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Two Cultures, One University: The Institutional Origins of the “Two Cultures” Controversy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 June 2017

Guy Ortolano
Guy Ortolano*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
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Extract

[T]he life of a country is determined by its educational ideals

—Scrutiny, 1932

[I]t is obligatory for us…to look at our education with fresh eyes.

—C. P. Snow, 1959

In 1959 C. P. Snow turned a phrase that continues to shape our perceptions of intellectual life in the twentieth century. Intellectuals, he observed, were divided into “two cultures,” the arts and the sciences, and between them stood “a gulf of mutual incomprehension.” That gulf constituted a crisis, because while literary intellectuals were said to control the heights of power, only the scientists possessed the knowledge and vision necessary to confront the problems of the modern world. Snow’s argument attracted widespread comment on both sides of the Atlantic, and its continuing purchase is attested to by the Cambridge University Press’s reprint of the lecture in 1993 with an introduction by Stefan Collini.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 34 , Issue 4 , Winter 2002 , pp. 606 - 624
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 2002

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Footnotes

1

An earlier version of this paper was delivered at Northwestern University in May 1999, where it benefitted from the comments of many friends and colleagues. I am also grateful to Ken Alder, T. H. Breen, David Hoyt, Michael J. Moore, Kirk Willis, the anonymous readers of Albion, and, in particular, T. W. Heyck for their comments and criticisms.

References

2 Snow, C. P., The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, 1959), p. 4Google Scholar.

3 Snow, , The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, introduction by Stefan Collini (Cambridge, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on the reception of Snow’s thesis, see Boytinck, Paul, C. P. Snow: A Reference Guide (Boston, 1980)Google Scholar.

4 Leavis, F. R., “The Significance of C. P. Snow,” Spectator, 9 March 1962, p. 299Google Scholar. Chatto and Windus published Leavis’s Richmond Lecture along with a critique of Snow by the biochemist Yudkin, Michael in Two Cultures? The Significance of C.P. Snow (London, 1962)Google Scholar. Citations in this article refer to the Spectator.

5 Considerations of the personal dimensions of the conflict include Mothe, John de la, C. P. Snow and the Struggle of Modernity (Austin, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Snow, Philip, Stranger and Brother: A Portrait of C. P. Snow (New York, 1982)Google Scholar; Corke, Hilary, “Dog That Didn’t Bark,” New Republic 148 (13 April 1963): 27–30Google Scholar; and the responses to Leavis in the Spectator in the three weeks following the publication of his lecture.

6 Boytinck, C. P. Snow: A Reference Guide, pp. vii-viii; Philip Snow, Stranger and Brother, pp. 120-21.

7 Snow, , “The Two Cultures,” New Statesman and Nation, 6 October 1956, pp. 413–14Google Scholar; “Britain’s Two Cultures: A Study of Education in a Scientific Age,” Sunday Times, 10 March 1957, p. 12; “Britain’s Two Cultures: A Revolution in Education,” Sunday Times, 17 March 1957, p. 5.

8 The best place to get a handle on the first two decades of the treatment of Snow’s thesis is in Boytinck, C. P. Snow: A Reference Guide. Recent commentaries include Collini’s introduction (note 3 above); Porter, Roy, “The Two Cultures Revisited,” The Cambridge Review (November 1994): 74–80Google Scholar; MacKillop, Ian, F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; Burnett, D. Graham, “A View from the Bridge: The Two Cultures Debate, Its Legacy, and the History of Science,” Daedalus 128 (Spring 1999): 193–218Google Scholar; and David Edgerton, “C. P. Snow as Anti-Historian of British Science,” lecture at the 1997 BAAS meeting in Leeds and the subject of chapter 9 of The Warfare State: Militarism, Technology, Expertise and Twentieth-Century Britain (forthcoming),

9 Snow, The Two Cultures, p. 12. Snow sharpened his attack in a broadcast recorded for the BBC on 3 June 1959 (broadcast 8 September), dispensing with the lament about the lack of communication and moving his charge that literary intellectuals were “natural Luddites” to the fifth sentence. BBC—Written Archives Center, Microfilm T491, 8 September 1959: Snow, “The Imperatives of Educational Strategy.”

10 Snow, The Two Cultures, p. 29.

11 Ibid., pp. 26, 23.

12 Ibid., p. 8.

13 Ibid., pp. 53-54.

14 Putt, S. Gorley, “Technique and Culture: Three Cambridge Portraits,” Essays and Studies 14 (1961): 34Google Scholar.

15 Wilson, Angus, “If It’s New and It’s Modish, Is It Good?” New York Times Book Review, 2 July 1961, p. 1Google Scholar.

16 Wilson, Angus, “A Plea Against Fashion in Writing,” Moderna Sprak 55 (1961): 345–50Google Scholar; “Fourteen Points,” Encounter 18 (January 1962): 10-12.

