The prevalence of CS, STEM on campus & in Silicon valley is a common topic that typically comes up when places like "Stanford" or "the Bay Area" are mentioned. Historically, famous figures like Larry Page (co-founder of Google) graduated from Stanford and went on to create STEM-related companies nearby. This caused a 'techie' atmosphere to develop around Stanford, despite the many different majors and well-known Stanford alumni from 'fuzzy' (slang for humanities) fields.

Stanford has grown this reputation through its proximity to Silicon Valley, but it has also created its own culture around STEM fields, with Computer Science at the center and many other schools of engineering receiving attention both outside the university and within the student culture. Even some non-STEM fields such as business have made huge leaps in the last several decades, yet the humanities remains a relatively unknown, unacknowledged part of the university and of the wider culture.

Humanities and non-STEM professors and alumni from/at Stanford receive little acclaim here despite their global significance. Most are never mentioned when discussing the elite academics and intellectualism of Stanford; instead, engineering and mathematics are almost always brought up as indicators of Stanford's intellectual rigor, rather than social sciences or language classes.

One of the most foundational linguistics professors in the world, Dr. Penelope Eckert, has taught at Stanford for over two decades, and it is difficult to find a linguistics paper that doesn't cite one of her works. bell hooks, an author and feminist who focuses on intersectionality, has written tens of world-renowned books on feminism and race. Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy and retired Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor both attended Stanford, neither in a STEM field. Rarely are the accomplishments of Stanford graduates celebrated if they did not found a company or receive a degree in Computer Science, and this has led to the division that we see today.

Recent Lecture and Controversy

Stanford Undergraduate Advising and Research put on an event, co-sponsored by BEAM, Stanford Career Education; the School of Engineering; the School of Humanities and Sciences; and the Stanford Alumni Association, titled '"Fuzzy" and "Techie" A False Divide?' that included a panel of guests there to speak on the issue; however, none of these guests had been humanities students, and their careers are focused on technology or business.

After the panel, contributing writer Anat Peled put up a Daily article that touched on the hypocrisy of the panel (https://bit.ly/2rGsNy8), which was then elaborated on by Religious Studies Professor Charlotte Fonrobert (https://bit.ly/2IGIsr5). Professor Fonrobert expressed her frustration at the lack of humanities voices at the panel, as well as the pejorative attitude STEM-focused students/professionals tend to have towards the humanities.

A week later, Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and Director of Undergraduate Advising and Research Louis Newman wrote another letter to the editor (https://bit.ly/2rGm2eZ) about why the panel was received poorly; Newman claims that the panel was not billed as a discussion between 'fuzzies' and 'techies' and was instead meant to discuss the importance of humanities ideas within the tech world. However, Newman's statement reads somewhat as backpedaling-- the panel was, in fact, billed as "a discussion and Q&A on the fuzzy-techie divide":

The results of this panel are yet to be seen (its only been about two weeks) but it does not seem like the event will have any lasting impact on the perceived divide, most likely because it did not actually address the conflict, and was another instance of the techie world being placed above the humanities.