“I believe the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups. . . .” So wrote the British physicist and novelist C. P. Snow in his famous The Two Cultures Rede Lecture delivered at Cambridge University in 1959. Although Snow was mostly concerned with the divisions he felt in his own personal and professional experience between the “literary intellectuals” and “physical scientists,” the two-culture split has come to symbolize a wider and ever-growing gulf in academia between the sciences and the humanities. This split, and the strife it often generates, is palpable in most universities, and it speaks directly to the heart of the liberal arts curriculum of schools across the globe, and to the markedly wrong, widespread perception that in a technology-driven world, the humanities are an anachronism.
The roots of this unfortunate split between the two cultures reach back beyond ...
