Of divisions and deans

four-way academic culture

I am sure that there is no nefarious plot to keep humanists out of power. For one thing, all five offices have been occupied, with distinction, by scholars from across campus, and one might well say that in the Graduate School, humanists have been overrepresented: When Russel assumed the deanship in 2002, it was the first time since 1973 that anyone from outside Division I had been in charge. On the other hand, though, the last humanist in the Office of the Provost, Paul Benacerraf ’52 GS ’60, returned to full-time teaching in the Department of Philosophy in 1991; the last dean of the college from Division I was English professor Neil Rudenstine ’56, who moved out of West College in 1977 to become Benacerraf’s predecessor as provost (before moving up — or down? — to the top job at Harvard); it was in 1972 that classicist Robert Goheen ’40 left 1 Nassau Hall; and Princeton has not had a humanist as dean of the faculty since the Chaucerian Robert Root stepped down 64 years ago, in 1946.

As everyone who reads this newspaper knows, we will be getting a new dean of the college in 2011 — the 11th in the 102 years that the position will have existed. No doubt there are many factors, personal and institutional, that the committee constituted to choose Malkiel’s successor is taking into account, and I do not wish to overstate the case for appointing a humanist. But I do think that there are both intellectual and practical reasons for the University to strive always to have a full complement of divisional representation in the administrative triangle of Nassau Hall, Clio Hall and West College. If, therefore, the new dean is not from Division I, there will — or should — be really quite significant pressure for the next senior administrative position that falls vacant to be filled with a humanist.

Why is this important? In an extraordinarily influential lecture of 1959 that was promptly published as a short book, the novelist C. P. Snow, who had been trained as a chemist and physicist and who held scientific posts in the British government for much of his life, suggested that the sciences and the humanities were “the two cultures” and that the differences and antagonisms between them, especially the disdain of literary folks for scientific knowledge and achievements, were causing serious problems in society at large, not just inside the academy. Hardly an original view, Snow’s words — a la-di-da muddle that is hard to read today with a straight face — nevertheless touched a nerve, setting off a series of often vicious reactions and counter-reactions that continue to this day. (If all this is news to you, I recommend the 1993 edition, well introduced by Stefan Collini, which contains the original work together with a “second look” by Snow.)

Much has happened in the past half-century, and it is sometimes hard to know where we now stand. Some say that there are three cultures (most recently Jerome Kagan in his likewise muddled and generally disappointing 2009 book “The Three Cultures: Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and the Humanities in the 21st Century”) or maybe four (Kagan ignores engineering); others deplore the overstatement of disciplinary boundaries and attempt to find natural links or build bridges (the old antagonists E. O. Wilson and the late Stephen Jay Gould have offered very different attempts at “consilience”); and some suggest that we are moving “from two cultures to no culture.” Of course, much depends on how “culture” is itself defined.

There is no inherent virtue in Princeton’s having precisely these four academic divisions (or, for that matter, seven “distribution areas” plus the foreign language requirement and the Writing Seminar). The fact that we do have them does, however, provide one indication of how we think about disciplines, the fuzziness of whose boundaries can be seen elsewhere on the official website, where the University puts history under both the social sciences and the humanities and calls psychology a social as well as a natural science. Other indications come from discrepancies in pay, perks and perceived intellectual value among the denizens of the various divisions. These are sensitive topics and provide good reason in themselves for the University to be sure that all cultures as we currently define them receive the highest possible level of sustained institutional representation and respect.

Joshua Katz is a professor in the Department of Classics. He can be reached at jtkatz@princeton.edu.