In defense of the arts

I am a scientist. In university, this seems to automatically make me out to be an autocratic, self-absorbed jerk, entirely uninterested in people or differing view-points. Too often, I've heard people (even professors!) spit the words engineer and scientist as if it implied "White Middle Class Protestant Oppressor Who Wishes Destruction Upon The Humanities!!!!". Now, I have met scientists (and even more engineers) like this, but not all of us dream about the day when our universities have become giant technical collages.

It constantly amazes me how the academic world can get this polarized. Why are the sciences trying to strip-mine resources from the humanities? I am all for increased science research money: we desperately need more basic research, now more than ever. However, gutting the humanities and social sciences to feed said research is just shooting ourselves in the foot. Science thrives on cross-fertilization of ideas. Some of the best ideas in biology have come from economics, and some of the most interesting theories in evolution are being proposed by philosophers. More importantly, the arts can provide an outside perspective on the methods and assumptions made in the scientific process. Hell, if anything, it's the arts that don't need the sciences (although I still maintain that both philosophy and history could be improved immeasurably if those fields took more interest in some of the new research coming from the sciences). Realistically, the natural and social sciences, as well as the arts, gain only when we stand together, both against imbeciles within, and those outside, who want to suborn knowledge to fit a political or ideological agenda.