3 Toward a Working Partnership of the Sciences and Humanities
2James R. Killian, Jr.
3 I count it a privilege to participate in Auburn’s Franklin Lectures in the Sciences and Humanities. My appearance here allows me to share in your tribute to John Leonard Franklin and to add my own appreciation of his rare qualities as an inventor and humanist. This lectureship also provides me with an opportunity to discuss a subject that has long been in the foreground of my thoughts.
4 Inevitably lectures dealing with the sciences and the humanities must run the risk of being merely footnotes to the great debate that Matthew Arnold, Bishop Wilberforce, and Thomas Huxley pursued with such vigor and vehemence, and that Sir Charles Snow and Frank Leavis have so recently updated---or backdated! What I say to you does not avoid echoes of that classic controversy, but I do hope also to move beyond their locus of battle and in the end to suggest out of my personal experience some down-to-earth but formidable examples of current issues, the resolution of which can be facilitated by a working partnership of the sciences and humanities, whatever may be their differences in mode and outlook. In fact, our society is confronted with a host of problems that in my view can best be solved by activists from the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities together contributing out of their specialized insights to the common account. Through their joint efforts in the public arena may lie our best hope for providing a program for a better society---better both for the lonely crowd and for the lonely human being.
5 Implicit in all that I say in this lecture is a plea that more humanists, scientists, and social scientists re-examine their relationships to society and descend from their ivory towers to engage in the grubby but vital social action that is required to advance the quality of our society. Both the humanities and the sciences have lost prestige and are in trouble today. The humanities are still too much afflicted by what George Santayana called the genteel tradition. As some of my colleagues in the humanities put it recently in an internal memorandum, ‘‘we share the suspicion that a severe kind of professionalism and a hardening of archaic igth century attitudes threaten the teaching of the humanities in the U.S. with a complacent and deadly kind of Mandarinism.’’
6 The sciences are also in trouble because they are associated in the minds of many, not so much with their socially constructive effects as with terrifying military technology and with the degradation of our environment through misapplied technology.
7 Is it not possible that closer couplings between the sciences and the humanities may help both?
8 In the spirit of these introductory observations, let me now turn to the Huxley-Arnold-Snow tradition, pipe some notes on my penny whistle, and review recent comments by informed observers.
9 I believe strongly that the future vigor and welfare of our society require that our science and technology flourish, but I believe with equal conviction that the humanities and arts must flourish too, and that our ultimate aim in learning and living should be to avoid detrimental conflicts and to achieve a confluence of these two domains. In a very deep sense they are interdependent, and they spring from the same act of imagination.
10 In his posthumously published Pegram Lectures, Andre Maurois recounts an anecdote told to him by the poet Saint-John Perse. Once while he was living in Washington, Einstein called him from Princeton and asked him to come to see him. ‘‘I have a question to ask you,’’ said Einstein. Saint-John Perse did visit Einstein, and the great physicist put to him the question: ‘‘How does the poet work? How does the idea of a poem come to him? How does this idea grow?’’ Saint-John Perse described the vast part played by intuition and by the subconscious. Einstein seemed delighted: ‘‘But it’s the same thing for the man of science,’’ he said. ‘‘The mechanics of discovery are neither logical nor intellectual. It is a sudden illumination, almost a rapture. Later, to be sure, intelligence, analysis, and experiments confirm (or invalidate) the intuition. But initially there is a great forward leap of the imagination.’’
11 It is the humanistic responsibility of our colleges and universities to stress this kinship, indeed the unity, of all creative work and to ease the vested interests and snobberies which all too often appear among learned men.
12 We need to remind ourselves of the subtle couplings interconnecting the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. We need to remember how the great humanists of Greece, of the Middle Ages, and of the Renaissance helped to create an intellectual and spiritual environment and attitude benign to the development of modern science. Some of the great men of religion made their contribution. St. Francis of Assisi led men to seek spiritual elevation in nature itself; Roger Bacon, the friar, stressed the study of nature as another way to perceive God; Peter Abelard foreshadowed the method of science when he wrote: ‘‘By doubting we are led to inquire, and by inquiring to perceive truth.’’ Thus nature gained importance as a domain for study, and thus science came to be encouraged. As Crane Brinton observed in Ideas and Men, [Brinton:1950aa] ‘‘science needed not merely an interest in material things; it needed the intellectual apparatus to devise the incredibly complex ordering of things we call science; it needed above all the long training in the use of reason afforded by the Greek and medieval philosophy and theology our innocent logical positivists scorn.’’
