A House Divided

The building of the new Humanities Center, which is to take the place of the old Freshman Union, will change Harvard fundamentally. Not only will it provide added convenience, but, more importantly, the new center represents the continuation of a polarizing trend in the academic life of this college which is pulling apart the worlds of the sciences and of the humanities. The Humanities Center, clearly intended to have the same centralizing influence on the humanities that the Science Center did on--not coincidentally--the sciences, will undoubtedly also widen the gulf between students in the two different fields.

It is obvious that this gulf exists. Though many undergraduates have interests in both science and humanities, the majority of them probably identify themselves largely with one group or the other, and even might express some good-natured scorn for the other discipline. An engineering student, who asked not to be identified "for fear of reprisals," said of English students and their ilk that "they think they're changing the world, but where would they be without their word processors?" One applied math major, who was similarly faint-hearted about his quote being cited, characterized his more verbally oriented colleagues as being "self-indulgent, non-rigorous, and generally without use." While most would not go this far, it is probable that, deep down in their heart of hearts, many science majors have similar, if less strongly expressed, feelings. Of course this inter-concentration rivalry is a two-way street. Humanities majors (and indeed probably much of the general public) tend to view their more math-and-sciencey counterparts as pale, soul-less sorts who shun the light and prefer the company of machines to that of humans. So we can see that the schism between science and the humanities is not an imagined one.

Nor, however, is it a wholly unnatural one. Clearly, there is bound to be some difference between adherents of these two disciplines; one can hardly expect that students' interest in computer science as opposed to English literature will have no effect on them and will not, in turn, be affected by their particular personalities. And just as clearly, this is not a phenomenon confined to these hallowed Harvardian halls--the warring intellectual stereotypes of the acne-ridden, bespectacled, socially inept math-science geek and the gaunt, black-clad, pseudo-European postmodern drama student are universal in American society, and are probably older than any of us (except, perhaps, for the postmodern part). "Revenge of the Nerds" and "Sprockets" are but the two most obvious examples of these recurring images. However, in the intellectually diverse atmosphere of a large university, one might hope that there would be substantial blurring of the line between science students and humanities students.

To be sure, not all concentrations, and not even some of the largest, are easily pigeon-holed as falling under one of the two broad categories. Economics, for example, seems to be the unwanted stepchild of the Harvard curriculum. Ask a Chemistry concentrator if Economics is a science and you will often get an emphatic no; ask a History and Literature concentrator if it falls under the rubric of the humanities and they too are likely to reply in the negative. Pre-meds who are not also science majors also straddle the dividing line between the two camps. However, they, too, seem to suffer the penalty for dividing their loyalties; their professors and classmates in the sciences often see them as mercenary sorts not committed to the subject matter, while more purely artistic or verbally-oriented types sometimes sniff that pre-meds have "sold their souls to organic chemistry," (this from stout-hearted Haley Steele '99, a VES major). These accusations are not totally warranted--all a pre-med is, after all, is just someone who wants to help others later in life. The fact that people often have a negative perception of this (mostly) innocent class of students is but additional evidence for the rigidity of the barrier between, for example, Physics and Philosophy (subjects which, in fact, are quite close to each other in a more than purely alphabetical sense).

One of the major causes of this gulf is the clannishness exhibited by adherents of the particular disciplines involved. In the manner of medieval guilds, these individual fields of study often seem to erect barriers to prevent anyone who is not actually concentrating in the subject from learning anything about it. Hence the two year long introductory track in Physics, and hence the seemingly incomprehensible post-Kantian meta-ethically relativist vocabulary of some literature classes. Obviously, every field has its own rhetoric and its own intellectual prerequisites, but in many cases these are probably more impenetrable than they need to be.

Of course, in an ideal world, nobody would leave Harvard without having read Macbeth and having understood Maxwell's equations. But given that our time here is short, and sometimes our interest in other fields, limited, this ideal is impossible. However, this does not mean that there can be be no rapprochement between disciplines as disparate as Chemistry and VES (they both, after all, are housed in large and arguably very ugly cement buildings).

Do not doom the twin monoliths of the Science Center and (soon) the Humanities Center to eying one another balefully across Harvard Yard forever. Students and professors alike must try to promote a new academic desegregation. If, every once in a while, each English major did a few integrals and each CS major wrote a haiku or two, the result would not just be a proliferation of bad haikus and incorrect integrals, but also a more interesting intellectual environment.

David M. Weld '98 is a Physics concentrator who also loved the Literature and Arts-A course "The City and the Novel."