17 For the background to Leavis’s lecture, see MacKillop, F. R. Leavis, pp. 311-18. For the innovative discussion of the “danger of Leavis and Snow being merged into a single ‘complex’,” see pages 311-14.

18 Leavis, “The Significance of C. P. Snow,” pp. 297-99.

19 Ibid., p. 303.

20 Ibid., p. 299. Emphasis mine.

21 Ibid., p. 300.

22 Wain, John, “A Certain Judo Demonstration,” in Cornelius, David K. and Vincent, Edwin St., eds., Cultures in Conflict: Perspectives on the Snow-Leavis Controversy (Chicago, 1964), pp. 16–17Google Scholar.

23 Jaki, Stanley, “A Hundred Years of the Two Cultures,” University of Windsor Review 11 (Fall-Winter 1975): 55–79Google Scholar; Trilling, Lionel, “Science, Literature and Culture: A Comment on the Snow-Leavis Controversy,” Commentary 33 (June 1962): 461–77Google Scholar; and Collini (cited in note 3 above).

24 Mothe, C. P. Snow and the Struggle of Modernity, p. 65.

25 Wyndam-Goldie, Grace, “The Story Behind the Challenge of Our Time,” in Koestler, Arthur, E. L. Woodward, J. D. Bernal, et al. The Challenge of Our Time (London, 1948), p. 12Google Scholar.

26 Salingar, Leo, in The Cambridge Quarterly 25 (1996): 401Google Scholar.

27 Halperin, John, C. P. Snow: An Oral Biography (Brighton, 1983), pp. 185–86Google Scholar; Watson, Ivar Alastair, “‘The Distance Runner’s Perfect Heart’: Dr. Leavis in Spain,” The Cambridge Review, November 1995Google Scholar; MacKillop, F. R. Leavis, pp. 270, 281, 301.

28 For consideration of the influence of social position in the development of Snow’s thesis, see Porter, Roy, “The Two Cultures Revisited,” The Cambridge Review, November 1994, pp. 74–80Google Scholar.

29 Leavis, , Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (Cambridge, 1930), p. 25Google Scholar.

30 Snow, The Two Cultures, pp. 10, 11. Snow acknowledged (yet stood by) the imprecision of his use of the concept of “culture” in “The Two Cultures: A Second Look,” Times Literary Supplement, 25 October 1963, pp. 839-44.

31 This story has been told by Turner, Frank Miller, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Ibid., chapter 10.

33 See the accounts by Trilling and Collini.

34 Huxley, T. H., “Science and Culture,” Science and Education (New York, 1896)Google Scholar.

35 Arnold, Matthew, “Literature and Science,” Discourses in America (London, 1885), pp. 79–80Google Scholar. This lecture, initially delivered in Cambridge, was revised for delivery in the United States—it is that revised version referred to here.

36 Ibid., p. 82.

37 Arnold, Matthew, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Essays in Criticism (New York, 1865), p. 29Google Scholar.

38 Ibid., pp. 18-19.

39 Baldick, Chris, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848-1932 (New York, 1983)Google Scholar.

40 Mulhern, Francis, The Moment of ‘Scrutiny’ (London, 1979), p. 13Google Scholar; Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, pp. 86, 80.

41 Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, p. 90.

42 Richards, I.. A., Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement (London 1929, 1964), p. 320Google Scholar.

43 Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, p. 197. On Richards see Collini, Stefan, “On Highest Authority: The Literary Critic and Other Aviators in Early Twentieth-Century Britain,” in Ross, Dorothy, ed., The Modernist Impulse in the Human Sciences, 1870-1930 (Baltimore, 1994)Google Scholar.

44 Leavis, , The Relationship of Journalism to Literature: Studied in the Rise and Earlier Development of the Press in England, Cambridge University Library, Ph.D. 66.Google Scholar

45 Mulhern, The Moment of ‘Scrutiny’, pp. 7-9.

46 The key texts are Mass Civilization and Minority Culture, D.H. Lawrence (Cambridge, 1930), reprinted in For Continuity (Cambridge, 1933); Leavis, Q. D., Fiction and the Reading Public (London, 1932)Google Scholar; and Leavis, and Thompson, Denys, Culture and Environment (Cambridge, 1933)Google Scholar.

47 Leavis, Mass Civilization and Minority Culture, p. 25.

48 Eagleton, Terry writes that, to Leavis, , “the quality of a society’s language was the most telling index of the quality of its personal and social life: a society which had ceased to value literature was one lethally closed to the impulses which had created and sustained the best of human civilization” (Literary Theory: An Introduction [Minneapolis, 1983], p. 32)Google Scholar.

