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CONVOCATION ADDRESS, SEPTEMBER 1, 2012 -­‐ JIM COHN THE TWO CULTURES On behalf of the faculty, it is my great pleasure to welcome you, the class of 2016, to Quest University Canada and to our sixth convocation ceremony. As one of Quest's founding faculty members, here from the start, I have to catch my breath as I stand up here and look around today. It's hard for me to believe you are already the sixth entering class. We've come a very long way, very quickly. Your class is the biggest we have ever admitted -­‐ it's twice the size of the first class. According to your grades and test scores on your applications, you are also our most qualified applicants yet. As David mentioned to you yesterday, we started five years ago with six full-­‐time and one half-­‐time faculty members, and today we have twenty-­‐six and a half, to which I should add four faculty associates and four teaching fellows. David also mentioned our top-­‐of-­‐the-­‐charts results on the National Survey of Student Engagement, which are very gratifying -­‐ we suspected that we'd do well, since we designed everything about a Quest education to be engaging, but it's always nice to have our intuitions verified by the experts in such a way that others have to recognize them, too. Some aspects of our success can't be easily quantified, like the spirit on campus, and the enthusiasm of your parents, and the smiles on our graduates who come back for a visit -­‐ all these are getting somehow gaining substance over the years, as if our morale could buff up. So I mean it from some deep place when I say that it is a pleasure for me to be able to welcome you. I'm proud of what Quest has become in such a short time. I'm proud of all that it promises to be for you. You've made an excellent choice, and you will have a chance to make Quest even better with your fresh voices and -­‐ if you are like previous classes -­‐ your vocal suggestions for reform. In its Latin roots, the word "con-­‐vocation" means "a calling together." You have chosen us to educate you, and we take that job very seriously. We have therefore called you to this beautiful place so that you can gather together with the teachers assembled on the platform to be educated in the liberal arts. The faculty have come to Quest because teaching galvanizes them, and they have dedicated their careers to the education of young people like yourselves. You can trust them to guide you through this liberal arts curriculum. We have thought it out with some care, and we keep thinking about it and tinkering with it all the time. Quest's mission statement says that the education you are about to embark on will be integrated. I'm sure that, as a buzz word, integrated is one of those qualities that you are supposed to look for when you shop around for an education, but trust me, it is easier said than done. By "integration," we mean our attempt to make all your course work fit together into a coherent whole. You can't be considered educated if you're educated only in parts, and yet we can't possibly teach you everything there is to know. The problem of integrating curriculum design is a head-­‐scratcher: How can we give you an undergraduate education in just four years that has a claim to wholeness? The divide between the arts and sciences -­‐ as they are typically called at most Canadian institutions, meaning "choose one" -­‐ the divide might lead you to believe from the outset that wholeness in education is impossible. I prefer the terms "natural sciences" and "humanities," but they are merely rough-­‐and-­‐ready categories. Of course I understand that people look at the world in a wide continuum of ways. Nonetheless, we do sometimes paint academics with a fat brush. As a student, you might think of yourself as preferring to deal with either numbers or words. My task today is to show you why it's a problem to think that way, why we expect something bigger from you, and what Quest does about it. Before Quest opened, the founders of Quest made explicit their objective of bridging the so-­‐called "Two Cultures" gap between the natural sciences and the humanities. They were rightly concerned that undergraduates at most universities major in "silos" of narrow specialization and have little or even nothing to do with learning in other fields, as though to be educated meant piling up courses in a single area, and neglecting all the others. The term "two cultures" comes from a famous lecture given in May 1959 by C.P. Snow, a British scientist and novelist. Because of his lecture, which he subsequently published as a book, the term "two cultures" now serves as shorthand to name this problem of specialized isolation in education and in society. C.P. Snow was in a good position to address this question. He was a fairly well-­‐known novelist in his time, but he was actually trained as a chemist. His day job for much of his life was working for the English civil service recommending scientific appointments -­‐ a high-­‐ranking job that was especially important to Britain's war efforts.1 In his lecture, Snow expressed several concerns, but foremost among them was the "gulf of mutual incomprehension" between two groups, both of which he knew intimately: the scientists with whom he worked during the day, and the literary colleagues whom he frequented in the evenings. Not only did he find that the two groups did not talk to each other, each group regarded the other with suspicion and even hostility. In the course of his job, he interviewed thousands of scientists, and he found that while of course some did, very many of them did not read literature. They had little notion of Shakespeare or Dickens, even though their ignorance would have struck anyone familiar with literature as a shocking gap in their education. Analogously, Snow's literary friends had no idea what the second law of thermodynamics was, even though their ignorance of this fundamental scientific law would have struck anyone familiar with modern science as a shocking gap in their education. Snow pointed out that all the social forces that segregated the scientists and the literati into their separate tribes only deepened this cultural divide. In other words, it wasn't just their day jobs that was keeping them apart. They