Stanford University will offer a new joint major this fall that fuses disciplines that might seem disparate: computer science and the humanities.
The move, which was approved on Thursday by the Faculty Senate, reflects the growing role of computer science in far-flung sectors of society and in disciplines with which that field may once have seemed to have little in common.
“Computer technology has started to permeate through humanistic disciplines in a profound way,” said Nicholas R. Jenkins, who is directing the joint major on behalf of Stanford’s Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education.
Students in the English department, where Mr. Jenkins is an associate professor, already pursue projects in the digital humanities, using computational methods to study humanistic subjects, he said.
But the influence runs in the other direction, too, he said. As computers are being used to harvest data in often controversial ways, they are at the center of ethical and policy dilemmas, which Mr. Jenkins said raise “questions lodged in the humanities.”
The new effort is a six-year pilot. Three disciplines will award the joint degrees, which will be a bachelor’s of arts and science. The degrees will be either in computer science and English or in computer science and music. Other disciplines are expected to propose joint programs in the future.
While anecdotal evidence suggests that businesses increasingly want to hire graduates with deep knowledge of multiple fields, Mr. Jenkins described the new program as a response to student demand. More than one-third of students surveyed in introductory computer-science courses expressed a desire to combine their interest in computers with another major, he said.
Parallel Lines and Arches
Computer science is also an unusually popular major at Stanford, ranking fourth in the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded, according to federal data. More than 8 percent of Stanford’s undergraduates earned a degree in computer and information science in 2012. That proportion is far higher than the national average, of about 2.5 percent.
Students in other disciplines are also much more conversant with computer science than their predecessors were, Mr. Jenkins said. They might compose music or write a short story and translate those works, through code, into something they can share on the web.
“For students it seems perfectly natural to have an interest in coding,” he said. “In one sense these fields might feel like they’re far apart, but they’re getting closer and closer.”
While other institutions also offer joint majors, those programs tend to combine disciplines that align more obviously. The University of California at San Diego, for instance, offers a joint major in economics and mathematics.
Spanning disciplinary domains may confer certain advantages, too. Some scholars have argued that students benefit cognitively when they develop areas of expertise in disciplines that use very different intellectual processes and ways of thinking.
Stanford’s joint major will differ from a traditional double major. In a double major, students satisfy course requirements for each department in ways that don’t necessarily connect. The joint major will explicitly find areas in which the disciplines overlap, said Mr. Jenkins.
“Instead of being two lines moving in parallel,” he said, “this is like an arch where they touch one another.”
But Stanford’s joint major will also retain the integrity of each discipline.
“This will involve substantial mastery in both fields,” Mr. Jenkins said. “This is a real computer-science degree and a real music degree.”