13 Humanism is no less important today as an ally of science in the great coalition, the unity of learning we seek. The humanist is one of the principal architects and custodians of the benign environment which science requires for its success. The aesthetic sensitivities the great humanist cultivates or makes us aware of, the perspectives of history he reveals, and the questions about the future he insists on asking, the ‘‘vision of greatness’’ and the ‘‘study of perfection’’ he brings before us, his search for the moral and the first-rate in living, the eternal questions he asks--- all these activities help to create the conditions and the outlook which science requires to flourish and men require for fulfillment.
14 We need also to remember how science has broken shackles of ignorance and superstition, given new leads in the social sciences, profoundly influenced and enriched the philosophy and the understanding of men, and thereby given a new depth and reach to humanism. Charles Frankel has called science ‘‘an example par excellence of a liberal art---a deliberate, selective reordering of experience, which releases men from the narrowness and urgency of their routine affairs …and makes it possible for their commerce with the world to have scope, order, and systematic consequences.’’
15 In recalling these special characteristics and interrelationships of science and the humanities, I do not minimize the continuing gap between them. Several years ago the American Academy of Arts and Sciences sponsored a conference on ‘‘Science and Culture,’’ and in the issue of Daedalus devoted to the conference, Gerald Holton reported as follows:
1617…this very diverse group of about thirty-five men and women, including scientists, scholars in the humanities, creative artists, social scientists, and administrators, found fairly quickly one area of substantial agreement. It was the feeling that the relationship between the sciences and the humanities may well become considerably more strained in the immediate future. This estimate did not neglect the many new and old areas of mutual help nor the fact that there has always been some background noise of mutual invective. Here we are speaking of something new. As one concerned scientist expressed it, ‘‘we may not have seen anything yet of the row that is really going to develop.’’ For example, one may expect drastic advances in the possibilities of increasing control over the human environment as well as over psychological and physiological functions (as by the action of drugs and the transplantation of organs); and this will have ‘‘a deep effect on what it is to be a human being.’’ A sociologist agreed completely: ‘‘I think that the development of the in-between sphere (where both the sciences and the humanities have claims) is going to force many, many fights; they have been developing rapidly, and we have seen only the barest beginning of what is coming.’’
18 Despite this foreboding about territorial aggression between the two domains, I still think it important to stress the interdependence of the two fields and of trends toward convergence and unitary vision.
19 I have been speaking mainly of science and the humanities, but I would not neglect engineering nor applied science and the humanities. Curiously the tendency to give applied science a lower rank in the intellectual pecking order may have been revived by certain snobberies in the humanities. In an article in Encounter in 1965, Peter B. Medawar, Director of London’s National Institute for Medical Research, made the interesting point that our current reverence for pure science derives from the ‘‘literary propaganda of the romantic revival.’’ Said he in that article:
2021If our reverence for Pure Science is a rather parochial thing, a by-product of literary propaganda of the romantic revival; if no case can be made for it on philosophic grounds; if purity is not part of a scientist’s own valuation of science; then why on earth do we think so highly of it? It is, I think, our humanist brethren who have taught us to believe that while pure science is a genteel and even creditable activity for scientists and universities, applied science, with all of its horrid connotations of trade, has no place on the campus; for only the purest of pure science can give countenance to research in the humanities…
22 This invidious distinction between pure and applied science is akin to the classical distinction between thought and practice---mind and hand---the attitude, still to be found in some societies, that spurns manual work as unfit for intellectuals.
23 Be that as it may, I wish to reiterate a view that I have often stated about the widening role of the engineer and the potentially close relationship between the humanist and the engineer. The engineer’s professional responsibility has never been so central to our society as it is today. I speak primarily of the engineer who, in Ashby’s phrase, ‘‘views technology as inseparable from men and communities.’’ I speak of the engineer who has achieved a mastery of his specialty but who, in addition, has the capacity and motivation to use and shape technology as a powerful humanistic instrument for enhancing the quality of our society as well as its material advance, for helping to solve the social problems of our time, and for directing technology toward aesthetic and moral objectives. When working in close harmony with humanists, the engineer today occupies this position of great social responsibility. He occupies a unique vantage point for harnessing both science and the humanities for coping with some of the most urgent problems of our time---the crisis in transportation, the maintenance of a benign environment, the humane use of computer technology, preserving the beauty and benignity of our land.
