Academia in its worst form leads to turf wars with little real-world relevance
Date created: 2022-08-31
So this is why it will be important for me to focus on learning about and solving the most important problems. Otherwise I’ll end up in pointless h-index bean counting.
Gradually, over the next few years, I got the lay of the professional terrain I’d entered into. It was marked not only by a relentless animus against the works of the past (and the “dead white men” who wrote them), but by a constant effort to enlist them in contemporary battles; by an enthrallment with jargon, a commitment to verbal opacity, and a suspicion of clear, conversational prose; by intellectual dishonesty and flabbiness and sloppiness, all implicitly excused by the alleged rightness of the cause; by an adolescent sense of moral superiority; by a pervasive atmosphere of ideological surveillance.