Us_Academia

 Was reading this morning how Jon Ossoff was a coming star in the US

Democratic party. But consulting his bio in Wikipedia did leave me with a question:

https://share.gemini.google/6OhLzQ2YROue

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Copilot:

'Ossoff is a 2009 graduate of Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service with a Bachelor of Science in culture and politics.' Read this description of a US Senator's biography on Wikipedia and it seems odd to me. How can one have a science degree in culture??

It does sound odd at first glance, but in the U.S. university system the phrase "Bachelor of Science" (B.S.) does not necessarily mean the subject itself is a natural science like physics, chemistry, or biology.

There are two separate things here:

The degree type: Bachelor of Science (B.S.) versus Bachelor of Arts (B.A.).

The major: Culture and Politics.

At many American universities, a social-science or interdisciplinary programme may award a B.S. even though its subject matter involves culture, politics, economics, international relations, or public policy rather than laboratory science.

In Ossoff's case, the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown is a specialised school focused on international affairs. "Culture and Politics" is an interdisciplinary major that examines questions such as:

How culture influences political behaviour.

Nationalism and identity.

Religion and politics.

Ethnic conflict.

Globalisation and cultural change.

International relations viewed through historical and social-science lenses.

The "science" part of the degree usually refers to the programme's emphasis on systematic analysis, research methods, social-science theory, statistics, economics, and empirical study, not test tubes and microscopes.

A rough analogy would be:

B.Sc. in Economics: common, even though economics is not a natural science.

B.Sc. in Psychology: also common, despite studying human behaviour.

B.Sc. in Culture and Politics: less common, but based on the same idea.

In fact, many subjects sit in a grey zone. Political scientists, economists, sociologists, and psychologists often use scientific methods (hypothesis testing, statistical analysis, surveys, modelling), which is why universities sometimes classify them as sciences.

So the wording is not saying that culture itself is a science. Rather, it means Ossoff completed a programme called Culture and Politics and Georgetown chose to award that programme as a Bachelor of Science degree.

Your reaction is shared by many Europeans and Canadians, because North American universities can be surprisingly liberal in how they use the B.A./B.S. distinction. In some cases, two students studying nearly the same material at different universities may graduate with different degree titles simply because of institutional tradition.

Are there universities in Canada that make this distinction?

Yes, although generally Canadian universities tend to be a bit more conservative than American ones in their degree titles.

For example, at Concordia University, Political Science is offered as a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), not a B.Sc. Likewise, the University of Waterloo awards a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science.

That said, Canada definitely has programmes where social-science subjects receive science-oriented degrees:

Psychology can be taken as a B.Sc. at McGill.

McGill also offers interdisciplinary B.A. & Sc. degrees that combine Arts and Science approaches, including Political Science and Psychology.

The deeper issue is that the distinction between B.A. and B.Sc. is often historical and administrative rather than philosophical.

A political science department might award:

a B.A. if it emphasizes history, political theory, and qualitative analysis;

a B.Sc. if it emphasizes statistics, formal modelling, economics, polling, and quantitative research methods.

Indeed, if you look at modern political science journals, much of the work involves statistics, survey design, econometrics, and data analysis. Some political scientists spend more time with datasets than historians do with archives.

Your reaction may also reflect an older understanding of the word science. In French and in much of Europe, science is often understood primarily as the natural sciences. In the English-speaking academic world, however, universities commonly speak of the social sciences: economics, political science, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and so on.

So a Canadian degree called"B.Sc. in Culture and Politics" would still be unusual, but not absurd. The more typical Canadian label would probably be B.A. in Culture and Politics, whereas an American institution such as Georgetown is somewhat more willing to attach a B.S. designation to an interdisciplinary social-science programme.

Interestingly, the very name "political science" dates from the 19th century, when scholars hoped that the study of government could become as systematic and evidence-based as the natural sciences. Whether they fully succeeded is still a matter of debate!

I think it had to do with the practice of publishing journals in a particular field...

You've put your finger on an important historical point.

The term "science" originally had a much broader meaning than it commonly does today. It comes from the Latin scientia, meaning simply "knowledge." For centuries, a science was essentially any organised body of knowledge.

One reason disciplines fought to be recognized as sciences was indeed the emergence of the modern research university and scholarly journals in the 19th century. Fields such as economics, sociology, political science, and psychology sought to establish themselves as rigorous academic disciplines by:

founding professional associations;

creating peer-reviewed journals;

developing specialised research methods;

collecting data systematically;

building theories that could be tested and criticized.

Political science, for example, wasn't merely the study of politics in the old sense of reading philosophers like Plato or Locke. Scholars wanted to study voting, institutions, revolutions, public opinion, and government behaviour in a way that resembled the growing prestige of the natural sciences.

This is why many academic disciplines acquired names ending in "-ology" or incorporated "science" into their titles. The label signalled: "We aren't just discussing ideas; we're conducting research according to recognised methods."

That said, there has always been a debate. Critics argue that human beings, cultures, and societies do not behave with the predictability of atoms or planets, so the social sciences can never be sciences in quite the same sense as physics or chemistry. Supporters reply that even if human behaviour is more complex, it can still be studied systematically and empirically.

Your observation about journals is especially relevant because, in academia, a field often gains legitimacy when it develops:

a research community,

specialised journals,

recognised methodologies,

standards of evidence.

In many ways, those institutions matter more than the degree title itself. A "Culture and Politics" programme is considered an academic discipline not because it studies culture, but because there is a community of scholars producing and evaluating research about culture and politics through journals, conferences, and peer review.

So when you see "Bachelor of Science in Culture and Politics," you're really seeing the outcome of a long academic tradition that says: culture and politics can be studied using scholarly methods, whether or not you personally feel that makes them "science" in the same sense as chemistry. Many academics themselves still debate that question.