What would convince faculty in other disciplines that programming is useful?

Recently I came across an article from the journal Issues in Information Systems, “Faculty perspectives on the information technology and analytics requirements of business students.” The authors surveyed 204 business faculty from 20 different universities.  They found that “[N]early a third of respondents (32.6%) felt that computer programming skills should not be required at all. Interestingly, the same number (32.6%) also believe that Calculus should not be required of business students.”  Below is the table with the results.  About a third of faculty actually thought that all business students should take a three credit hour course in programming, but a third also felt that it shouldn’t be required at all. Details in the table below:

I’ve been working with the Georgia Department of Education on a new kind of pre-calculus course that uses computing to demonstrate the pre-calc concepts in a variety of contexts, e.g., scalar multiplication of a vector by reducing red in all the pixels in a picture, matrix multiplication by doing transforms of objects in 3-D space, periodicity of functions (like trigonometric functions) to generate sounds, etc. We did a careful mapping of each pre-calculus learning objective to relevant computing demonstrations, with multiple possible computing contexts for each pre-calculus learning objective. The course was rejected by the mathematics oversight board today. They didn’t buy it at all.  Among the responses: “The description of the course states that it is ‘designed to prepare students for calculus and other college level mathematics courses,’ which they believe it does not” and “Members feel that computer science is not mathematics and should not be replacing a mathematics course.”

I’m struck by these two stories.  For me, programming is this useful new notation that can enhance learning in many disciplines.  I’m swayed by the results with Bootstrap and with the CT-STEM effort at Northwestern. I hadn’t realized the extent to which the teachers in the non-CS disciplines were not buying the story.

• Business faculty are clearly dubious about the benefits of programming for business students.  I wonder if they’ve done the studies about how many business school graduates use programming (from SQL queries and spreadsheet macros, to data analysis and even modeling and simulation) in their daily jobs.
• Mathematics faculty are clearly dubious that (a) programming to apply mathematics topics leads to more mathematics learning and (b) computer science is even related to mathematics.

These create an interesting set of research questions to me. Why are faculty in non-CS disciplines dubious about the advantages of programming for their students?  What do they think programming is?  Maybe they’re right — maybe “programming” as we are currently defining it isn’t worth the credit hours for their students. How could we re-define programming (and programming languages and tools) to make it more useful?