Clark Kerr, President of the University of California, famously coined the term the “multiversity” to capture the expansion of universities in mid twentieth-century America to the point that they contained multiple and often competing (and indeed conflicting) goals, interests, and trajectories. While Kerr waxed eloquent about the value of the multiversity, he worried about the loss of community and purpose he associated with the smaller undergraduate college – especially in relation to undergraduate education. In particular, he worried that incentive structures for faculty led them to focus on narrow research as well as their own entrepreneurial opportunities outside the university, while they became more detached from undergraduate teaching on the one side, and more resistant to administrative leadership and guidance on the other. I follow up on the tensions between administrators and faculty and the ways in which disciplinary structures impede both intellectual openness and institutional experimentation.

By bridging the world of academic chemistry and the major German chemical companies, the chemist Fritz Haber was able to effectively deliver chemical weapons to the German military over the course of World War I. While the first German chlorine gas attack at the Second Battle of Ypres on April 22, 1915, is often described as the commencement of the chemical war and a major breach in the international rules of warfare, it can also be productively viewed as a merging of academic science and industrial chemistry into the bureaucratic structures of the German military. Thus, Fritz Haber’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical and Electrochemistry, the major site of German chemical weapons research, should be read as an early blueprint for later historical developments in Big Science and the military-industrial-academic complex.

The post-apartheid ANC government took pride in repurposing the country as a modern, democratic state and promoted a vision of science and technology for the common good. Astronomy was a particular beneficiary of the new dispensation. The Southern African Large Telescope at Sutherland was part of the dividend resulting from the country’s transition to democracy and the decommissioning of nuclear weaponry. Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki, advocated national renewal through an ‘African Renaissance’ that promoted both indigenous knowledge and scientific ambition. Mbeki’s suspicion of the authority of Western science and his Africanist affinities impelled him to intervene in the controversy surrounding HIV/AIDS and to support AIDs denialism. It has often been alleged that Mbeki was caught between ‘indigenous’ and ‘Western’ knowledge, yet his scientific legacy was more complex. In fields such as ethno-botany, for instance, there is evidence of complementary research in post-apartheid South Africa between scientists and carriers of African knowledge of plant medicines. The process of developing a new spirit of ‘South Africanism’ in the post-apartheid rainbow nation meant greater openness to South Africa’s position as an African nation, while also inviting bids leadership of Africa through ‘big science’ initiatives like astronomy and Antarctic research.

Chapter 8 considers the widespread epistemic dependence that characterizes “big science,” and uses the information economy framework to dispel the worry that such dependence is inconsistent with the standards for scientific knowledge. This leads to a new argument against reductionism in the epistemology of testimony. First, reductionism is shown to be untenable for scientific knowledge.Second, if reductionism must be rejected for scientific knowledge, then it should be rejected more generally. This second idea can be vindicated in two ways. First, anti-reductionism about scientific knowledge entails anti-reductionism about knowledge in general, since anti-reductionism is best understood as the thesis that some transmitted knowledge cannot be reduced to generated knowledge. Second, if anti-reductionism is required for scientific knowledge, then reductionism for non-scientific knowledge is unmotivated. The most elegant position is anti-reductionism about knowledge transmission in general.