A highly-regarded thinker delivers a stirring talk before an audience of scholars decrying the declining quality of education and growing divide between science and the humanities. Sound familiar? The first and best talk in this genre was delivered 50 years ago by the British novelist and physicist C.P. Snow.

Snow’s lecture, entitled The Two Cultures, argued that the breakdown in communication between the two cultures of modern society — the sciences and the humanities — was a major barrier to solving society’s problems. Many scientists, Snow maintained, did not read the classics of literature, while many literary intellectuals were  equally unschooled in the principles of science. 

Fifty years later this disconnect has shifted, write two leading Berkeley faculty. In a co-authored essay, published in the Townsend Center for the Humanities newsletter, Anthony Cascardi, a professor of comparative literature, Spanish and rhetoric, and Fiona Doyle, a professor of materials science and engineering, revisit Snow’s lecture and find that any gap between the sciences and the humanities takes a distant second place to a more troubling disconnect.

“We are more worried about the relationship between research universities and the public,” says Cascardi. “We wrote this piece together because as faculty, we equally value this great research university.”

Scientists and humanists alike, Cascardi and Doyle write, share the common values of questioning, reflecting and thinking critically. These values and the broader life-skills that they foster in students over the course of a lifetime are at the core of what a research university offers.

While the level of public funding for universities like Berkeley is important, Cascardi says, it is not the only thing that matters.

“Yes, our funding is important, but the necessary political support for the University has to rest on a broader base, which includes an understanding of the role of a public research university.”