There are a few really smart people in academia.
Then there are some who fall back into academia after they “fail” in the big bad world. That’s not to say that they are necessarily incompetent at what they do in academia, it’s just that they don’t fit well into the “real world”. That is not infrequently the case if they’ve specialised in some esoteric area and they can’t find a private industry employer who can see a profit in exploiting that niche and support them in research to yield commercial products.
The academic world has its own horrors of operations. It’s competitive and in many schools, highly political. This makes proper research in academic institutions very much a minefield as all publications have to meet with the political approval of the institution and their co-workers.
There are some academics who are truly miserable people; unhappy with their own lot and compelled to mess with the minds of their students so that they also won’t have a happy and productive life.
So instead of universities giving flight to free thinking, they shackle it to political ideologies.
(Originally published on Facebook 2010-02-06)
