The nerd culture is, I think, a genuine cultural shift. Perhaps not as large as that from a humanities dominated culture to a science dominated culture, but it does seem more a shift than a fashion. How we are to accommodate this shift is a significant challenge to the university and to the natural sciences.
The last shift, that heralded by C.P. Snow's Rede lecture, was accommodated at a substantial cost to the humanities - a cost from which we have yet to recover. Standing proudly aloof, as Bloom said of the humanities, seems a strategy intent on reducing one's influence. And aping the methods of the foreign culture is quickly seen for what it is.
Fortunately, there is much in the sciences that is already heavily computational which could easily be, and should be, made more visible to the student. Gratuitous computational use, however, is not on - aping is aping. In this it is important to remember that, while we may regard the computer as a powerful and even essential tool, in the `nerd culture' it is the raison d'ĂȘtre, a malleable medium for expression - in, of, and for itself.
The challenges to the natural sciences are: to ensure that science and scientific reasoning are an important part of everyone's education, to attract the good students to the sciences, and to apply scientific knowledge and reasoning to this new specialization.
The broader challenge to the university culture is to incorporate important cultural shifts without sacrificing the best of what went before. We have a new shift that requires addressing and we have yet to deal justly with the last much larger shift.
The same questions still need to be answered. Northrop Frye argued in 1963 that C.P. Snow's problem of two (or now more) cultures is not a major problem of society.
``It is not the humanist's ignorance of science or the scientist's ignorance of the humanities which is important, but their common ignorance of the society they are living in, and their responsibilities as citizens. It is not the humanist's inability to read a textbook in physics or the physicist's ability to read a textbook in literary criticism, but the inability of both of them to read the morning paper with a kind of insight demanded of educated citizens.''What should constitute an education? Must specializations be so specialized? And so soon? Allan Bloom suggests that posing some of these questions would be a threat to the peace, yet pose them we must. But where?
From The Changing Pace in Canadian Education, the Kenneth E. Norris Memorial Lectured delivered at Sir George Williams University, January 24, 1963 as reprinted in Frye, 1988, p. 69.
This series of conferences is important in that they provide a rare forum where scholars from across the spectrum of intellectual inquiry can raise and discuss these and like questions. How to foster the same kind of discussion back at our home institutions is a challenge for all of us.