Universities have become a kind of halfway house for the most neurotic and conformist members of the educated class.

From Understanding the Tech Right by Richard Hanania.  The subheading is The next decade will be shaped by Silicon Valley fully entering our politics. 

I eventually concluded that there was a common thread between DEI, IRB, and covid. Universities have become a kind of halfway house for the most neurotic and conformist members of the educated class. People who care about truth and are passionate about their work would be outraged by DEI and IRB requirements and less likely to stand for them. If you go into academia, however, because you want the status of being a professor so it can make you feel like an intellectual who is more enlightened than other people, then the more paperwork the better.

You would think people who try to become professors are those most interested in ideas. My experience is, if anything, the opposite. They’re the kind of people who like the idea of thinking about themselves as people interested in ideas, but actually lack genuine curiosity about the world. If they did have curiosity about the world, they would go participate in it, where they’d have real experiences, find out how it works, and not spend their time bogged down in so much paperwork (disclaimer here: I’m talking about the social sciences, I have no direct experience with STEM). To the extent they wanted to produce intellectually important work, they would want to share it with the world, rather than write in impenetrable jargon directed at a select few. Of course there are exceptions, but the majority of academics have little to nothing important to say because they’re playing a status game, not a truth game.

One thing I’ve noticed from talking to conservatives in academia is that the university bureaucracy provides endless opportunities for their enemies to persecute them. The complaint processes surrounding ethics and anti-harassment are extremely easy to abuse, and one’s professional life can be ruined even if an individual has done nothing wrong. Left-wing academics are good with paperwork, small minded, and vengeful, making them very skilled at navigating these system and bending them to their ends. They don’t need to actually ban heretical ideas, but instead use the machinery of academia to gradually grind down those who won’t conform, as they did with Joshua Katz. Always keep in mind that academics are the people who selected into this world, and they did so for less money than they could’ve earned doing something else, since their reward is being part of a priestly class. Of course they’re going to defend established dogma.