Of course, such types have, in various forms, long been around. Certainly, they were familiar to the Cambridge scholar F. M. Cornford, who in his satire Microcosmographia Academica, published in 1908, identified them as "sound scholars", exponents of the Principle of Sound Learning:

The Principle of Sound Learning is that the noise of vulgar fame should never trouble the cloistered calm of academic existence. Hence, learning is called sound when no one has ever heard of it; and "sound scholar" is a term of praise applied to one another by learned men who have no reputation outside the University, and a rather queer one inside it. If you should write a book (you had better not), be sure that it is unreadable; otherwise you will be called brilliant and forfeit all respect.

Cornford's words were in my mind as I settled down to answer my student's query. The university was alive with a discourse that seemed reminiscent of Cornford's world yet, at the same time, distinct from it. My colleagues, for example, would never talk of the university in the manner of Cornford. They worked not in a university but in a department, and they routinely spoke and thought of the university as something else-as management, administration, head office and Big Brother. And my colleagues, unlike Cornford's, were all writing, and under pressure to write, books. Their fellow academics wanted (in the Cornfordian sense) these books to be "sound", or at least decidedly not popular. The university wanted them to be both "sound" and popular and the bodies that funded the research for these books wanted them to be "sound" with a quantifiable "social impact" ("Foucault and Town Planning"). I often mourn the failure of academics to interact more readily with the wider intellectual community, but whatever happened to the celebration of learning for its own sake? It is not an ideal that is alive in the universities, and with its demise we are losing, if we have not lost already, the commitment to teaching, to learning, and to ideas for their own sake that should be the very purpose of higher education. 

Instead, students are asked to think not in terms of knowledge and ideas, but rather of skills, relevance and marketability. Instead of educating, questioning and inspiring the young, it is demanded of academics that they treat their students like customers while bearing a workload that makes proper teaching and research impossible. Once, as I was struggling with one such load and wedged between a tower of essays and a tower of exams, a senior colleague offered me some words of comfort. "Don't worry too much," he said, gesturing at the of essays, "the exams will take half the time." I offered a look that asked him to elaborate. "Exams?" he continued. "Students don't get them back, do they? Skim the middle of the page, get the gist. No borderline grades. If in doubt, 2:1." 

Not long after I left the university, this "sound scholar" wrote to me to say there was a job going and to ask if I should like to apply. But I knew that it was a job that I did not want, and that this was a world of which I should not wish to be a part.