Most view academic inbreeding as detrimental to academic careers. We argue that the effects of inbreeding on individual careers depend on the stage of the lifecycle of local research programs at universities. We propose a new ‘genealogical’ view whereby scientists are considered ‘inbred’ if their PhD was supervised by a professor who holds a PhD from the same university and within the same discipline. We can then measure ‘genealogical academic inbreeding’ by reconstructing the number of generations of inbreds preceding an individual scholar at the time of PhD training. We test the effect of inbreeding on seven academic performance indicators for 473 scientists at Dutch universities during the period 1815–1943. We further investigate the main local research programs across disciplines and universities in The Netherlands using historical sources. Our analysis provides evidence that inbreeding generally enhances academic performance, but only in the early lifecycle stages of a new intellectual movement.

Ontboezemingen van een emeritus hoogleraar over zijn vroegere lidmaatschap van onder andere de communistische partij, waar hij met forse zelfkritiek op terugkijkt, o.a. over het USC.

De theoloog Jannes Reiling was de belangrijkste kerkleider van de Unie van Baptistengemeenten in de twintigste eeuw. Zijn betekenis ligt in de bijdrage die hij leverde aan de emancipatie van dit kleine protestantse kerkgenootschap.

In well-established disciplines like history it is not common to find professionals who admit that they are driven by a “calling” or who say they have a “mission” to fulfill. In emerging disciplines, however, the situation is different: in order to gain recognition these new disciplines need highly driven practitioners, who’s calling enables them to overcome opposition or neglect from the side of the established disciplines. A clear example of such a practitioner with a mission in an emerging field of knowledge is the Dutch historian of science Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis (1892–1965). His career as a mathematics teacher, historical scholar, and public intellectual was marked by the desire to re-integrate science and mathematics in culture in general. Dijksterhuis regarded the history of science as a major instrument to bring about this ideal. His magnum opus, The Mechanization of the World Picture (first published in 1950 in Dutch; translated into English in 1961), was the culmination of a lifetime of writing in the service of a cultural vision that can still inspire our own generation.