had distinct world views that determined their choices of work, their choices of leisure activities, and their friends and colleagues. Although they lived side by side in roughly the same social class, they shared none of the richness of their learning with each other. Snow thought their estrangement from each other led to an intellectual loss for everyone. Snow did not think he was saying anything new, by the way. In the late 1950's, intellectuals were greatly concerned about the real possibility of nuclear war; the development of the atomic bomb was often taken to be the archetypical example of the rift between our technological prowess and our moral immaturity. For example, in your Cornerstone class, you will read Max Frisch's novel Homo Faber. It was published in 1957, two years before Snow's lecture. It imagines the tragic consequences for a Swiss engineer named Walter Faber, who tries to separate the technological from the human view of life. In that same class you will also read a famous article by Garret Hardin from 1968 called "The Tragedy of the Commons." Hardin points out that some of our most urgent social problems -­‐ like the threat of nuclear war or overpopulation -­‐ do not have technological solutions, although they have essential technological components. How did the two cultures ever break apart? Snow pointed to specialization as the prime suspect. In England in his day, and to a certain extent even today, the school system forced students to decide early on whether they would follow a scientific or humanistic track -­‐ basically, you had to decide when you were still in grade school whether to concentrate in math or languages. And then your train stayed on that track, and the system made jumping the track practically impossible. These tracks are very much standard operating procedure at all research universities in Canada today. You must apply to a program before you even know what you're getting into, or what other fields are out there that you might be interested in. Moreover, the disciplines have tried to distinguish themselves from each other, partly due to pride, partly due to competition, and partly due to necessity. The necessity derives from the expectation that, in order to be considered reasonably competent in any field, there's more and more you have to learn. To reach the PhD level you must specialize in a narrow field because you must make an original contribution to scholarship. If you are going to write something original about Shakespeare, you have a lot of homework to do because a lot of other people have had excellent insights before you. In the sciences, if you want to contribute something new about the 2nd law of thermodynamics, you have to be up to speed on the latest theories and discoveries. As discoveries accumulate, you have to go further and further before you can even understand what is going on. It's fair to say that no human being can now be up to speed across the board in the natural sciences or the humanities. Crossing over the tracks, and integrating the fields of knowledge, gets more and more difficult because of the mountain chain of accumulated details that separate the tracks. In its etymology, the word "uni-­‐versity" means "combined into one whole." Perhaps the large research universities today could more accurately be called "multi-­‐versities." They do not think of themselves as offering a single, unified curriculum. Rather, they offer many different schools consisting of dozens of different disciplines existing side by side in a sort of uneasy pseudodemocratic equality. They do so in response to the specialization and the proliferation of disciplines. But by doing so, they have abandoned their responsibility to educate undergraduates into some sort of integrated whole. By contrast, the liberal arts strive to think of learning as a whole, but a whole with defined parts. Traditionally -­‐ that is, going back 600 years to about 1400 -­‐ the liberal arts have been seven in number, divided into two groups called the Trivium and the Quadrivium. The arts of the Trivium are grammar, rhetoric, and logic. These skills allow us to understand texts critically and to present cogent, elegant arguments. The grammar part included learning to read and compose Greek and Latin, as well as mastering the classics written in those languages. Grammar, rhetoric, and logic involve interpreting texts and their meanings, as well as writing texts and giving public speeches. The Quadrivium consists of the remaining four liberal arts: mathematics, geometry, music, and astronomy. These fields of study represent the world of intelligible objects. I'm using "intelligible" in the Platonic sense of the word, meaning not objects of sense perception, but objects of thought. For example, you can't see the concept of the mathematical ratio we call Pi. Although you can perceive and distinguish the circumference of a circle from its diameter, you have to think the relation between the two. The Quadrivium takes up these sorts of intelligible objects -­‐ numbers; mathematical figures; scales, intervals, and harmonies; and models of the universe. Today, much of what we call "natural science" follows the paradigm of the traditional liberal art of astronomy. Ancient astronomers -­‐ Ptolemy foremost -­‐ made very careful and painstaking observations of the positions of the heavenly bodies. Ptolemy used records going back 800 years, and he was able to fit that data into a coherent theory using geometry and mathematics. This model was highly sophisticated and impressively accurate, even by today's standards. The fundamental principle of organizing observations mathematically into models remains the core of astronomy and of many other branches of science. As I said, the distinction between the two different approaches to the world has been recognized for hundreds of years, but the Trivium and the Quadrivium together have a claim on you. No educated person can dismiss the importance of science in the 21st century -­‐ and please remember that you have come to Quest because you aspire to be an educated person of the 21st century. The instrumental success of the sciences is simply fabulous -­‐ I mean "fabulous" literally, as if it belonged to fables. Feats like flying through the air or swimming beneath the