would be expected to be active researchers. They would also populate committees that would fully handle admissions, counseling, curriculum, hiring, tenure and promotion, discipline, and external relations. Especially heavy responsibilities, such as chairing a major committee, might earn a course release. There would be no full-time administrators, but professors would serve elected terms as leaders with titles like president, provost, and dean, and would have limited course loads for the duration. The whole faculty would also meet for deliberations and governance.

Student responsibilities: Students would meet as a kind of legislative body in a bicameral arrangement with the faculty for some decision-making purposes. Some students would also be elected to serve on committees along with faculty and to provide other forms of leadership. For instance, instead of coaches and extramural athletics, there would be strong student-led intramurals and club sports. Although faculty would be involved in counseling of various kinds, students would also play essential roles in helping their peers. Some jobs might be eligible for Federal Work Study, which would reduce the $11k sticker price for those with greater need.

A board of trustees. The faculty and students would elect a board of trustees, including a few of their own number along with prominent outsiders. This board would serve as an accountability and review committee and would be able to lend their blessing to the whole enterprise.

Culture: I would recommend not especially targeting zealous proponents of alternative economics for either the student body or the faculty. I believe groups dominated by people with that kind of motivation tend to devolve into ideological hair-splitting and factional strife. (See Jenny Mansbridge‘s work on 1960s communes–or think of the French Revolution.) Instead, I would be looking for pragmatists with maturity and people-skills, along with academic excellence and diversity of various kinds. I’d recruit the faculty from a generation of talented and dedicated younger scholars who are facing a terrible job market. I’d look for students with a high potential to benefit from the experience–in other words, not necessarily the highest test scores or GPAs, but serious interest in learning in a no-frills environment.

Curriculum: This would be developed and modified by the group, deliberatively over time. It would be disappointing if the results failed to be unusual. That would be a waste of the opportunity to innovate, given the absence of traditional silos and barriers. But it wouldn’t necessarily be wise to create one curriculum for everyone. Diversity and choice are not only intellectual values; they prevent self-governing groups from splintering over matters of principle. Specifically, there is a kind of conversation that goes: “‘X is important, so X should be a required topic of study for all.’ ‘Well, if X is important, so is Y, and why isn’t that required?'” (Repeat endlessly.) I’d expect some coherence and some distinctiveness to emerge in a wholly new college with a democratic process, but if I were in the deliberations, I’d probably be a voice for individual choice.

National attention has turned to political debates and conflicts at one flagship Land Grant state university and one Ivy League. Mizzou and Yale exemplify the whole higher education system, which is a political flashpoint–for good reasons.

On one hand, universities are designed to stand somewhat aside from the political/economic system, to be independent of the usual power structures, and to supply, teach, and encourage critical analysis. On the other hand, they are absolutely pivotal to maintaining the political/economic system that exists, with all of its flaws as well as its virtues.

Racism is the main topic of the current activism. I fully concur with the importance of racial injustice on campuses. (See Jelani Cobb‘s summary, although Conor Friedersdorf‘s response is also valuable and not diametrically opposed.)

If you want a detailed, sophisticated, critical view of racism in America, higher education is one important place to find it. Many faculty share the critical diagnosis. And the most prestigious universities supply some of the most sophisticated and trenchant criticism.

At the same time, only 4 percent of full professors in America are Black. Young White adults are twice as likely to have a college degree as young African Americans (40% versus 20%), due to an accumulating series of racial gaps in k12 promotion and retention, high school graduation, college admission and retention, and on-time graduation. Their lower college graduation rates are one indication of a generally less supportive and satisfying educational experience for students of color. Given the demographics of faculty and students, the culturally dominant group is almost always White, and they have the whole symbolic heritage of the universities behind them. Finally, these institutions exist in blatantly unjust larger communities. Mizzou is the flagship university of the state that encompasses Ferguson. Yale is in the heart of New Haven, where the NAACP reports that 25% of Black families live below the poverty line, 18.9% of Black children have asthma, and no public school sees more than 28% of its graduates achieve a college degree.

Racial issues are thus unavoidable and supply telling examples of the contradictions built into higher education. But the contradictions extend further. For instance, if you want a trenchant and sophisticated critique of Wall Street, an excellent place to look is in the classrooms and journals of the finest American universities. One stream of critique is economic, but you can also find critical views of the culture, psychology, and even the aesthetics and spirituality of 21st century capitalism. An institution like Mizzou or Yale is designed to be safe from the incentives and pressures that dominate contemporary capitalism so that it can provide an independent view; hence the rules that govern tenure, academic freedom, etc.

Yet these institutions produce the people who actually take over and profit from contemporary global capitalism. The financial services industry employs more members of the Yale class of 2013 (14.8%) than any other other field. Consulting employs another 11.6% of that class. Many more Yalies apply to but don’t get Wall Street jobs right away. And of the 18.2% who go straight to graduate school, many are heading to finance via law school or business school. From a different perspective, we can say that Wall Street is dominated by graduates of institutions like Yale.

