She is a theoretical physicist, known mostly outside her own field for her criticism of groupthink in academia. Here is an article on her Backreaction blog yesterday that is getting some attention.
How Heroes Hurt Sciencehttp://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/04/how-heroes-hurt-science.html
An excerpt mentioning higher education.
…
… Focusing on individual achievement, while forgetting about the scientific infrastructure that enabled it, has downsides.
One downside of our hero-stories is that we fail to acknowledge the big role privilege still plays for access to higher education. Too many people on the planet will never contribute to science, not because they don’t have the intellectual ability, but because they do not have the opportunity to acquire the necessary knowledge.
The other downside is that we underestimate the relevance of communication and information-sharing in scientific communities. If you believe that genius alone will do, then you are likely to believe it doesn’t matter how smart people arrange their interaction. If you, on the other hand, take into account that even big-brained scientists must somehow make decisions about what information to have a look at, you understand that it matters a lot how scientists organize their work-life.
I think that currently many scientists, especially in the foundations of physics, fail to pay attention to how they exchange and gather information, processes that can easily be skewed by social biases. What’s a scientist, after all? A scientist is someone who collects information, chews on it, and outputs new information. But, as they say, garbage in, garbage out.
The major hurdle on the way to progress is presently not a shortage of smart people. It’s smart people who don’t want to realize that they are but wheels in the machinery.