49 Knights, L. C. and Culver, Donald, “Scrutiny: A Manifesto,” Scrutiny 1 (May 1932): 3–4Google Scholar.

50 Leavis, , “Why Universities?” Scrutiny 3 (May 1934): 117–32Google Scholar; “Education and the University: Sketch for an English School,” Scrutiny 9 (September 1940): 98-120; “Education and the University: Criticism and Comment,” Scrutiny 9 (December 1940):. 259-70; “Education and the University: (iii) Literary Studies,” Scrutiny 9 (March 1941): 306-22; “Education and the University: Considerations at a Critical Time,” Scrutiny 11 (Spring 1943): 162-67; Education and the University: A Sketch for an “English School” (London, 1943). The book consisted of revised versions of the second, fourth, and fifth of these articles. For a close reading of Education and the University, see Storer, Richard, “Education and the University: Structure and Sources,” in MacKillop, and Storer, , eds., F. R. Leavis: Essays and Documents (Sheffield, 1995), pp. 129–46Google Scholar.

51 Leavis, “Why Universities?” p. 126.

52 Leavis, “A Sketch for an English School,” p. 113.

53 Leavis, “Education and the University: Considerations at a Critical Time,” p. 162.

54 Ibid.

55 Heyck, T.|W., “The Idea of a University in Britain, 1870-1970,” History of European Ideas 8 (1987): 210CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 Ibid., p. 207.

57 Ibid., p. 210.

58 Halsey, A. H. and Trow, M. A., The British Academics (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), p. 156CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 Halsey, A. H., Decline of Donnish Dominion: The British Academic Professions in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1992), pp. 63–64Google Scholar; Edgerton, David, Science, Technology, and the British Industrial Decline,’ 1870-1970 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 22Google Scholar.

60 “Report of the Syndicate on the Relationship Between the University and the Colleges,” Cambridge University Reporter 92 (13 March 1962): 1146. Enrollment in the arts declined from 2,978 to 2,957, a decrease of.04%.

61 MacKillop, F. R. Leavis, p. 282.

62 Ibid., p. 311.

63 Ibid., pp. 317, 293.

64 Leavis to Parsons, 6 April 1957, Chatto and Windus archive, University of Reading.

65 See Edgerton, Science, Technology and the British Industrial ‘Decline,’ 1870-1970.

66 “The Atom’s Power for Peace: The Shape of Things to Come,” Illustrated London News, 13 October 1945, p. 399.

67 Endeavor, April 1947, pp. 51-57.

68 Scientific Manpower: Report of a Committee Appointed by the Lord President of the Council (London: HMSO, 1946; cmnd. 6824), p. 631.

69 Ibid., p. 636.

70 Perkin, Harold, Key Profession: The History of the Association of University Teachers (New York, 1969), p. 132Google Scholar.

71 Ibid., p. 218.

72 Werskey, Gary, The Visible College: The Collective Biography of British Scientific Socialists of the 1930s (New York, 1978), p. 191Google Scholar.

73 Heyck, “The Idea of a University in Britain,” p. 213; Halsey, Decline of Donnish Dominion, p. 81.

74 University Grants Committee, Report, 1929/1930-1934/1935 (London: HMSO, 1936), p. 54; University Grants Committee, University Development, 1962-1967 (London: HMSO, 1968; cmnd. 3820), p. 19. My thanks to T. W. Heyck for sharing his notes with the UGC figures.

75 British Information Services, Universities in Britain (Swindon, 1963), p. 13.

76 The second figure includes the teachers in the former Colleges of Advanced Technology that were awarded university status in 1965—not an insignificant development given Leavis’s insistence that he did not oppose the expansion of higher education in general, but rather that of the university in particular (UGC, University Development, 1962-1967, p. 26).

77 Ibid., p. 42.

78 Scientific Manpower, p. 637.

79 Halsey, Decline of Donnish Dominion, p. 13.

80 Ibid., pp. 97, 65.

81 Halsey argues that from the 1950s ‘It became received opinion that society needed scholars and scientists to be productively and efficiently modern” (Decline of Donnish Dominion, p. 103).

82 Higher Education: Report of the Committee Appointed by the Prime Minister under the Chairmanship of Lord Robbins, 1961-1963 (London: HMSO, 1963; cmnd. 2154), p. 165.

83 Ibid., pp. 268, 155, 271, 280. The figure of 216,000 students in 1962/63 refers to students in higher education as a whole, which is why it is greater than the number of students in universities cited above.

84 Dean, Robert, “The Tripos of 1961,” The Cambridge Review, 28 October 1961, p. 57Google Scholar.

85 Philip Snow, Stranger and Brother, p. 127; Collini, The Two Cultures, p. xl.

86 Leavis, F. R., Nor Shall My Sword (London, 1972), pp. 150–51Google Scholar.

87 Leavis, , “English, Unrest and Continuity,” Times Literary Supplement, 29 May 1969, pp. 569–72Google Scholar; “‘Literarism’ versus ‘Scientism,’” ibid., 23 April 1970, pp. 441-44.

88 Eagleton, Literary Theory, p. 31.