Tenure System

Science communicators beware! History shows that the pursuit of scientific truth can sometimes get both communicators and scientists in trouble. The Italian Galileo Galilei was hired early in the 1600s as a professor of mathematics at Padua in Venice. At the time, the Mediterranean was the center of scientific study. In 1608, merchants from Flanders arrived selling spyglasses. Intrigued, Galileo soon learned how to make what we would now call telescopes that were much more powerful than those the merchants offered. With them, one could identify ships 2 hours before they actually arrived in Venice.

When he trained his telescope on the heavens, Galileo found many more stars than had been previously reported. He also discovered four moons that orbit the planet Jupiter. Most important, he confirmed that Nicholas Copernicus's research published at his death in 1543 was right—the Earth is not the center of the heavens; instead, it [Page 886]and the other planets revolve around the sun. The problem with this finding was that it ran counter to the doctrine of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. In 1632, Galileo published a book that included arguments both in favor of and opposed to the Copernican idea. Church officials closed down the print shop, bought up the books, and delivered Galileo to the Inquisition, which forced him to recant and to spend the rest of his life under house arrest. Partly as a result of Galileo's fate, scientific work declined in the Mediterranean region and shifted to northern Europe.

Galileo died in 1642, the same year that Isaac Newton was born in England. Newton used mathematics and the calculus methods he had developed to conceive the idea of universal gravitation, and he first tested his idea by correctly calculating the motion of the Moon around the Earth. He became a professor of mathematics at Cambridge at age 26, but he could not be promoted because he was a Unitarian—he did not accept the doctrine of the Trinity.

Throughout history, there has been an uneasy relationship between the centers of science and political and religious authorities. Under authoritarian governments or churches, scientists at universities could easily be fired or worse for theories or findings that ran contrary to accepted doctrine. But England had rejected the idea of an all-powerful monarch, and new and more permissive ideas were found in Europe. John Stuart Mill's libertarian ideas held that science and society thrive best in an environment where there is a free marketplace of ideas and where truth is never finally possessed but must be endlessly discovered. The German concepts of Lehrfreiheit and Lenrfreiheit let professors teach and do research without fear of censorship.