We had already spent decades building a world organised around writing more and more, faster and faster, until abundance itself began to change what writing was worth.
We both love the disciplines we have devoted ourselves to. We both tell stories about their decline, each of us locating the causes in ways that no doubt contain blind spots of their own.
The gown becomes almost tragicomic in this context. Rather than interrogating why symbolic hierarchy matters so much in academia, the solution becomes extending access to its ceremonial symbols.
Far from exposing an intellectual life that merely dresses, speaks, and performs itself through pretension and exclusivity, the text has, in many ways, come to romanticise it.
While the gentleman and the scholar never truly aligned with one another, it would be a mistake to conclude that this encounter between the two had no lasting effects.
Non/Critical Scholarship, Laundering Reputation, and Modest, Wise Female Scholars
Such material would have been unusual for these publications, given that only five women in the entire country would have the training and expertise to understand it at the time it was published.
The concern is not about the value of applied knowledge, which is self-evident. The risk lies in treating contributions to “how” knowledge as interchangeable with contributions to “what” knowledge.
