The Return of the Two Cultures in the Israel–Hamas War Protests

In 1959, C. P. Snow delivered the Rede Lecture on “The Two Cultures.” Snow’s fundamental point was that humanists and scientists speak past each other, assuming that they communicate at all. “[I]ntellectual life,” Snow writes, “is increasingly being split into two polar groups.” At one end, “literary intellectuals,” at the other, “scientists,” and between the two “a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding.” Scientists don’t read any imaginative literature because it has no practical application; and humanists ignore science because they think it is “of no interest either in its own value or its consequences.” The result is a split that does nobody any good.

While Snow’s thesis has not entirely aged well (many universities today, for example, mandate that students take courses in both the sciences and the humanities) and while one can find isolated examples of people combining both (e.g., Oliver Sacks), the response by faculty to the recent wave of protests shows that a deep gulf still separates the humanities and the sciences.

For example, “An Open Letter from Columbia University and Barnard College Faculty in Defense of Robust Debate About the History and Meaning of the War in Israel/Gaza” has approximately 180 signatures from fields as various as social work, government, gender and sexuality studies, literature, anthropology, history, and religion. Nobody from engineering, chemistry, or biology. Three are from medicine, and one each from mathematics and physics.

On the other side, an open letter “against encampment protests,” signed by 237 professors (including two Nobel laureates) and 70 “research staff,” has one person from literature, but 43 from medicine, 41 from physics, 18 engineers, and 72 mathematicians.

Similarly, 503 current and emeritus University of California faculty signed the “UC Faculty for Integrity Letter” to the Board of Regents. Nearly all the signatures come from people teaching in STEM fields and medicine: 90 professors of medicine, 21 computer scientists, and 21 mathematicians. Literature has only one representative, and nobody from gender studies.

And on the other side of the ledger, nearly all the 72 Princeton faculty who signed on to the letter defending the students who went on a hunger strike (since halted) to protest Israel’s “genocidal” assault on Gaza teach in such fields as history, African American Studies, Near Eastern Studies, English, and philosophy. Approximately ten come from the sciences.

You see the same split in this letter from Columbia faculty arguing for maintaining ties with Israel (almost all from the sciences) and those protesting the punishments meted out to student protestors.

What accounts for such a stark split between STEM fields and the humanities/social sciences? Broadly speaking, the sciences tend to deal with hard evidence, and their subjects are not easily amenable to ideological perspectives. Quantum physics and string theory do not have much to do with race or gender. Which is not to say that ideology doesn’t shape these fields in certain ways. But a cancer cell does not care about your pronouns. Neither should the oncologist.

The humanities, on the other hand, are a different story. The standards of proof, while not entirely subjective, are very different, and hiring in the humanities has a significant ideological component (e.g., diversity statements). For years now, the non-STEM fields have tilted toward approaches that privilege anti-colonialism, Critical Race Theory, intersectionality, and generally any theory that condemns the West for its manifold sins. Given the popularity of approaches that view Israel–Gaza through the “oppressor/oppressed” lens, it comes as little surprise that statements from the humanities would repeat such falsehoods as “Israel is a settler-colonialist state” or that the IDF is committing genocide in Gaza (they are not).

But the unbridgeable gap between the sciences and the humanities may have larger consequences. Between 2012 and 2020, the number of humanities majors declined by 17 percent. At some schools, the fall has been precipitous. At Ohio State University, the number fell by a stunning 46 percent. Replacing the humanities: science degrees, such as computer science. While cuts to humanities program have become routine, STEM funding continues to rise. Nathan Heller observed in “The End of the English Major” that “[t]he money at Harvard—and a lot of other universities, too—is disproportionately going into STEM.” It’s science and engineering that gets the fancy new complex that cost one billion dollars, not the English department.

And where money goes, power and prestige follow.

By siding with Hamas, or with student protestors who take over and vandalize buildings (see, for example, the damage done to the administration building at Cal Poly Humboldt), humanities professors only further undermine their position in the university and the larger culture. Why would legislators or university administrators support programs and faculty who publicly state that “One could regard the events of October 7th as just one salvo in an ongoing war between an occupying state and the people it occupies,” while ignoring the hostages and the raping, murdering, and pillaging that Hamas committed on that terrible day? Why would parents pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition and living expenses to see their progeny radicalized and chanting “Intifada! Intifada!”?

C. P. Snow worried that the “two cultures” might lead to the West losing the Cold War. I worry that the present incarnation of the “two cultures” might lead to the defunding and, ultimately, the elimination of the humanities as a viable field of study.

Peter C. Herman is a professor of English literature at San Diego State University.

This post is part of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute Israel initiative. For more information about this initiative, please visit the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute website.