LOL! This is a great post about the phrase “hotly debated” in an academic context. There’s lots of great stories about academics fighting over things. It turns out academia is just another form of fandom with better citation practices.
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“This should be right up his alley” is the phrase that tipped me off. I studied biology in college. On some level (fortunately not one I subscribe to) I failed as a biologist because I did not find some impossibly specific biological subject on which to become the world’s foremost expert — the evolutionary taxonomy of (scientific name here) or the reproductive cycle of (scientific name here), that kind of thing.
Academia is another form of fandom with better citation practices and MORE SPECIAL INTERESTS. You can, depending on subject, get two academics with similar levels of advancement in the same field in a room and have them not know a THING about the subject the other specializes in. And that is the beauty and the horror of all this.