Tenure committees
Notes:
Some of our missing friends are hiding from tenure committees.
Today, serious writers are often associated with universities. The college has displaced the royal court as the dispenser of public patronage.
But, in recent years, our universities have tended to judge and promote people based not on understanding their work, but on reputation and appearance.
This, too, is failure to do the work. We can hope that, someday, hypertext will let even provosts and presidents once again to distinguish sound scholarship from flummery.