Comment by mistrial9

> It had a modern academic research library, the largest in the world, which featured brand-new innovations like organizing books on shelves by subjects with reference to a catalogue

the tone is light-hearted overall, but really think about how foolish this insufficiently rigorous statement is!

> It hardly mattered if a professor of oriental languages could read Hebrew or Arabic, so long as he had adequate seniority, and a poetry professor who wanted a raise might well be handed an additional chair in mathematics.

this is a glib treatment of seniority

> As we’ll see, they mostly failed. The rights of traditional university faculties were protected by ancient laws (and ancient lawyers)

but some genuinely funny lines too!

> Promising young scholars had to burnish their resumes with useless publications long before anyone thought of asking them to do real research.

insightful

> before any kind of institutional academic specialization

it feels a bit unsettling to read so many detailed and insightful bits of this story but then get these sort of bombastic over-summary lines that sink credibility IMHO