" Decades ago, the sociologist Robert K. Merton worried that the rise of more rapidly changing forms of knowledge would exacerbate the costs of academic gerontocracy. It might have been more defensible in the past — the medieval university coming honestly by its premodern characteristics — but no longer. “Today everything is quickly acquired, even that experience in which formerly consisted the sole and genuine superiority of the old over the young,” Merton cited his forerunner in sociology, Robert Michels, as saying all the way back in 1911. Modernity meant that “age has lost much of its value and therefore has lost, in addition, the respect which it inspired and the influence which it exercised.”"
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