So these colleges select the global economic elite, disproportionately choosing the children of the current elite. They expose them to four years of critique of the global economic system–some of it very gentle and subtle, and some fairly blatant. Students see implicit alternatives to contemporary capitalism when they study Dante or Buddha in a seminar room, and they get direct criticisms in social science and philosophy classes. These experiences probably sharpen their minds and skills before they proceed in disproportionate numbers to take over the dominant political/economic institutions of the world and to fund the universities that chose and prepared them so well.

All kinds of odd practices and situations arise. For instance, Yale has $2.4 million of endowment per student, sufficient to generate about $112,000 of annual revenue per student. Given Yale’s faculty/student ratio of 6.1:1, that means the university gets about $683,000 per professor per year from its endowment funds. Yet it charges the students a sticker price of more than $50,000 and constantly solicits its alumni for donations to make enrollment affordable. The institution presents itself as a tax-deductible nonprofit philanthropy devoted to light and truth, yet it is also a corporation with $23.9 billion in the bank. Many of its faculty see themselves as critics of the status quo, yet they work in an institution that replicates it.

I love these places. They have been very good to me–Yale more than any other institution. They have broadened my mind and given me whatever skills and passions I have for analyzing social justice. They create zones of debate and critique that are freer and more vibrant than most other sectors of our society, and they encompass more diversity than most of our neighborhoods and work sites. To the extent that we have any upward mobility, they provide some of the upward paths. They permit and even encourage the criticism that is directed at themselves. At the same time, they are pillars of social injustice. No wonder they stand in the crosshairs today.

The Washington Center for Internships selects the annual New York Life Higher Education Civic Engagement Award, and the 2015 award went to us at Tufts University along with Dominican University, John Carroll University (Ohio), Rutgers University-Camden (N.J.), and Weber State University (Utah).

These institutions are all wonderfully different, and the award emphasizes the many ways that colleges and universities can educate their own students for citizenship and strengthen public life in America.

At Tufts, we have two distinctive advantages.

First, we have elevated civic engagement to a high institutional priority. Unlike a typical school of public policy or public affairs, the Tisch College of Citizenship & Public Service at Tufts is charged with reaching all the students and faculty of the whole university, regardless of their majors, degree programs, and disciplines. And unlike a center for public engagement or service, the college has a dean who serves as a peer with the deans of Arts & Sciences, Medicine, and the other Tufts colleges and thereby influences the direction of the whole university. Tisch College is the epicenter of civic engagement at Tufts, collaborating closely with all the other schools.

Second, since we are a research university, we contribute to civic life by studying it and by conducting high-end research in collaboration with civil society. The award application asked for one example of a civic engagement program at each applicant’s campus, and we cited the Community Assessment of Freeway Exposure and Health (CAFEH) project. I’ve written about CAFEH before, but the essential points are that the idea came from community groups; they worked with Tufts on sophisticated, federally-funded science; and the results include not only more than 20 peer-reviewed articles but also local policies meant to address a really serious health problem (fine particulate pollution from highways). This is just an example, but it well illustrates how a research-intensive university can support civic life.

The blurbs on the other four winners are also inspiring and informative.

Don Ritchie reports,

On 8 September 2015, a 20-year struggle culminated in a ruling from the US Department of Health and Human Services that specifically excludes the following from human subject regulation: “Oral history, journalism, biography, and historical scholarship activities that focus directly on the specific individuals about whom the information is collected.”

I see this ruling as a vindication of First Amendment rights, but I don’t think it should be limited to the four named forms of research. People have the right to talk to others and to communicate what they learn. People also have the right to be talked to. In almost any form of talk, it is possible to violate ethical principles or even laws. For instance, you can commit fraud, libel, conspiracy, or harassment by speaking. But a government requirement to seek prior approval for talk is highly problematic on constitutional grounds and violates liberal principles.

I want to emphasize that I have no personal problem with seeking Institutional Review Board approval for my own research or that of my team. We get IRB approval many times a year. Our own IRB is professional, efficient, and helpful. We have never been rejected or significantly delayed. We have the capacity to handle the paperwork without hardship. My objection is not to our IRB but to federal policies–and I worry about the practical impact on other people in less fortunate circumstances.

Imagine the editor of a newspaper in a police state whose local police authorities are unfailingly polite and helpful, actually trying to support her journalism. This editor must seek prior approval for all her reporting, but it is given cheerfully and quickly. Nevertheless, her freedom has been abridged, as have the rights of the people she might choose to interview. And there is a potential for more concrete harms if the local police are not so benign.

Some Q&A’s:

What about the Tuskegee experiments and other violations of basic human rights conducted under the name of “research”? These are horrifying cases but they do not centrally involve speech. They involve giving or withholding physical treatments. They should be strictly regulated. (By the way, I would also favor the regulation of talk therapies that are comparable to medical procedures, but I don’t think surveys or interviews constitute therapies.)

