(It’s not just universities.)

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/computing-college-cs-majors/677792/?gift=ly-h2TZGdDJyaoFv6n-KaVm8z–QoVaXTzvFuQCez-g&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

«Universities are conservative institutions, steeped in tradition. When they elevate computing to the status of a college, with departments and a budget, they are declaring it a higher-order domain of knowledge and practice, akin to law or engineering. That decision will inform a fundamental question: whether computing ought to be seen as a superfield that lords over all others, or just a servant of other domains, subordinated to their interests and control. This is, by no happenstance, also the basic question about computing in our society writ large.

…

An American university is organized like this, into divisions that are sometimes called colleges, and sometimes schools. These typically enjoy a good deal of independence to define their courses of study and requirements as well as research practices for their constituent disciplines. Included in this purview: whether a CS student really needs to learn French.

…

Near the end of our conversation, Isbell mentioned the engineering fallacy, which he summarized like this: Someone asks you to solve a problem, and you solve it without asking if it’s a problem worth solving. I used to think computing education might be stuck in a nesting-doll version of the engineer’s fallacy, in which CS departments have been asked to train more software engineers without considering whether more software engineers are really what the world needs. Now I worry that they have a bigger problem to address: how to make computer people care about everything else as much as they care about computers.»