My sibling used to say that we should have the valedictory address given by the lowest-ranked student who nevertheless managed to pass. That student surely knows more about what the school is really like -- in its self-concept and ironies, its cruelties and its tendernesses -- than the valedictorian who has won a finite game.
Likewise, I think that there's probably the most exciting, divergent, and generative brew of ideas happening at the angst-filled lower ranks of the academic class. People who end up on the tenure track at top-tier schools are really smart, and I don't want to take one whit away from that, but they have also had to bear the pressure of playing the finite game exactly perfectly. Their research agendas suffer from an invisible self-impairment due to the self-veiling that they have to undertake.
And by contrast, the various angry ABDs, adjuncts, and community college faculty can all go on substack and give free reign to their inquiry.
CS Peirce, the patron saint of all hyperpsychic fail-son cranks, recreated metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, information science, etc. from the position of being a freelancer.
