I’ve been using the Ignorant Schoolmaster as a form of psychic self-defense, to try and see through what happens in the classroom (and in the extensions of the classroom into other parts of life which students often effect, myself included), and to respond to it with anger instead of fear. (I think anger generally beats fear, at least if the quantities are right, in the game of psychological rock-paper-scissors.)

This is all a long digression, but my sense is that the way of writing and speaking using names is a holdover from these aspects of the labor process in universities, and at least in some cases a continuing (re)production of the same processes. In regard to all this, I think I’d want to say that my undergraduate analytic philosophy courses tended to involve less of the big names power play and more of the ruling things out of bounds power play (sometimes rather viciously and with powerful rhetorical moves). I think the former allows one to do almost whatever one wants, including what I think are sometimes logical leaps, provided one has enough names on the scorecard (which means one has to do the labor of learning and doing effective name dropping), while the latter doesn’t require the same name-dropping labors but limits the range of topics that are admissible. Anyway, thanks for the comments.
take care,
Nate