by Peter C. Herman
The following essay is part of a special series of responses to recent events centered, for now, at Columbia University, and extending beyond its confines to include the wider array of societal problems that the disorder there symptomatizes. For details, see Gabriel Noah Brahm, “From Palestine Avenue to Morningside Heights.”
—Gabriel Noah Brahm, Director of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative
In 1959, C. P. Snow delivered the Rede Lecture on “The Two Cultures.” Snow’s fundamental point was that humanists and scientists speak past each other, assuming that they communicate at all. “[I]ntellectual life,” Snow writes, “is increasingly being split into two polar groups.” At one end, “literary intellectuals,” at the other, “scientists,” and between the two “a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding.” Scientists don’t read any imaginative literature because it has no practical application; and humanists ignore science because they think it is “of no interest either in its own value or its consequences.” The result is a split that does nobody any good.
While Snow’s thesis has not entirely aged well (many universities today, for example, mandate that students take courses in both the sciences and the humanities) and while one can find isolated examples of people combining both (e.g., Oliver Sacks), the response by faculty to the recent wave of protests shows that a deep gulf still separates the humanities and the sciences.
For example, “An Open Letter from Columbia University and Barnard College Faculty in Defense of Robust Debate About the History and Meaning of the War in Israel/Gaza” has approximately 180 signatures from fields as various as social work, government, gender and sexuality studies, literature, anthropology, history, and religion. Nobody from engineering, chemistry, or biology. Three are from medicine, and one each from mathematics and physics.
On the other side, an open letter “against encampment protests,” signed by 237 professors (including two Nobel laureates) and 70 “research staff,” has one person from literature, but 43 from medicine, 41 from physics, 18 engineers, and 72 mathematicians.
Similarly, 503 current and emeritus University of California faculty signed the “UC Faculty for Integrity Letter” to the Board of Regents. Nearly all the signatures come from people teaching in STEM fields and medicine: 90 professors of medicine, 21 computer scientists, and 21 mathematicians. Literature has only one representative, and nobody from gender studies.
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