Lasting novels don’t come from literature departments. Successful businesses don’t come from business schools. Scientific revolutions don’t come from research universities. Get your education, then get moving. Find the loners tinkering at the edge.
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Departments fall on a continuum in this respect, from literature, where almost no professors are among the best practitioners, through CS where a significant number are, to math, where most are.
So while it's true that only a microscopically small fraction of great literature is produced by literature professors, a lot of the most important new math comes from math professors.
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Incidentally, *this* is the reason you shouldn't major in English or business in college. It's not that literature and business aren't important so much as that the people teaching them in college are no good at them.
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Philosophy.
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Yes, I remember your post on this. My point is more about the dangers of groupthink, which pervades even some scientific research groups. Math and the hard sciences fare the best, although I do remember a case where multiple groups would publish erroneous adjacent measurements.
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The more objective the field (eg maths) the more likely that academic success is correlated with being right. That said, academic success is still a fallacious proxy compared to the real world. In the real world there is no such thing as “restricting scope to assumptions”.
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You probably have to get a PhD in math to advance the math state of the art. Getting a PhD in literature probably actively prevents you from understanding the human condition enough to advance the state of the art.
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Pure hubris to think math could be subservient to a human institution. Also, wrong. I suppose believing advances in hard sciences and engineering come only from PhDs might provide a more pleasant, coherent worldview, not unlike religious simplifications.https://amp.reddit.com/r/math/comments/azneyn/are_there_cases_of_amateur_mathematicians_who/ …
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I don't think the claim about lit professors is actually true. Many many famous novelists also teach lit or creative writing.
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And, probably because there's not really a market for poetry these days, pretty much all famous poets are also profs. Yes, some authors aren't lit profs & some lit profs aren't authors (it's not in the job description! they study lit, not write it!), but there's real overlap.
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And almost no history is made in history departments...
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