If university professors were muzzled by convention from producing widely-consumed commentaries on areas outside of their own university-funded areas...

... then we would be in a world that had never heard of Noam Chomsky (stick to the grammar of linguistics, dude) or David Suzuki (stick to fruit fly genetics, dude) or JRR Tolkien (stick to translating old English poems, dude) or W.E.B. Du Bois (stick to writing about the history of abolitionism, dude).

I think that all of this can be taken too far in multiple dimensions, not just in the dimension described by today's column writer...