This is a time when new scholars might influence the discourse through fresh research.
Baraka was denied tenure at Rutgers University in 1990, a time when other scholars were being granted tenure for their books about him, evidence of the way the winds were blowing.
Once she began studying the lives of women in non-Western countries, she identified as a feminist but of the unfashionable kind: a traditional liberal who believed in the power of reason at a time when postmodern scholars viewed it as an instrument or a disguise for oppression.
Above all else, I feel lucky to have achieved a tenure-track position at a time when many talented scholars fail to do so, and am excited at the thought of becoming a faculty member at a great school where the people are exceptionally nice.
But at a time when many black leaders and scholars suggest that there is no longer such a thing as the civil rights movement -- at least in the conventional sense of the word -- there doesn't seem to be a great demand for visionaries or philosophers.
He was born in Oklahoma in 1915, and after graduating from Fisk, went to Harvard to get his Ph.D. in history, at a time when being a young black scholar there was, to say the least, complicated.
He was a newlywed when we met and I was awash in young gentleman scholars at a time when the law school gender split was pretty extreme.
"We need to provide the opportunity to browse for books at a time when bookstores are closing," he said, adding that "scholars and researchers should be able to enjoy the serendipity of what they find on the shelf".
To grasp this "rational" approach to reading, Lynch asks you to transport yourself back to a time when, in place of today's literary culture, what scholars call "rhetorical" culture reigned.
