I wanted to get into academia for the pursuit of knowledge/love of wisdom and all that jazz. But I noticed some of the same stuff as you.

Curiosity and inquiry were not the main priority. There’s a lot of red tape, faux pas, hoops to jump through, and you end up needing to do a lot of kowtowing, self-aggrandizing, and following the established narrative. And if you didn’t intuitively know the social norms of academic culture, you were basically shunned as a hopelessly backwards outsider.

Part of the problem is the commodification of education (specific to the US, I presume). Grant writing and acquiring funding shouldn’t be an exercise in marketing yourself as a product, but it is. Universities shouldn’t be run like a business, faculty shouldn’t be treated like labor, students shouldn’t be treated like customers, and degrees shouldn’t be treated like products, but they are. It’s a serious problem and it degrades the value of education.

Another part is the gatekeeping in the peer-review system. I understand the desire to keep the nonsense out, and there’s a way to do that without filtering out novel ideas and unpopular opinions. People tend to think that’s an anti-science dogwhistle, but that’s not how I mean it. A truly scientific mindset should keep an open mind about things that are unconfirmed, but a lot of scientific journals commit the fallacy of negating the antecedent: “there is not enough evidence to establish this, so it must not be true.” There’s never enough evidence to establish a new hypothesis at first, but that doesn’t mean we should discourage formulating new hypotheses. A lot of scientific breakthroughs were initially viewed as crackpot theories.

I’m not talking about “do essential oils cure meningitis,” I’m talking about “can a Big Crunch result in a cyclical universe?” Or “Can taichi improve health outcomes by exercising the circulatory, respiratory, endocrine, and nervous systems?”

Stuff that there’s already enough scientific groundwork to demonstrate the validity of, but are still likely to get you dismissed as a crackpot if you bring it up in an academic setting.

There’s also a lot of office politics to navigate. Which is easy if you’re from a traditionally disenfranchised minority group. As much as they’ll argue to the contrary, women, LGBTQ+, and people of color are privileged within the ivory tower of academia. I’ve been to honors conferences where I was only one of a few white dudes, and likely the only one who was hetero, and yet I had to sit through a key note speaker about underrepresentation of minorities in academia. I felt like I was being gaslit.

But if you’re a white man and you try to claim something like “ecosystems deserve recognition of intrinsic value just like humans do,” everyone will jump down your throat as if you’re trying to reduce minorities to the ontological position of animals, rather than trying to raise the environment up ontologically to the position of humanity. As if everything is a zero-sum game. They view everything through the paradigm of capitalistic systems, even when trying to deconstruct them through some lofty armchair exercise in mental masturbation.

But if you try discussing the merits of collaboration towards common goals over self-serving competition, they’ll think you’re trying to take something away from minorities. They think everything is some shaded attempt at a dogwhistle, so you either have to walk on eggshells or just stay silent. Unless you’re mindlessly parroting the established narrative.

And if you’re competing for grants or a research position and you want to study the intersections of social ecology, deep ecology, and the land ethic, they’ll easily take the brown woman who wants to study media depictions over you. Even though the field is saturated with papers on how minorities are depicted in the media, yet hardly anyone writes about social ecology. You really have to stick to the favored topics, and if you diverge at all then you’d better have some serious connections or otherwise be well-established in your field already.

And if you raise the slightest structural critique of academia, everyone thinks you’re some anti-intellectual, anti-science, worm-brained right-winger. Even if your critique is that the structures of academia themselves are anti-intellectual and in some cases anti-science.

Oh but you also have to be careful about mentioning intellectualism, or they might think you’re elitist! God forbid an outsider believes intelligence should get you farther in academia than emotional appeals do…

When I was in art school our TA’s were making 20k a year but stilling on 50k - 100k in student debt. They’d all been to bigger, more prestigious art schools, and they were barely getting by. And each of these schools was churning out hundreds or thousands of students every year.

That convinced me to take a different direction in life. Glad I did. I’m still a working artist and make a good living with it as a side hustle, but I’m glad I don’t have to live with the uncertainty.

it was all dick measuring contests and covert social signalling

this exists in most professions.

What I mean is that most of these people are self interested fools who are nowhere near as knowledgeable as they believe themselves to be.

Most in that category are also not very good at their jobs, which leads to administrative bloat, torturously ineffective bureaucracy, and teaching positions going to whoever is best at politicking rather than the person who is better at teaching.

I don’t care at all about economic usefulness.

my undergrad experience was awesome, but my grad experience was bad.

really good schools/programs can isolate you from the shitshow and actually are very professional. but they are rare.

it could also have been you meshed with the politics of your school. i very much meshed with the politics of my undergrad dept, but was a pariah in my grad program for those very same politics/values.