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  • Introduction:Arts & Sciences
  • Erika Behrisch Elce

"The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, [are] as proper objects of the Poet's art as any upon which it can be employed."

—William Wordsworth

The scientist-writer C.P. Snow famously articulated what seemed to be an unbreachable intellectual wall in 1959 in his "Two Cultures" lecture. He spoke of two groups of intellectuals who worked alongside each other in academic institutions, both doing important work, but who had almost totally ceased to communicate. The "literary intellectuals" and the "scientific intellectuals" of Snow's era, grunting unpleasantly at each other across the high tables of Cambridge, may look like distant ancestors in an intellectual evolution that has progressed well beyond that period, but we should look again, and carefully.

In certain circles of government, in industry, and even in the academy itself, that divide is not just perpetuated, but nurtured. The current neoliberal, corporate approach to university governance means that throughput rules the day, and departments of all stripes have to justify their existence through sets of numbers: money brought in, graduate employment statistics, graduate mean incomes, graduate productivity. These are not unimportant considerations—all university departments should be accountable for what they teach and develop in their students in all departments and programmes—but the measurements of success have become dangerously narrow. What they point to is a [End Page 7] fundamental, corporate-driven misunderstanding of what the academy as a whole offers, and a prioritizing of technical skill over knowledge acquisition. In this scenario, STEM programmes teach "hard skills," easily quantifiable, and many of which are directly transferrable to (and sometimes funded by) industry; social sciences and especially humanities departments teach the "soft skills" vital to all facets of culture—even industry and business—but not so easily translated into tabular proof of success. For students, this manifests in some difficult choices, in which they are made to narrow their fields of enquiry to fit into one particular niche, even from their first years after high school. Instead of arts and sciences, it is too often a choice between arts or sciences.

The data tells a sad story. There has been an ironic reversal in the last 50 years: even within the last century, the grand old departments of English Literature, Classics, Philosophy, and History—the big guns of the traditional academy—were offering seed money to fledgling scientific and professional programmes then struggling to get off the ground. Now, humanities programmes are vulnerable to the corporate pressure of economic efficiency: they are being consolidated (English and Philosophy are the same, right?), downgraded to service departments (no one actually needs a full degree in Italian, French, German, or Spanish, right?), or cut altogether (Classics?). As devastating as this trend is for humanities programmes across the western academies, it is not without equally frightening implications for the sciences: STEM and professional programmes are likewise being privatized or hardwired into industry to maximize profits and outsource oversight. As public funding shrinks for "pure" scientific research, in order to continue their work, some scientists are compelled to tie their research to corporations in order to secure funding, and their research is directed by a corporate, rather than an intellectual, agenda. The bad old days of scientific academics claiming that there are health benefits to smoking really aren't that far away. On both sides of the academy, and on both sides of culture, discovery is being compelled less by that most wonderful of human attributes, curiosity, than by profit.

There is so much to be learned in both directions, from the arts to the sciences and back again. Indeed, both sides of culture are necessary for meaningful intellectual growth. As Dame Gillian Beer articulated in her revolutionary 1983 work, Darwin's Plots, it was the novel, that "loose [End Page 8] baggy monster" that pushed its way into the hands of eighteenth and nineteenth-century readers and that gathered all the messiness of lived experience within it, that made it possible for Charles Darwin to imagine and then articulate his theory of evolution, the most amazing narrative of the world and life upon it. The title "natural philosopher" to describe...

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