24 We must, of course, recognize the importance of those engineers---the great specialists---who limit themselves to dedicated, creative technical work, and we honor them no less by stressing the need for humanist-engineers who accept the more comprehensive responsibility now so important to our society.
25 One of my colleagues, Professor Jay Forrester, has spoken of this urgently needed new engineer as an ‘‘enterprise engineer’’ or a ‘‘socio-technical systems engineer,’’ and he believes that a ‘‘tenfold increase in the yield of enterprise engineer caliber of men calls for an entirely different kind of educational institution …that focuses on the gap in the upper elite sector of engineering practice.’’
26 Both the schools and the engineering profession itself must turn their attention toward creating the engineer who can provide the kind of professional leadership I have sought to describe. I call again for a major effort in our schools and in our professional societies to create the context out of which this kind of engineer can emerge.
27 The historian, Professor Lynn White, Jr., has suggested that engineers can help shape a new humanism. ‘‘Engineers are the chief revolutionaries of our time,’’ he says.
2829Their implicit ideology is a compound of compassion for those suffering from physical want, combined with a Promethean rebellion against all bonds, even bonds to this planet. Engineers are arch-enemies of all who, because of their fortunate position, resist the surge of the mass of mankind toward a new order of plenty, of mobility, and of personal freedom. Within the societies which have consolidated about the Marxist and the Western democratic revolutions, engineers’ activities are the chief threat to surviving privilege.
30Without deliberate intent, but by the nature of their activity, engineers have largely destroyed the contemporary validity of the older aristocratic humanism which was a cultural weapon in the hands of the ruling class. When engineers in greater numbers come to know explicitly what they are doing, when they recognize their dedication, they can join with alert humanists to shape a new humanism which will speak for and to a global democratic culture.
31 Not only are there many intersections between the humanities and the sciences and engineering, but also between the arts and science. Advances in science have clearly given new dimensions to art. Leonardo the artist, as well as Leonardo the engineer, was a truth-seeker, and the Renaissance came to be a time when art and science most nearly converged---at least in spirit.
32 Whether the progress of science is constantly shaped to some degree by the larger cultural movements is more uncertain and more difficult to argue. Yet I remember well a conversation I had some forty years ago with the late great mathematician Norbert Wiener, who expressed to me his own conviction that mathematics, at least, ‘‘has been an active participant in the larger aesthetic movements.’’ Later in 1930, Wiener set these ideas down in an article on ‘‘Mathematics and Art’’ in The Technology Review. He essayed to show how mathematics is a fine art as close to that of music, of literature, of painting as these are one to another and that it has shared in the characteristic style of the philosophy and aesthetics and general culture that differentiates, more or less, one period from another in the history of Western civilization.
33 As an example of the Wiener argument let me quote his comments on the transition from the Romantic period in mathematics to the present. ‘‘The romantic period,’’ he says,
3435…carries us well towards the later years of the Nineteenth Century. The period of self-satisfaction in mathematics and in physics which ensued thereon, the period in which the physicist’s ideal was the addition of another decimal place to already established constants and in which many a mathematician envisages the future as an absolutely traditional pursuit of lines of research already mapped out, is but the mirror of the Philistinism which has architecturally so disfigured Europe and America, the era of the red plush sofa.
36The present epoch both in the mathematical disciplines and in the arts represents a revolt against this Philistinism. The spirit underlying both revolts may be regarded as a development of romanticism. The romantic artist struck out on a line of his own in revolt against the rigidity of the Eighteenth Century. The artist of the present also regards it as his privilege to experiment and to adopt totally new methods; but, and this is important, without the act of assent that marks the true romanticist. The romanticist said, ‘‘I believe in this new art, as against the vitiated tradition.’’ The modernist says, ‘‘This idea looks interesting to me. Let me see where it leads me, even though I may give it no ultimate approval.’’ …Einstein developed his full gravitational theory in the beginning as a tour de force, as a possibility, interesting whether true or false. That it was ultimately to be verified reflects enormous credit on his intuition, but even unverified, it already existed as a mathematical essence, and this essence, this construction, parallels closely the goal of the effort of the modern artist.
