Pride in math illiteracy

Erin O'Connor, a professor in the English department at the University of Pennsylvania -- boy, I wish she'd been there in 1990 when I was scandalizing that department with my refusal to bow and scrape before the PC literary theorists and my insistence on publicizing this fact -- ponders the detrimental effect of the pride many humanities scholars take in their math illiteracy. From her blog:

Someone somewhere--perhaps even on this blog!--is going to say that Orzel is a self-important catastrophist and that it really does not make sense to blame those poor math-challenged, absent-minded humanists for a problem that might better be pinned on the usual suspects, the leaders academics love to hate. So let's just skip that step and talk about how it is the duty of college professors to embody an ideal of intellectual inquiry, awareness, curiosity, and ongoing learning; about how that requires a humbleness about what one does not know as well as a sober firmness about what one does know; and about how, within that obligation, a grandiose dismissal of entire fields of knowledge--as too hard, or too obscure, or whatever--such that the person doing the dismissing somehow elevates his or her academic cred with disciplinary colleagues, is way, way, way wrong. It sets a devastating example for students--and it does have an effect on the intellectual viability of our nation.

She said it better than I could.