Some foolish notions. Engineering isn’t creative? Who knew?
And journalism is creative? Well, I guess the way that a lot of “jouralists” do it, it is. When it comes to that, though, I could actually use a little less creativity and more reality.
12 thoughts on “Creativity”
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All activities that people do, when raised to a sufficient level, are art, and the practitioners, artists.
Well Rand, MSNBC has done some quite creative editing and creative agitprop as of late.
Well, a lot of The Community-Organizer-in-Chief’s early appointees were found to have engaged in creative accounting.
People who don’t know math have to find *something* with which to buttress their egos. Hence “creativity” — creativity that excludes math.
Journalism is largely a major for those who found a Phys Ed degree or women’s studies degree too much of a challenge.
It seems all the Journalists I admire and respect come from a background outside of journalism.
I will give a pass for my bud Dennis Thompson who used to contribute to Space Today. I went to school with Dennis. Dennis knew if he pooched something space-related, I would hunt him down like a dog.
Funny, when I took a journalism course — in high school in the late seventies — we were taught that “creativity” as it is normally defined (i.e., artistic, original) was discouraged. Journalists were supposed to suppress their urges, should they have them, to write in “creative” prose and embellish stories in order to present a dry, factual account. And this wasn’t considered in any way shameful, but a standard characteristic of the job. (We were also taught that the editorial pages were a separate issue from reporting, and therefore of course didn’t have to follow the same rules.)
To the original point, I think Dean Brill picked the wrong explanation for why women are more attracted to certain fields than others. It’s not a question of creativity; neither sex can lay special claim to that ability. However, I believe it has been well established that women tend to be more drawn to relational fields. As a group, they are less likely to want to spend their days interacting with things and more likely to want to spend them interacting with people. That’s on average, but of course every one is an individual.
Take me, for instance, I’m perfectly happy to sit in front of a keyboard all day and interact mainly with machines. My wife is a teacher, and it would drive her crazy to spend all day on the computer. In contrast, my ideal day is one where I didn’t get interrupted much.
OK, the dean is clearly a poorly educated lackwit.
Engineering not creative? Tell that to I.M. Pei. Frank Lloyd Wright. Gustave Eiffel. Dr. Richard Gatling, or Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotine.
Or the engineers that worked at McDonnel Aircraft Co, and in designing the F4 Phantom, crammed ten pounds of crap into a 4 pound space. Same with the various successful spacecraft.
How about Debakey, making an artificial heart? Or Dr. Kolff, developing the human blood dialysis machine. Christian Barnard transplanting a heart? Tausig and Blalock (and Mr. Vivian Thomas, not a physician or engineer but a very smart cookie) who figured out how to perform open heart surgery on kids?
Clearly the dean is challenged by lightswitches. Just where the hell does she think that comes from? Farted out of magic unicorns?
The Fundamental fallacy is tat you can’t be both analytical and creative.
It tries to place people on a one dimension scale, when in fact people are multidimensional.
This drives me nuts, just like the liberal/conservative one dimensional scale.
Why hasn’t she been vilified by radical men’s groups for her bigoted support of teh matriarchy? Why does she still have a job after ol’ Larry put his foot in it and had to leave in disgrace?
What I find funny is her belief business schools are mostly male. The majority of students in the classes I teach in business have nearly always been women. The only exception was when I was teaching for a University at Laughlin AFB where the students were mostly pilots going for their MBA for promotion. Those classes were nearly all male.