oceans, which we have come to take for granted, were once the stuff of tales in which humans could assume the special powers of animals like eagles or salmon. Quite apart from what we expect science to do for us and produce for us, however, we teach the sciences at Quest primarily as part of the Quadrivium. Insofar as the natural sciences are liberal arts, and not training in engineering, we teach them because they have their true origins in wonder. Wonder is the origin of all reflection upon the world, whether upon ourselves or upon the natural objects in it. It is the wonder of the natural world that connects our interest in it to our essential humanity. Likewise, no educated person of the 21st century can dismiss the importance of the humanities. Snow's sampling of what scientists knew of traditional culture consisted primarily of finding out what fiction they read, or rather, didn't read. Literature surely has an essential place in teaching us how to imagine other lives and other circumstances. It helps us stretch our empathies and practice our moral judgment. We could say much the same thing for history, which likewise teaches us about the significance to us of other times and peoples and places. Philosophy and religious studies entertain the questions that are of great significance to us personally and socially: What kind of life should I live? What obligations do I have to others? What do I think is true? And music and fine art help us appreciate what's beautiful, without the inspiration of which any life is impoverished. To be an educated person in the 21st century obliges you to think about your connection to the culture of the people you live with, and also the cultures of the peoples you do not live with, who do not think the way you do. The humanities educate us away from parochialism, lifting us to a higher plane of regard. Your education at Quest will help you gain some familiarity with the two cultures. We cannot make you an expert in the sciences or the humanities, or even in any one of the sciences or humanities. Expertise is not what the liberal arts promise you. But we will teach you enough facility to allow you to understand what is at stake, and how the arguments are made, in each domain so that you have the wherewithal to make informed judgments. Your foundation years will emphasize Rhetoric and Quantitative Reasoning. We think you need to know how to make persuasive arguments in writing and in person, and we also insist that you comprehend and make correct and persuasive arguments with numbers and all their associated techniques. To bring out the full sparkle of your minds, we are going to polish up both of these facets. All your classes will be seminar style to allow for the constant give-­‐andtake of ideas, the careful development of argument through discussion, and the challenge of responding to classmates who disagree with you, or who don't understand your point of view, or who come at the question from a way you never even dreamed of because they didn't grow up where you did and don't share your assumptions about the world. In other words, you have to talk to each other in and outside of class, no matter what your interests or talents are, just as we on the faculty talk to each other and learn from each other precisely because we come from different backgrounds. Many of you have told us in your applications for admission to Quest that you would like to save the world. We hope you will do so. The world needs you. It needs your talent. It needs your energy. In my experience, Quest students are impressively sophisticated about understanding how complicated it is to save even one piece of the world. To take just one example, they understand that environmental degradation is a problem that does not have a simply technological solution: if you want to do anything about it, you must master the scientific and the human elements involved. C.P. Snow likewise had a strong motive of social justice in identifying the Two Cultures. He believed that industrialization was the only hope for the world's poor. He thought that the gap between the developed and underdeveloped worlds was unconscionable. His family came from very modest means, and he understood from personal experience what it meant for the developed world to produce fabulous plenty -­‐ and also what it felt like if you did not share it. He worried that scientists often had a poor understanding of social relations, which impeded the spread of the benefits of research and technology. That's a loss for everyone. What unites all of the liberal arts in both the Trivium and the Quadrivium is the adjective "liberal." Together they are the studies that pertain to being free. The ancients used the word primarily in a political sense to mean "free" as in "a citizen," and not a slave or a tradesman. Today we can legitimately use the word to include "free" as in "a citizen of the Republic of Letters." A liberally educated individual strives to be intellectually free and not a slave to ignorance or narrowmindedness. Although each faculty member at Quest comes from a distinct area of specialization, we all teach the liberal arts. We will teach you the intellectual freedom that originates in wonder about yourselves and about the natural world you live in. We will teach you why we love our subjects, and we will convey their basic principles and methods so that you can continue learning them on your own. By the mere fact of sitting in your chairs at this ancient, ritual ceremony of initiation, you are telling the faculty that you would like to join us in a conversation that will open up the world for you. Not just part of the world, but the whole world. We are pleased to welcome you into that conversation, as you aspire to be free and educated men and women, global citizens of the 21st century. Yes, there's a lot to learn in each of the Two Cultures, but you've come to the right place to get your start. And it starts with Cornerstone, on Monday. Class of 2016, congratulations, and welcome to Quest University Canada! 1 C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures. Intro. Stefan Collini. Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1998. p. xxi. I have relied throughout on Collini's excellent introduction for the information about Snow's life.