> I'm reading tea leaves here, but my guess as to why she was never hired is that she was deemed "unable to get grants".

Rest assured, this is exactly what happened. University administrators have no expertise, interest, or motivation to identify and invest in promising research direction - they outsource this task to funding agencies. The only signal universities are extremely skillful in reading is dollar amounts.

I do not necessarily criticize this setup. Think of a research university as a start-up accelerator of sorts. Its main task is to give resources to secure sources of funding, not provide funds themselves.