37 While recognizing that he was walking in the quicksands of aesthetic theory, Wiener’s comments provide one kind of interpretation of some of the relations between art and science, which may or may not be true, and which certainly are not provable in the ordinary sense. But we can accept as true, I believe, the ample testimony that scientists and artists have a base of shared experience in their mutual ‘‘sense of wonder in nature, of freedom within her boundaries, and of unity with her in knowledge.’’
38 The relationship between technology and art is, in many respects, more direct and therefore more observable. New materials, new processes, new techniques, especially in the use of light, film, and of electronics, have all widened the boundaries of art and ushered in an era of multi-media artistic endeavor. Changing technology stimulates also experiments in point of view as well as innovation in substance and form. And this is not new.
39 August Heckscher is fond of telling that ‘‘the great art critic Berenson described in his letters how a single technological creation could overturn all the accepted patterns of art. Berenson said that early in the century, he had gone out to look at one of the Wright Brothers’ early airplanes. He went on to say: ‘‘I cannot tell you how I hate this innocent monster which is going to destroy the world I love. It will destroy the world I love, the world of level vision or vision from down upwards, in other words, the whole way of looking at things that the artist had been taught to expect, all the rules of perspective, the sense of looking at solid objects from one fixed place on the earth. ‘All that,’ said Berenson, ‘was being thrown out by the invention of the airplane’.’’
40 The rapid pace of change, accelerated by the progress of science and technology, bears on the artist with an especially heavy impact. Heckscher says of Berenson’s remarks on the impact of the airplane on the artist’s view of the world that the artist living in this changing world, if he is going to produce great art, is going to have to do one of two things, and both of these are helped or supported by his being part of the traditional environment of learning in our society. In the first place, the artist will have to borrow from the visions of those men who are themselves expanding the horizons of truth, from the physicists who are giving us a new sense of what material is …to the psychologists who are looking deeper into the human consciousness than men have ever looked before. In this environment, the artist attains some of the vision and some of the understanding that our confused society cannot always give him.
41 …The university, with its sense of true seeking, being out on the furthest limits of knowledge, will give the artist some sense of the world which he must try to interpret….
42 Some time ago I was rereading a favorite book, As I Remember Him, [Zinsser:1940aa] by the late Hans Zinsser. Zinsser was a first-rate scientist and physician and in the highest sense a humanist and occasionally a poet. And in this book he had some very wise things to say about the importance of the artist---visual, literary, or performing---to the world of science. He argued that the insights of the artist, and the re-enthronement of art in our life, can serve as vital guides and guardians of the objectives of progress. In his argument for art, he quoted Santayana’s observation that there is a ‘‘high breathlessness about beauty that cancels lust and superstitions.’’ Might art not also, asked Zinsser, ‘‘cancel materialism gone wild as well?’’ And might it not---‘‘If it could move arm-in-arm with science---give direction and harmonious dignity to the new powers …that science provides?’’ And by enriching man’s feelings, may it not help him avoid a sterile intellectualism? Certainly art and artists can increase the ‘‘qualitative richness and emotional range’’ which can be beneficial to the work of the scientist in seeking to enlarge our understanding.
43 These scattered observations about the many intersections between the arts and humanities and the sciences and engineering bring me finally to the culminating argument I wish to present: our society urgently needs more humanists and scientists as activists jointly working in the public arena on real-life problems. There are a multitude of public policy issues where there is urgent need in the national decision-making process for the diverse judgments and insights of humanists, scientists, engineers, and social scientists. Let me select just two, because I have recently been involved in both.
44 The first is the security of the United States as it is affected by nuclear weapons. We are in the midst of an intense national debate about the deployment of an anti-ballistic missile system. In order to deal wisely with such a question, it is important to penetrate an array of arcane complexities, many of them nontechnical, and to give the ABM its proper place in the total context of our national security. It is urgently important to invent new ways of making decisions about weapons systems that will command public confidence and insure wiser policies. So far we have not done this well, as the current ABM controversy reveals.
