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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."

7 of 363 comments (clear)

  1. Assholes abound by Dancin_Santa · · Score: 5, Funny

    Newton is rumored to have been an uber-asshole. An asshole among assholes. His main trait wasn't that he was eccentric, it was that he was an asshole to each and everyone he met.

    It depends on the university and the department chair, but I'm willing to bet that you can find assholes in faculty at any given university.

    So yes, Isaac Newton could probably have been hired on despite his assholeness.

  2. 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
  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. Only problem being by nizo · · Score: 5, Funny
    Could Isaac Newton get a faculty job, or is modern society too intolerant of eccentricity?

    Eccentricity is ok, its the whole dead thing that might make it hard for him to get hired. Then again, with some of the braindead teachers I have had in the past, maybe not.

    What do you mean you haven't published anything in over 300 years??

    --
    I Am My Own Worst Enemy
  6. Benjamin Franklin by suso · · Score: 5, Funny

    Ben Franklin would probably get arrested for flying a kite without a license.

  7. Newton shouldn't have been hired. by bcrowell · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Newton shouldn't have been hired for a faculty job. He was reputed to be the worst teacher ever. He often didn't even pretend to teach, and treated his job as a sinecure. On the occasions when he did pretend to give a lecture, it was generally to an empty hall, because no students would show up.

    A better niche for Newton in modern society would have been a research job at a national lab -- no teaching required, just research.

    You also have to realize that the research world was a massive disaster back then. People didn't publish their results. There were no scientific journals. Newton invented calculus, found the laws of motion, and analyzed the motion of the planets. Then he sat on his discoveries for decades (and only eventually published the Principia because he wanted to build a claim that Leibniz and Hooke had taken ideas from him, rather than the other way around).

    So let's not imagine a golden age when it was OK to be a socially nonconforming geek.

    --
    Find free books.