The Techies and The Fuzzies: A History of the Two Cultures Problem (HISTORY 341)

4–5 credits · Undergraduate

In a famous lecture in 1959, urging a major reform of higher education in Britain, the chemist and novelist C. P. Snow claimed that the main obstacle lay in the mutual incomprehension of "the two cultures." On one side were scientists who dismissed literature as so much fluff, irrelevant for the modern, technological age. On the other were literary figures like Leo Tolstoy, who condemned science for failing to answer the all-important questions of values: "What shall we do and how shall we live?" The opposition Snow described had been building for more than a century already. Stanford was founded right in the midst of the great divorce between sciences and humanities; little wonder that Stanford students have traditionally identified themselves as "techies" or "fuzzies." This course traces the modern history of the two-cultures debate from its nineteenth-century origins through the present day.