45 Recently, in testifying before a Senate committee on this matter, I made some suggestions about how our Government might better deal with such grave and fateful decisions about our nuclear strategic forces and policies. I proposed that the government, from time to time, should convene an ad hoc or blue ribbon committee of wise men from varied backgrounds to make an independent, comprehensive study in depth of our strategic forces and policies.
46 The commission that I have in mind should be made up not only of such experts as those drawn from the military, from science and technology, and from foreign affairs, but also of those who are accustomed to weighing great issues in terms of man’s highest social responsibilities.
47 The task force should be independent of the Department of Defense and other government agencies which have a direct responsibility for formulating, advocating, and carrying out strategic programs. In its studies it should seek to gain an understanding of the relationships of all of our weapons systems and of the strategic options confronting this country in the years immediately ahead.
48 I do not propose that the findings of such a commission should necessarily carry more weight than studies conducted within government. I have great respect for the thoroughness and rigor which the government can bring to the formulation of policy decisions although it does not always do so. Independent studies, such as I suggest, might well serve to sharpen the government’s own analyses. The task force’s recommendations should be critically examined by the normal procedures of the government and considered in relation to proposals which have come from within government. Their special value would be that they would be independent conclusions reached by a group of competent citizens who were free of organizational loyalties, and who bring to bear a wide spectrum of insights and sensitivities, and who could, therefore, formulate their evaluations and recommendations without being constrained by any departmental or disciplinary commitments or biases. So often the roles and missions interests of the armed services influence and narrow defense decisions more than they should, and the task force I suggest could transcend these service interests. By virtue of its freedom from any vested interests, such a commission could also provide some reassurance to the growing number of citizens who are concerned about the ‘‘military-industrial complex’’ and its alleged influence on our strategic policies and programs.
49 In 1954, I chaired a large-scale study partaking of some of these characteristics, which was undertaken at the request of President Eisenhower, and I think it fair to say that the intensive and comprehensive study which resulted helped in reaching priority judgments about our weapons technology and related matters, and was ultimately viewed as helpful by the government agencies involved. This task force, incidentally, included not only scientists and engineers but a gifted historian and representatives of other disciplines.
50 In playing its fundamental role in reaching decisions about these weapons systems, which require vast expenditures and which might have a fateful effect on our survival, Congress, I respectfully suggest, can benefit from independent assessments arising out of a variety of different outlooks and experiences. Essential as it is, I am not sure that the conventional hearing is by itself sufficient to provide Congress with the searching studies it needs to cope with the complexities of great security issues such as that presented by the ABM. Is it not possible that Congress, too, could benefit from creating a variety of special task forces to make studies in depth for its cognizant committees? It has been heartening to note the growing practice of some Congressional committees to contract for special studies and to engage consultants who can do more than simply appear for brief testimony. The public would also benefit if independent studies marked by thoroughness and objectivity could be made available. It would be of advantage if these studies were financed by private funds. There are a growing number of scholars in our universities who are engaged in interdisciplinary studies of public policy issues, including defense, and they constitute a growing pool that can be tapped. I believe we could have modulated some of the current cacophony and disagreement about the ABM if we had mobilized the kind of interdisciplinary systems study I advocate.
51 Some years back, Dr. James B. Conant made a proposal that I do not believe has ever been tried in a formal way. He advocated that in the consideration of weapons of technical complexity and great cost, there be a quasi-judicial review of proposals, including a form of adversary proceeding. ‘‘When a question comes up to be settled,’’ he said, ‘‘one or more referees might hear the arguments pro and con. If there were no contr ary arguments, some technical expert should be appointed to speak on behalf of the taxpayer against the proposed research and development. Then adequate briefs of the two or more sides should be prepared (not a compromise committee report.)’’ Conant went on to emphasize that today every citizen is a ‘‘party to an enormous new enterprise. His government has gone into the research and development business on a scale totally different from anything seen in the past…Consequences of tremendous significance in terms of survival may hang on the way this work is carried on,’’ and ‘‘the waste of enormous sums of money could threaten the soundness of our economy.’’
