Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Could Isaac Newton Get a Faculty Job?

Posted by timothy on from the fella-with-the-nutty-apple-theory dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Could Isaac Newton get a faculty job, or is modern society too intolerant of eccentricity? That's one of the questions that Glenn Reynolds asks Neal Stephenson in this interview over at TechCentralstation. Others involve the changing nature of fame in an age of fragmented media, the role of the Seventeenth Century in shaping the modern world, and what it's like to write a book with a fountain pen, in the twenty-first century."

3 of 363 comments (clear)

  1. If he was born today by duffbeer703 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    His eccentricity would no doubt have been diagnosed as ADD or ADHD. He would have been drugged with narcotics and told to behave himself.

    --
    Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
  2. Not just scientists by onyxruby · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This isn't just science. How many major computer companies were founded by people who never even finished college? Dell, Microsoft, Apple, and so on, these are all companies that would never hire their own founders considering them unqualified. I'm reasonably certain that this problem persists in other industries as well.

  3. No lack of eccentrics in University faculties by deanc · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The university system is one of the last havens of eccentricity. It's full of eccentrics. To claim otherwise bespeaks an ignorance of university culture.

    "Normal" people end up in investment banking, consulting, or corporate law where there truly is no room for eccentrics.