A little history will go a long way. You ought to be aware, and I suspect you really are, that the inscription over Widener Hall was not some rich person’s purchase. It was the tenor of the times, the commonly shared opinion among both the educated and the less educated.

Some disreputable (see http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1987/PSCF9-87Lindberg.html) yet influential histories have told us the church was violently opposed to Copernicus (see http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1987/PSCF9-87Lindberg.html. It wasn’t. Copernicus was a child of the church, and his theory was the child of two clerics’ thinking (http://pages.citebite.com/s9s2e4q8ysbo).

Look through both those linked pages, and you may change your assessment of the role the church has played in discovering knowledge of nature.

Why, in particular? Are non-church institutions for some reason less susceptible to substituting some kind of received orthodoxy for actual truth, than the church is? Is there any reason to believe that would be the case?

This ironic example reminds us to be grateful that most our universities aren’t controlled by the church (nor by the rich non-academic outsiders who often fund the building projects at our universities, thereby getting to choose the peculiar inscriptions on buildings like the Widener library and Emerson Hall).

I love the idea of a university with Illusio as the motto!