Can’t you do just as much damage with words as with physical interventions? First of all, yes, you can. But that is a problem with free speech in general, not particularly with research. Journalists and bloggers can do more harm than professors because their audiences are bigger. A thoughtful argument for free speech acknowledges the potential for harm but still defends the First Amendment. Second, the kinds of harms that researchers do with words tend not to be prevented by IRB approval. Social scientists do the most damage when they argue for terrible policies, like mass incarceration, invading Iraq, or slashing taxes in order to raise revenues. IRB have no relevance to those examples. And third, prior censorship is not the best way to handle harmful speech. It is better to criticize, punish or remediate speech after it occurs. Prior censorship puts the burden in the wrong place and gives too much power to the regulators. It prevents information from even being collected, thus precluding speech that might turn out to be highly valuable.

What about research on children and prisoners? When a research subject is vulnerable, the ethical demands rise. I am not unalterably opposed to IRB review of research involving minors and prisoners. However, I remain skeptical even in those cases. First, children and prisoners have the right to be studied and to be understood. Although they can be harmed by research that (for instance) violates their privacy, they can also be harmed by rules that discourage scholars from studying them. Our presumption should favor speech, not block it. Second, prior review is only one possible approach to protecting vulnerable populations. Another option is to publish rules that guide matters like obtaining permission from minors and prisoners and then subject scholars to sanctions when they violate those rules. Again, prior review is dangerous because it prevents information from being collected, and that power can be abused.

Won’t universities be vulnerable to lawsuits unless they closely monitor their researchers’ interactions with subjects? I do not understand the relevant law well enough to know whether, if Prof. A harms a subject by interviewing her, Prof. A’s institution could be liable for damages. But even if that is the case, the solution is not to require prior permission for research that involves talk. I’d rather see the law put all the responsibility on Prof. A.

Free speech is under threat in universities today. One little part of the threat is political correctness of various sorts, which leads to short-sighted policies and decisions. But much larger threats are bureaucratic: the erosion of tenure, excessive IRB review, too much influence by funders, too much control by central administrations who are too risk-averse and too concerned about reputation. The HHS decision about oral history and journalism is a step in the right direction, but I fail to see the distinction between these forms of talk and many others that are still reviewed by IRBs.

I constantly see evidence that people are confused about phrases like “the liberal arts,” the “arts & sciences,” and “the humanities.”  Although some of my definitions may be controversial, I thought a lexicon might be helpful:

The liberal arts encompass the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. These disciplines are meant to be valuable irrespective of their utility as preparation for careers. The root meaning is that they are appropriate for a gentleman or -lady. In the middle ages, it was common to list seven liberal arts, often the following: music (which was really music theory), arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The last three were about language, whereas the first four were about nature. Philosophy and theology were sometimes substituted or added to the list, and philosophy has subsequently given rise to a range of liberal arts, from anthropology to zoology.

The phrase arts & sciences seems to be synonymous with liberal arts but avoids the modern implication that the “arts” exclude the sciences.

The humanities involve the interpretation of human culture. Interpretation generally takes the form of insightful description, whether organized over time (as narrative) or across space, but the humanities also encompass theorizing about human culture and applying such theories. By this definition, the humanities encompass the study of literature, music, and the arts. They also include portions of history (cultural history and historical narrative), anthropology (qualitative cultural anthropology/ethnography), political science (normative political theory), and philosophy (history of philosophy and some approaches to ethics and political philosophy). Many would disagree, but I believe that the rigorous moral assessment of human phenomena is intrinsic to the humanities, whereas science claims to separate facts from values.

The social sciences investigate the human world in ways analogous to the natural sciences, meaning that they generally seek to classify, model, and/or explain human phenomena. So a historian who tells the story of Boston’s development is a humanist, but a historian who tries to model the causes of urban growth is a social scientist. The social sciences can be primarily qualitative, quantitative, or theoretical. The line between the humanities and social sciences cuts through departments; the criterion is whether the research is analogous to natural science.

The behavioral sciences do not seem to me sharply distinguishable from the social sciences, but they put human mental states (such as choices and responses) at the center, as opposed to social systems and processes. They tend to employ the elaborate toolkit of empirical psychology rather than other methods.

The arts (in the context of a university) involve the actual production of cultural products, from ceramics and paintings to dance performances and music.

The natural sciences investigate nature, sometimes including human beings as natural species. They thus encompass not only mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and their offshoots but also some forms psychology, anthropology, and philosophy.

Engineering, computer science and related fields do not investigate nature but rather aim to change nature through deliberate interventions.

The professional disciplines aim to understand and teach the techniques, ethics, and underlying principles applicable to particular socially constructed professions, ranging from those that are strictly licensed (e.g., medicine and law) to those that are more loosely and informally defined (business, journalism).