Israeli: Military Blog
In 1987, Jacoby, then 42, reported that, in his view, no serious American thinker under the age of 45 was writing for anyone other than academics, or able to. (“Intellectuals who write with vigor and clarity may be as scarce as low rents in New York.”) For this, Jacoby blamed higher education. The growth of the modern research university in the decades following the Second World War nursed a generation of intellectuals who had hardly ever lived off campus; they barely knew anyone who hadn’t earned a Ph.D. These people couldn’t hold a decent dinner conversation with an ordinary reader, much less write for one.
.. But publicity and public-spiritedness are not one and the same, and when publicity, for its own sake, is taken for a measure of worth—some tenure evaluations are conducted by counting “hits”—attention replaces citation as the academic author’s compensation. One trouble here is: Peer review may reward opacity, but a search engine rewards nothing so much as outrageousness.