How would you explain from both a cultural/institutional and an individual/psychological perspective (and how would you change) the apparent paradox of age discrimination in a way that is unrelated to performance (physical stamina) that occurs and is promoted without challenge in many places in academia in the selection of researchers, teachers, and managers (particularly in social science and humanities), given that academia presents itself as the most merit based of professions in which skills and intellectual ability are the stated goals, and is this something recent or embedded in academia?

Is it a result of:

- (Return to) the model of the church/pagoda and the idea of hierarchy of ideological disciples by age, to promote doctrines without the capacity to challenge them,

- (Contemporary) political goals of eliminating past advances to dismantle disciplines, dumb down fields and prevent real teaching of skills and solving of problems that would promote social change;

- A corporate driven attempt to assure all insitutions use only new technologies of social media and social control;

- Fraudulence and lack of standards in disciplines;

- Emergence of economic realities in academia that require the exploitation of large numbers of over-degreed tuition paying students in a pyramid scheme, with the need to convince these new pools of students that they might be hired even without real aptitude or skills;

- Exploitative relations in academia that force young intellectuals into work that is physically and emotionally demanding to the point of abuse and destruction of their fields, and that they will abandon or find themselves discarded, to be replaced by a new younger cohort, and/or

- Personal insecurity and incompetence of older academics, leading them to seek manipulable and incompetent inferiors;

or something else, and who has the incentives or ability to change it?