Academia gives you six years to publish top-tier papers and obtain significant grant funding to impress one's peers. Failure to do that and have a mediocre, but

Academia gives you six years to publish top-tier papers and obtain significant grant funding to impress one's peers. Failure to do that and have a mediocre, but not an abysmal, teaching record means dismissal (i.e., not being on the tenure track any longer - not necessarily being fired outright). In general, the system works okay, but one has to play the game. Winning grants is extraordinarily hard, even more so today than it was in the 1980s. To me it is unclear whether to blame the university, the grant agency reviewers, or her writing (one must make a convincing arguments to the reviewers, which is very hard if one is breaking with dogma). Her university peers may not have been able to see how revolutionary her work was at the time and so they fell back on the metrics. Getting tenure is extremely difficult. I applied for it this year at my university...