While I am grateful for Liam Kinney’s interest in the “CS+X” initiative (“CS+X –traordinary,” The Stanford Daily, May 15), a number of things troubled me about his op-ed. To go through all the problems his piece raises would take too much space. Instead, I will mention just a couple of points, one large and one small.

First, Kinney characterizes the Symbolic Systems program as “the next best thing to Computer Science.” This is a statement which is plainly wrong-headed — these two great and very popular Stanford majors have quite distinct aims and different intellectual foci. To speak of one as if it were the inferior fallback of the other is, to put it mildly, a disservice to both.

Second, Kinney blankly describes me as “directing” the CS+X initiative. That’s misleading. CS+X, building on an idea first suggested by CS professor Eric Roberts, is a collective project on which very many faculty and staff have collaborated intensively over the last year or so. While I direct the initiative within VPUE, each of the ten CS+X Joint Majors approved by the Faculty Senate is housed inside two partnering departments and is shaped, steered and administered by the faculty in these departments, not by me.

Nicholas Jenkins
Associate Professor, Department of English

Contact Nicholas Jenkins at njenkins “at” stanford.edu.