As a bit of variety today I will make some notes on academic life in the 18th century. The source is a book on the friendship between two of the great figures of the enlightenment, David Hume and Adam Smith. Dennis Rasmussen outlines their friendship. It is clearly remarkable that such great thinkers were such close friends. (Jean-Jacques Rousseau even ended up joining Hume for a while but that didn’t go very well.)
David Hume Wasn’t Good Enough For The Academics At The Time
Adam Smith was, as one might suspect, a professor. Although he ended up doing many more things too. More surprisingly David Hume, despite being one of the world’s great philosophers, was never given an academic post. He tried twice to get an academic job.
…despite his earlier failure to attain a professorship at Edinburgh Hume allowed his name to be put forward…
Rasmussen, 2017, page 52
the university rejected a chance to recruit one of the brightest minds of his generation. Instead, they chose a man who “could be counted on to fill Scotland’s impressionable young minds with the ‘right’ principles”. Neither of the men who beat Hume to academic posts “seems to have ever published a scholarly work of any kind” (Rasmussen, 2017, page 54).
However bad some academic decisions are nowadays we can take comfort that the appointment committees at least aren’t getting any worse. David Hume got rejected, as such, it makes sense we will all get rejected sometimes.
Academic Life In The 18th Century
Later Hume tried to get Smith to move to the Scottish capital (from Glasgow). Smith wanted the philosopher/economist to buy out the current occupant of the Chair of the Law of Nature and Nations in Edinburgh.
“This was one of the best endowed chairs in all of Scotland so the move would eventually have become a financial boon to Smith”
Rasmussen, 2017, page 84
The move didn’t happen but is interesting the way the plan was supposed to take place. Nowadays I have seen universities pay professors to retire but I had never seen a prospective candidate doing it. (Might be worth a try?) I guess Smith probably learned something about economic principles from the whole business.
For more on academia see here, here, and here.
Read: Dennis C. Rasmussen (2017) The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the friendship that shaped modern thought. Princeton University Press, 2017.