52 It is important for the policymaker and the public to have the benefit of listening to contending points of view on complex technical and strategic proposals such as the ABM, and also for them to recognize that many questions involving technical, policy, and humane issues cannot be answered with positive yes or no certainty. There are many such questions to which scientists or other specialists of equivalent competence, objectivity, and complete integrity will respond differently. I cannot fault either those who sincerely and thoughtfully favor an ABM deployment, or those who oppose, and both should have full opportunities to be heard.
53 The second and wholly different area of public policy where engineers and humanists together face a common challenge is in the improvement of television. In fact, the quality of television depends upon joint action by engineers and humanists, else in any truly humane sense the medium can fail. Senator Pastore’s recent hearings on the possibly harmful social effects of current commercial television programs were symptomatic of a deep concern in our country that the miraculous and powerful technology of televison has not been put to the best uses of American society.
54 Two years ago the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television declared in its report that a well-financed and well-directed educational television system substantially larger and far more pervasive and effective than that which now exists in the United States must be brought into being if the full needs of the American public are to be served. It advanced the concept of Public Television as that kind of programming which includes all that is of human interest and importance which is not appropriate or available for support by advertising and which is not arranged for formal instruction. Said the Carnegie Commission:
5556We have become aware of television as a technology of immense power, growing steadily more powerful. What confronts our society is the obligation to bring that technology into the full service of man, so that its power to move image and sound is consistently coupled with a power to move mind and spirit. Television should enable us not only to see and hear more vividly, but to understand more deeply.
57 So far, television of all kinds has largely failed to provide this kind of service.
58 Since the Carnegie Commission report appeared, Congress has acted upon its principal recommendations and passed the Public Broadcasting Act, designed to build a noncommercial television system which can provide a much needed supplement to commercial television. This Act called for the establishment of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and this is now in being under strong leadership, although the funds yet made available are very small. With this landmark legislation, the American people have available to them a plan and an instrument which, if their potentials are realized, can offer the artist, the technician, the journalist, the scholar, the scientist, and the humanist a new freedom to create, innovate, and be heard.
59 In a letter to the Carnegie Commission, Mr. E. B. White summed up the potential of noncommercial or ‘public’ television when he said:
6061Noncommercial television should address itself to the ideal of excellence, not the idea of acceptability---which is what keeps commercial television from climbing the staircase. I think television should be the visual counterpart of the literary essay, should arouse our dreams, satisfy our hunger for beauty, take us on journeys, enable us to participate in events, present great drama and music, explore the sea and the sky and the woods and the hills. It should be our Lyceum, our Chautauqua, our Minsky’s, and our Camelot. It should restate and clarify the social dilemma and the political pickle. Once in a while it does, and you get a quick glimpse of its potential.
62 Educational television also has had its great failure. It has not yet come close to mastering television technology for instructional purposes. This technology is advancing rapidly. Perhaps one of the most revolutionary of all developments is the impending technology of low-cost storage and playback of television programs---the possibility that in the future both black and white and color television programs can be purchased in the form of cassettes or records which can be inserted into an instrument plugged into the television set and played at will. The impact of this technology can be very great in multiplying the choices available to the home and the school and in making it possible to utilize program materials in much the same way that one plays phonograph records and, thus, break away from the fixed schedule.
63 The second impending major change in communications technology is the use of the communications satellite. In facilitating and multiplying the transmission of programs, communication satellites pose great issues of public policy. How should they be financed and managed? And should or should they not be used to bring a high degree of centralization in programming, both for the home and for the school? The communications satellite may well make it possible to broadcast from a central point directly into the school and home, thus leapfrogging over the local station or the state system and threatening a new kind of national regimentation and conformity. This is a problem of tremendous moment, and it will require the combined wisdom of the humanist and technologist to arrive at the best answer.
64 Next, there are immense possibilities ahead for extending television technology into wholly new domains. I speak of such concepts as interactive television, which would permit the viewer to communicate with the performer. I speak of arrangements to multiply the number of program choices available; of the concept of ‘‘narrow-casting’’ for reaching the small, select audience, or the many different small, select audiences.
