Courting Culture in Computer Science
Batya Friedman
I began my talk today with the suggestion that computer scientists need more adequately to court culture. I have tried to provide a sense of what is meant by this idea through the structured and unstructured activities. Taken as a whole, these activities represent a position that education involves, among other things, a process of social transformation. Now, this is a powerful if not, unfortunately, loaded term because of recent discussions surrounding “political correctness”? and leads to ideas I do not have time to develop here. But because of the possibility of misinterpretation, I should at least mention that in my view social transformation is bounded by an objectivity. For partly through the nature of rigorous analytic scrutiny not everything goes. Not every position can be defended. Indeed, from a non-political perspective, it is the rigorous analytical scrutiny in consort with humanistic sensibilities that lead us as a discipline to respond constructively to the pressing social problems that arise out of our very practice.
Colby College
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