The Scotsman newspaper doesn’t like changes being planned for universities and invoked Robert Heinlein and other science fiction writers to explain why:
THE PRIME contractor for the first manned expedition to Mars was Edinburgh University – at least according to the renowned science fiction writer, Robert Heinlein, in his classic 1961 novel, Stranger in a Strange Land. Heinlein was not the first to set the future in Edinburgh. And Jules Verne has an Edinburgh University professor of geology, Oliver Lindenbrook, set out on a Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Along the way, he discovers the secrets of evolution and what happened to the dinosaurs. Of course, that discovery might be disputed by Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger – he who discovered “The Lost World” – whom Doyle informs us was a famous graduate of Edinburgh University.
Scotland’s universities are our local pride and joy, but they are much more than that: they have helped shape the entire western imagination, as well as created the modern scientific and technical world. From the pre-Reformation world when Scottish Latin scholars at Aberdeen and St Andrews universities dominated European thinking, through the 18th-century Enlightenment, which gave us Adam Smith and David Hume, to the age of science, which gave us Lord Kelvin, Clerk Maxwell and Darwin, Scottish higher education institutions have predominated. So it is not surprising that generations of science fiction writers, American and European, have seen our universities as blazing an intellectual trail into the future. Unfortunately, Robert Heinlein and Jules Verne did not imagine that the Scots themselves might one day deliberately sabotage the very institutions that have served humanity so well, never mind laid the foundations for the modern Scottish economy.
I also find that my arguments make more sense when I toss in a Heinlein quote or two. I only borrow from the best.
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