eugyppius

A parable from my time in American academia: One day, the Gates Foundation descended on a field related to mine, with enormous bags of money. They wanted to fund /encourage a certain flavour of historical research. The orders had come on high, from Gates himself.

It didn't make any sense, what Gates & co. wanted. It wasn't compelling, it was without substance, it wasn't something anybody was interested in But, there was money behind it. Administrators wanted postdocs & professors doing this thing, teaching this thing

The reason, I eventually discovered, was that Bill Gates had read some book by a third-rate knockoff Malcom Gladwell type, and he'd been convinced by this book that this research was super important and compelling, and so he wanted to fund it.

Someone told me that it was during a period when Gates was spending a lot of time walking on a treadmill trying to lose weight & reading various dumb books while doing so & getting ideas. I don't know if that's true, but it's the level at which we were operating.

All kinds of dumb mediocre academics claimed suddenly to be interested in this fake field, to already be working in this field, and so on. Conferences were organised, campus talks organised, guest professorships, the works.