South Africa Press: An astronomer gets fired for, says here, talking about an observatory plan
You would think that an astronomer running a big observatory would get summarily fired only for something really awful, like selling the telescope to a foreign scrap dealer, or making up that discovery of a black hole made entirely of dark matter, or running off with the chancellor’s wife, or husband, or whomever, along with the money budgeted for a new ultraviolet spectrometer.
But one learns that for weeks now sketchy reports in South Africa have told readers about a British radio astronomer, director of the South African Astronomical Observatory, canned and now under investigation. Suspicion is that he leaked to colleagues elsewhere some details of S.Africa’s strategy to land for the nation an international project, the Square Kilometer Array. Australia is SA’s big rival for it. The project is a big deal, a billion-dollar interferometric masterpiece that, they say, would open new frontiers in radio astronomy and its resolution and generally peek into the cosmos like never before.
It is difficult from this distance to judge the merits of the case or the seriousness of the allegations. But it is notable to find such attention to an astronomer just for doing astronomer things which include talking about a potential observatory but that this time gets him the ax.
The story that brought this to my attention is in the on line Johannesburg Mail & Guardian by Yolandi Groenewald, but it is composed as a story mid-stream through an event about which readers already have a clue.
This apparently has triggered considerable international dismay. Nature wrote it up in its news pages a few weeks ago, which I missed. Here are some earlier reports in open media. Few of them, alas, get into the substance or depth of the accusations or into the institutional science context of the new affair.
- Mail & Guardian – Yolandi Groenwald (Feb 5) : NRF suspends top gun ;
- University World News – Karen MacGregor (Feb 7): SOUTH AFRICA: Top UK astronomer suspended ;
- Cape Times – Craig McCune (Feb. 1): Chief astronomer suspended ;
Here’s what’s particularly odd. South Africa is, as far as I know, a reasonably open, democratic, free speech-and-press-abiding nation with a cosmopolitan elite and a market economy. But these news pieces appear timid and circumspect. They are loaded with bureaucratic-sounding phrasings and evasions of clarity. They smell ever so slightly of an intimidated press. Maybe the topic is boring or routine, but it does seem to me that good reporters there should be digging around in the nation’s universities and funding agencies to see how they handle such issues as openness of inquiry, the slack normally given academics for talking among one another about academic matters, and the ways that governing institutions exert political control over scientists or any other scholars. One hopes a few reporters there have grabbed their shovels and are digging. Maybe a few have done so, with results. If anybody has a link to a more expansive take on this, let us know.
- Charlie Petit
