At Oberlin, it often seems as though the student body is split— students either take weekly naps on the couches in King or have a permanent nesting place in the Science Center atrium. How to contextualize and characterize this split and what its effects are were the questions that sophomore Ashley Taylor strove to answer on Tuesday.

Taylor did research on this topic for her final project titled, “The Two Cultures of Oberlin: A Perspective on Cultural Dichotomies” for History 201: History of Science from Antiquity through the Scientific Revolution. The basis of her analysis started with a speech given by the novelist and scientist C.P. Snow in 1959, called “The Two Cultures.”

Taylor described the speech as “addressing what he saw as a division between the scientific culture and the traditional or literary culture worldwide. This divide, Snow said, resulted in fear and rejection of technology by the traditional culture and thus impeded social progress and humanitarian efforts that technology, if embraced, could facilitate.

“As the daughter of scientists and a science student myself I was compelled to analyze Snow’s description of a scientific culture and decide if and how that culture affected my life,” continued Taylor.

Taylor stopped here to define a term. “If culture is the way we make sense of the world, people who make sense of the world in different ways can be said to belong to different cultures,” she said. “This is the basis of my cultural classification scheme.”

Before specifically addressing how the cultural dichotomy is manifested at Oberlin, Taylor dug into her autobiography for her already established attitudes.

“I grew up in Bar Harbor, Maine, an open-minded, progressive and liberal community,” she said. “Creativity and progressive thought go hand in hand; new ideas are willingly tried out and, if successful, applied.”

Before coming to Oberlin, Taylor made a decision.

“For a while, I thought so and really believed that Snow’s description of scientific and traditional cultures applied exactly to Bar Harbor and Owensboro. It was then that I labeled Bar Harbor as a scientific culture and attributed to this scientific influence Bar Harbor’s open-minded character.”

Once at Oberlin, she was forced to redefine her terms.

“My current classification scheme can be divided into two cultures, intellectual and non-intellectual,” she said. “Members of the intellectual culture make sense of the world by trying to explain it, by proposing models and mechanisms for the way it works.”

But although Taylor has stopped valuing one specialization of intellectual culture over another, the problem of fundamental differences between the two still exist.

“This is another way to view Snow’s two cultures, as a sort of speciation of the intellectual culture into two subcultures, whose highly developed ways of making sense of the world have become incompatible,” she said.

To discover wherein this incompatibility lay specifically in Oberlin, Taylor interviewed professors and surveyed students on the questions of what factors contribute to interdisciplinary relations and if there is a divide.

“Many people felt that there was a divide of some kind between science and non-science students here,” said Taylor. “Academically, students are divided by the courses they take each semester. They are also divided by the locations of their courses on campus, with non-science classes primarily on South campus and science classes in the Science Center.

“The Science Center has an uncertain role in interdisciplinary relations here. Some people suggest that the Science Center sequesters science students from the rest of the campus. The Science Center may chaperone formation of a scientific culture more than other academic buildings do formation of a non-scientific, but academic, culture. This facility also attracts students of other disciplines who use the computer labs, the library, the study areas. Professors who have been in Oberlin before and after the Science Center was built say that this building has led to increased interactions between students of different disciplines.”

Taylor pointed out the unifying aspects of curricular life in the college, citing the environmental studies program, FYSPs and Winter Terms.

“While Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’ do exist in Oberlin, while students do engage in academic specialization, while academic divisions exist here, these divisions are subsumed by Oberlin’s unifying intellectual culture,” she concluded.