I came across this awhile ago and thought it pretty incredible and interesting:
I find it curious and bad that people can go through the academic pipeline without ever being presented with any deep explanation of what this thing even is, where it came from, what else it could be, what historical opposition there was or what debate there was around what it should be, what it is in ideal theory and what it is in real practice and what cynics see it as. People just enroll because that's obviously the thing to do. Then they may stick around for grad school and get comfy in the system but reflection and meta is rare.
Kepler developed his ideas while at the University of Graz. [16th century]
Galileo built his first telescopes while a professor at the University of Padua. [16th - 17th century]
Newton did all of his work while at Cambridge (although, admittedly, it took the plague and a lockdown for him to have his annus mirabilis). [17th century]
William of Ockham (of Razor fame) did his work at Oxford. [14th century]
Giordano Bruno did the work that got him burnt at the stake while at the University of Paris (and briefly Oxford). [16th century]
Roger Bacon developed the scientific method while at Oxford. [13th century]
Kepler didn't get a professorship and did his most famous work (elliptical orbits, Kepler's Laws) later in Prague as imperial mathematician.
Newton is the main one who indeed was a prof in Cambridge during his main works.
For the examples you listed, were their famous research achievements really part of their university job description?
Otherwise it’s more like Nietzsche working as an undertaker or Einstein working in the patent office just to support themselves. Naturally many such people would opt to be teachers to get by, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the university was a research institution.
Earlier many philosophers and mathematicians were also priests or monks, that’s also a lifestyle that allows for research without worrying about supporting yourself. Similarly during the scientific revolution it was mostly hobbyist aristocrats that drove it, those who had the means to support themselves while doing free research.
It’s the same story with most famous artists actually, even now. Most of open-source even operates that way, and it’s an important foundation of our modern world.
I don’t really know what to do about that, it’s not like giving everyone universal income would work either, most people do not have this impulse. And grant systems are pretty flawed too. But there is some important insight in the observation of how much has been achieved by people trying to do cool things as a hobby. It’s just really hard to support that systematically, almost by definition.
I think this is overexaggerated in the popular consciousness. Most of the famous intellectuals weren't really big aristocrats. Yes they mostly didn't come from dirt poor peasant or serf families. But they also weren't, with some exceptions, highest nobility. It was much more common that they secured funding through patronage from or got hired by the aristocrats. The aristocrats didn't really do the hard work themselves, again with some exceptions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Society_of_Birmingham
Pioneered and exploited by Robert Maxwell (father of the infamous Ghislaine). Good summary below; was an all around eye-opening revelation for me.
https://thetaper.library.virginia.edu/big%20deal/2019/04/26/...
> “We would get dinner and fine wine, and at the end he would present us a cheque – a few thousand pounds for the society. It was more money than us poor scientists had ever seen.”
Similar to what Jeffrey Epstein did.
the tone is light-hearted overall, but really think about how foolish this insufficiently rigorous statement is!
> It hardly mattered if a professor of oriental languages could read Hebrew or Arabic, so long as he had adequate seniority, and a poetry professor who wanted a raise might well be handed an additional chair in mathematics.
this is a glib treatment of seniority
> As we’ll see, they mostly failed. The rights of traditional university faculties were protected by ancient laws (and ancient lawyers)
but some genuinely funny lines too!
> Promising young scholars had to burnish their resumes with useless publications long before anyone thought of asking them to do real research.
insightful
> before any kind of institutional academic specialization
it feels a bit unsettling to read so many detailed and insightful bits of this story but then get these sort of bombastic over-summary lines that sink credibility IMHO
I happen to be very close with the dean of arts and science of a major state university. He told me that all of his professional goals given to him by the president and provost had to do with research impact, while 100% of the money he was allocated came from student tuition. The incentives are completely out of line and the students are the ones who pay the price.
sebmellen•8h ago