Trevor wants to write a Disciplinary Heretics Manifesto to keep us academics from DD, disciplinary death, and DR, disciplinary rigidity. Great idea.
I have thought a lot about what causes DR and one thing that contributes is the need to establish one’s credentials and “make it” (aka, fight for tenure) which makes one often rigid or follow the disciplinary path too closely. That is, there is a sort of pressure to conform although one can also make ones mark though revolution, underturning and overturning that which can before you (Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions minimally discusses how younger generations of scientists help to usher in a new paradigm by overturning their views of their mentors as a means to establish their careers). But I think that is the exception. But once one gets tenure, one is supposedly in the structural position to think as one pleases, right? One would at least like to think that