Academia Is Our Enemy So We Should Help It Commit Suicide

I graduated in 2015, so my experiences at uni have been pretty recent. I can say, comfortably, that not all academia falls into the category touted here.

I'll acknowledge that it probably depends heavily on your degree path. I was Information Assurance, which falls somewhere between CISM and CS. I was also talked to by my Physics and Astronomy profs about seriously considering switching over to one of the sciences. So STEM's a little different than your average lib arts programs.

But in all my time at uni, I never got the sense of a sacrifice of true learning over codling. The professors I had (even the one that had to be replaced mid-class because of some bad reasons) were genuinely there to impart knowledge, not agendas. Yes, politics were brought up in a few classes as part of the instruction, but I never hesitated to bring up a differing point of view with my profs. Granted, I wasn't an 18 year old fresh out of high school... but the debates I'd have with some of my profs were genuine debates, point and counter-point. And I was conceded to as often as I capitulated.

Maybe I got lucky. Maybe my university is outside the norm. Or, maybe, we just see the extreme sides of a problem that exists in the culture. I don't know for sure. What I do know is that higher education shouldn't be looked at as worthless. There's things that need to be improved, yes. But we should be saying, as a culture, to fix those problems. Not looking to destroy the institution.

If Ike were alive today he would warn us about "The Academic Industrial Complex".

I see it as a science curriculum vs. an arts curriculum; not an overall college issue; just as in the military we usually see it as a combat arms vs. non-combat arms MOS's. The people who gravitate toward these positions define them.