Consider the mythology of the region. West Texas is a land of brutal honesty. The heat is real. The distances are unforgiving. There is no room for pretense. A man’s worth is measured by what he can fix, build, or survive. This is the anti-virtue-signaling zone of academia. At an elite university, Sheldon’s eccentricities would be curated, celebrated, or pathologized. At Texas Tech, they would be simply... tolerated.