65 In commenting upon these technological possibilities, a consultant to the Carnegie Commission, Dr. J. C. L. Licklider, who is a psychologist and communications engineer, and educator, made this observation:
6667The main trend of educational television is somewhat too conservative in its estimation of the feasibility of selective, interactive, and inter-communicational television systems and of the achievability, with the aid of such systems, of a significant breakthrough in education. The main factor that is not sufficiently appreciated, I believe, is the effectiveness of interactive participation in a well-designed, strongly reinforcing educational process. Advances in technology are making it possible for the first time to set up such a process without depending upon lavish use of scarce human resources. Other advances are making it at least conceivable that we may be able to set up such processes on a broad enough scale to reach almost every educable member of the society. My conclusion, therefore, is that the situation calls for intensive research in two complementary fields: the exploitability of informational technology in support of education, and education within the new context offered by informational technology.
68 One does not need to embrace the metaphysics of Marshall McLuhan to see the enormous responsibilities which rest upon both the engineers and the humanists, the generalists and the politicians and all people who are concerned about the public welfare to salvage television technology to serve the best man and not the worst. I can think of no better example of the need for humanists, artists, and engineers to join forces to enhance the quality of our society.
69 Let me conclude by reporting on what I see to be the growing role of the humanities in those institutions such as Auburn in which science and technology are fully embraced. In such a setting, humanists have an opportunity to pursue liberal teaching and liberal learning in an atmosphere of exceptional freedom to innovate and to extend the scope of the humanities and to teach them in fresh ways that have a renewed relevance to contemporary affairs. They have, therefore, an opportunity also to advance the humanities in new ways, but in the great tradition of humane learning and without any sense of being either subordinate or superior to science. I do not propose a kind of scientific humanism, nor do I suggest we develop the humanities in the image of science. I believe, as Jacob Bronowski, that ‘‘every cast of mind has its creative activity which explores the likeness appropriate to it….’’ The humanities as humanities have an opportunity to flourish in this environment just as the social sciences have.
70 But there is another aspect of the study of man that is of growing importance in institutions such as Auburn and my own, where science and engineering have important emphasis. In these institutions, with their great strength in science and engineering, the humanist, the social scientist, the engineer, the scientist, the planner, the artist, and the architect can form---and are forming---unique coalitions of resources to serve man and society.
71 We are currently examining at my own institution a program or center for policy studies with the thought that it might provide a new way for the university to involve itself constructively in current public issues and in the process educate a new kind of professional man who can bring a systems approach to socio-technical matters and who has the breadth to formulate policies and actions which are beyond the scope of the specialist. Such a program of policy studies, if it is to be effective, must include the arts and humanities as well as science, engineering, and social studies. The humanists, who have so far not been so ready as the engineers to involve themselves in systems studies, have a special opportunity to put the humanities to work through participation in such policy studies concerned with the real and urgent problems of contemporary society.
72 Even though they may be predominantly science or engineering, these collective efforts demonstrate humanism in action directed to goals highly relevant to the urgent needs of a technological society. These socio-technical or scientific-humanistic programs include such undertakings as programs in urban affairs, in bioengineering and living systems, in health-related activities, in psycho-social studies of man-machine relationships, and in the pursuit of the life sciences. In all these programs there is a preoccupation with specific problems relating to the human condition, such as poverty and pollution, urban reconstruction, better housing, better transportation, a benign environment. There is gathering determination to counter the effects of harmful technological fall-out and, more positively, to anticipate and avoid such fall-out in the future. There is a widening effort to identify and mobilize the powers inherent in science and engineering qualitatively to enrich our society.
73 If our technological society is to be made to work and be humane, if we are to make headway in solving the horrendous problems which confront us, there must be a continuing emphasis on these collective efforts to invent new ways, new programs, and new organizational arrangements whereby science and engineering, the arts, the social sciences, and the humanities work in partnership and bring their resources sensitively to bear on the contemporary needs of our society.
74 What I describe, then, is a kind of institution in which a constellation of collective efforts are invested with humanistic purpose. Each of the great disciplines, whether they be science, social science, humanities, or the arts, pursuing their teaching and research according to their own ways and traditions, come together in the fellowship of one great humanistic enterprise.
75 These lectures are but another manifestation of this interweaving and interdependence of these great fields in seeking to meet the relevant and urgent needs of man in a technological society and to construct a new and unified vision of the full potential of man. Walter Pater aptly stated the goal: ‘‘Here artists and philosophers and those whom the action of the world has elevated and made keen, do not live in isolation but breathe a common air, and catch light and heat from each other’s thoughts.’’
76 April, 1969