Science & Tech Quote by Alfred Whitney Griswold

A university president reaches for Michelangelo to make an argument about authority: creation is contact, and the modern world runs on whatever survives that contact. Griswold’s “divine spark” isn’t a pious flourish so much as a legitimizing device, a way to stitch together the sacred aura of Genesis with the secular prestige of modern knowledge. By placing “a law of physics” beside “a law of the land,” he collapses the usual hierarchy that treats art as ornament and policy as reality. Everything consequential, he implies, is a kind of making: the sonata and the computer share a lineage because both begin as an act of imagination disciplined into form.

The subtext is institutional and midcentury. Griswold led Yale through an era when American higher education was redefining itself around big science, Cold War governance, and the rising cultural authority of technocracy. The phrase “mechanical computer” dates the moment: computing is still strange enough to need an adjective, still close enough to the workshop that it can be rhetorically paired with “poem.” That pairing is the point. Griswold is selling a humanist vision of the university that can absorb the new machines without surrendering to them, insisting that invention, lawmaking, and artmaking are not rival domains but different “ultimate shapes” of the same spark.

It’s also a quiet claim about responsibility. If policies and machines carry the same origin myth as poems, they inherit the same moral burden: creators can’t hide behind neutrality. The spark sanctifies the work, then dares the maker to be worthy of it.