Las ciencias naturales en la universidad nacionalcatólica. La reacción antimoderna

Abstract

Between 1949 and 1951 the Competition Board to University Chairs in Physics, Chemistry and Natural Sciences were controlled by a small number of professors appointed by the Ministry of National Education. That was a way of ensuring the political and ideological oversight and statecontrol in the selection procedure to professorships. The most prominent areas of Physics, which had stood out during the first third of the 20th century, were dismantled. Most of the professors and researchers were in exile, in prison and outside the University or they were victims of reprisal and discrimination after their reinstatement at the University. In the 1940s the autarchy policy of the dictatorship favoured the privilege position of the Chemistry, specially the technical Chemistry, through the establishment of new university chairs at the same time that the government shut down the Colleges of Enrique Moles. In the field of Natural Sciences, the ideological and cultural postulates of the New State clashed with the Theory of the Evolution. There has been a huge loss of human capital with the purge and the exile. Lines of solid researches were abandoned. Young scientists, after a first-rate education, were excluded from the University. As a result of these policies, Genetics lost the most prestigious researchers and professors, while Geology and Palaeontology were seriously affected.