When British physicist and novelist C. P. Snow examined what he called “the two cultures” of science vs. the humanities more than a half century ago, college and university science students and studies presumably had no more call on public support than did humanities students and studies. Things have changed. A headline on the 22 February New York Times business section front page announced “A rising call to foster STEM fields, and decrease liberal arts funding.”
Linking to a report from US News headlined “Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin wants state colleges and universities to produce more electrical engineers and less [sic] French literature scholars,” the Times’s opening lines tied the reportedly nationally rising call to the illustrative Kentucky controversy:
When the Kentucky governor, Matt Bevin, suggested last month that students majoring in French literature should not receive state funding for their college education, he joined a growing number of elected officials who want to nudge students away from the humanities and toward more job-friendly subjects like electrical engineering.
Frustrated by soaring tuition costs, crushing student loan debt and a lack of skilled workers, particularly in science and technology, more and more states have adopted the idea of rewarding public colleges and universities for churning out students educated in fields seen as important to the economy.
When it comes to dividing the pot of money devoted to higher education, at least 15 states offer some type of bonus or premium for certain high-demand degrees, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
The Times article observed that “much to the horror of many in academia,” the Obama administration has proposed “rating the country’s 7,000 colleges and universities not only on measures like completion rates and student loan debt, but also on earnings after graduation.” It reported that “dozens of states have already moved to performance-based goals that more closely tie a portion of their higher education funding to particular outcomes like degrees earned or courses completed” and that “the particular focus on jobs and earnings—originally limited to vocational programs and community colleges—is gaining momentum.” It predicted that “in general, the trend of reducing funding the humanities and providing added incentives for STEM majors at public institutions would mean that a liberal arts education would be increasingly limited to those who could afford to attend expensive private institutions.”
Linking to a controversial 29 March 2015 Washington Post column by Fareed Zakaria, who hosts a CNN news show, the Times emphasized, “What has incensed many educators is not so much the emphasis on work force development but the disdain for the humanities, particularly among Republicans.” The Times explained: “Several Republicans have portrayed a liberal arts education as an expendable, sometimes frivolous luxury that taxpayers should not be expected to pay for. The Republican presidential candidate Senator Marco Rubio, for example, has called for more welders and fewer philosophers. Gov. Rick Scott of Florida criticized anthropologists, and [North Carolina Gov. Pat] McCrory belittled gender studies.”
Zakaria’s piece, reported on at the time in this Physics Today Online venue, alleged danger in an increasing national STEM emphasis. To announce the column, the Post placed a teaser blurb atop the front page: “Too much science and math? Rethinking the obsession with STEM education.” The blurb pointed to the Sunday Outlook section, where that front page announced, “We can’t all be MATH NERDS & SCIENCE GEEKS.” The column appeared on 29 March 2015. Zakaria’s book In Defense of a Liberal Education (W. W. Norton) appeared the next day. A brief commentary three weeks later in the New York Times Sunday book review section mentioned both an article at Forbes.com and the Physics Today Online piece, reporting that both “bristled at the implication” that STEM doesn’t foster creativity.
In Kentucky and elsewhere, the reportedly growing public-policy preference for STEM has caused bristling among humanities advocates too. The Times and others have cited a gently sarcastic Lexington Herald-Leader op-ed by University of Kentucky French literature professor Jeffrey N. Peters. He began this way:
Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin graduated from college in 1989 with a bachelor’s degree in Japanese and East Asian Studies after studying abroad in Japan.
I would like to thank Bevin for drawing on that formative experience to remind Kentuckians during his Tuesday budget presentation that the study of world languages, literatures and cultures is a valuable pursuit that has led countless college students to successful careers in education, business, international relations, the arts and—as his own story demonstrates—public service.
Of course, Bevin did no such explicit reminding of these important facts. Instead, he proposed “funding that incentivizes outcomes that are specific to the things people want ... All the people in the world who want to study French literature can do so, they’re just not going to be subsidized by taxpayers like engineers will be.”
At the New Yorker, David Denby reacted to the Times article by declaring that “this STEM panic may be nonsense. Business leaders have repeatedly said they want to hire people who can think and judge, follow complicated instructions, understand fellow-workers, stand up and talk in a meeting.”
At the Times itself, in a 24 February op-ed in the international edition, Brown University comparative literature professor Arnold Weinstein didn’t mention the Times news article, but presented a vigorous defense of the liberal arts. In most respects it could have come from any decade in recent memory. Here’s a sample:
“How much do you know about Shakespeare,” I once asked a friend who has committed much of her life to studying the Bard. She replied, “Not as much as he knows about me.” Remember this the next time someone tells you literature is useless.
But Weinstein also gave some cause for more bristling, not by defending the humanities but by mischaracterizing STEM:
Enthusiasm for the Humanities, though, is much diminished in today’s educational institutions. Our data-driven culture bears much of the blame: The arts can no longer compete with the prestige and financial payoffs promised by studying the STEM fields—a curriculum integrating science, technology, engineering and mathematics. These are all worthy disciplines that offer precise information on practically everything. But, often and inadvertently, they distort our perceptions; they even shortchange us.
The regime of information may well sport its specific truths, but it is locked out of the associations—subjective but also moral and philosophical—that bathe all literature.
It sometimes seems fashionable to discard C. P. Snow’s two-cultures concept as simplistic and largely inapplicable. Maybe there’s something to that. But just as it’s unjust and unwise to disdain humanities graduates as frivolously self-condemned to lives of menial labor—“You want fries with that?”—it seems unjust and unwise to disdain STEM as a mere “regime of information” that can “sport” facts and “precise information” but is “locked out” from enlightening and even ennobling students and practitioners in the moral and philosophical realms. In any case, the Times report shows that forces from within Snow’s contrast are driving changes in public policy.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
