Two Cultures

Hello and welcome everyone; my name is Karen van der Poel, and I am a pre-med anthropology student at UCLA. Last week, I learned that many in academia agree that there is a divide between the humanities/arts and the sciences; they go as far as to categorize them into two different “cultures.” For instance, in C. P. Snow’s essay, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, he states that the arts and sciences are regarded as two distinct intellectual fields (Snow 1959). This distinction has not been noticed just by scholars like Snow; the idea of this dichotomy has also been so ingrained in our society that you even see bands called Art vs Science.

The apparent dichotomy between the arts and sciences is also reflected on our campus at UCLA both physically and mentally. When you look at our campus, you see that the humanities and art classes are located in the north part of campus while the math and sciences are in the south, creating a literal divide between the disciplines, as seen in Professor Vesna’s third lecture video of last week.

North Campus

vs

South Campus

When you look at our students, you see that they categorize themselves as either “north campus” or “south campus” students, and they adopt a certain mentality along with it; often you will hear north campus scoffing at the intellectual haughtiness of their south campus counterparts, while the south campus students complain about how much coursework they have to in supposed comparison to those in north campus. Sometimes, this mentality goes beyond the students and becomes involved in the interactions of adults on campus as well, as can be seen in the infamous video of UCLA’s Professor Scerri and a preacher.

While I do agree that at the surface level there appears to be a divide between the arts and sciences, others, including myself, argue that in actuality there is no such dichotomy. Professor Vesna argues in her essay, Third Culture: Being in Between, that there is a third culture that utilizes both the arts and sciences to carry out their work (Vesna 2001). However, I argue that rather than being categorized into distinct disciplines, we all fall into a spectrum between the arts and sciences. Some of us, like myself, have scientifically-inclined career tracks with a humanities curriculum; others, like my good friend Johnny, have “north campus” majors like economics with crucial mathematical components. I have seen many others like ourselves that also fall in between the arts and sciences in varying degrees, which reinforces my notion that we should be wary of our habit of organizing things into distinct categories, like what we do with race, gender roles, and apparently, academic disciplines.

Works Cited/Linked

Art vs Science. http://www.artvsscience.net/. June 28, 2013.

Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge University Press, London. 1959.

Vesna, Victoria. Third Culture: Being in Between. Leonardo, Vol. 34, No. 2. (2001), pp. 121-125.

Vesna, Victoria. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=GUr4xxZ_0gw. June 29, 2013.