Mountain View, Calif.—The humanities are kaput. Sorry, liberal arts cap-and-gowners. You blew it. In a software-run world, what's wanted are more engineers.
    At least, so goes the argument in a rising number of states, which have embraced a funding model for higher education that uses tuition "bonuses" to favor hard-skilled degrees like computer science over the humanities. The trend is backed by countless think pieces. "Macbeth does not make my priority list," wrote Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the author of a widely shared blog post titled "Is Majoring in Liberal Arts a Mistake for Students?" (Subtitle: "Critical Thinking and the Scientific Process First—Humanities Later").
    The technologist's argument begins with a suspicion that the liberal arts are of dubious academic rigor, suited mostly to dreamers. From there it proceeds to a reminder: Software powers the world, ergo, the only rational education is one built on STEM. Finally, lest he be accused of making a pyre of the canon, the technologist grants that yes, after students have finished their engineering degrees and found jobs, they should pick up a book—history, poetry, whatever.
    To be sure, each craft also requires a command of the language and its rules of syntax. But these are only starting points. To say that more good developers will be produced by swapping the arts for engineering is like saying that to produce great writers, we should double down on sentence diagraming.
    But if anything can be treated as a plug-in, it's learning how to code. It took me 18 months to become proficient as a developer. This isn't to pretend software development is easy—those were long months, and I never touched the heights of my truly gifted peers. But in my experience, programming lends itself to concentrated self-study in a way that, say, "To the Lighthouse" or "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" do not. To learn how to write code, you need a few good books. To enter the mind of an artist, you need a human guide.
    For folks like Mr. Khosla, such an approach is dangerous: "If subjects like history and literature are focused on too early, it is easy for someone not to learn to think for themselves and not to question assumptions, conclusions, and expert philosophies."
    How much better is the view of another Silicon Valley figure, who argued that "technology alone is not enough—it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing."
    His name? Steve Jobs.  From the first paragraph, we can infer that Mountain View is a place ______.