This fellow (Eagleworks guy) was told in no uncertain terms by his PhD thesis committee at Rice that this was a bad idea and forced to rewrite his thesis. He clearly doesn’t know when to take a hint.

Yes there are commonly clever people that know how to play organizational ladders with minimum amount of work in every sufficiently large organization. Also a fair amount of "morons".

Arthur C Clark has addressed this general point in his first law:

“ When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”