The Academy is a Fucking Joke
There's really no other way to say it. From communist indoctrination, to subpar standards at Ivy League schools. Scholarship is dead.
Zach McClanahan was a second-year marketing PhD student at the University of North Texas (UNT), but given that he is not a liberal; in a true liberal “Mean Girls” fashion, they made it impossible to pass his first-year review. He has now transitioned to psychology in a new university so he can study the unhinged state of modern academia and liberal psychopathology in general. This is his third piece for the Multilevel Mailer.
I remember my first day of the UNT PhD orientation like it was yesterday. I showed up in a suit, tie and all, I figured it was a big deal, so I might as well dress the part. My sister had bought the suit for me to officiate her wedding, and I was very fond of it. But when I arrived, expecting to see a room full of eager scholars ready to take the pursuit of knowledge seriously, I was met with a bunch of slobs. Most of the men didn’t even bother with a button-up shirt, and the women dressed like they were heading to a lazy Sunday brunch. That should’ve been my first clue.
I thought a PhD program would be about immersing myself in the great minds that came before me, learning from the giants of history, wrestling with the biggest intellectual questions and, you know, actually knowing things. Instead, I walked into a soulless machine that cares about one thing: publishing papers no one will ever replicate. You don’t become a scholar in a modern university. You become a statistician, churning out papers you know are probably suspect (at best) so you don’t lose your job. Then you get tenure and abuse PhD students because you hate yourself. Rinse and repeat.
And if you think as a PhD student you’re going to go in and discuss philosophy because, you know, it has the word philosophy in the title, think again. The second you mention anything you’ve read that was written before 1950, some dipshit will call you a white supremacist. I also made the mistake of assuming that people in academia cared about discussing morality and truth, but of course, I’m met with; “First of all what do you mean by GREAT?”, “WHO’s morality Zach?!?!” well, certainly not yours.
The university today isn’t a place of learning. It’s a credential factory. It doesn’t create scholars; it creates paper-pushers with statistics degrees. The people running the credentialing factory think they’re statisticians, but they can’t even calculate how many PhDs the market can accommodate. Not that they wouldn’t understand a market economy anyway, after all, capitalism bad.
This isn’t just about how the university system is broken. It’s about how the entire fucking culture of academia is a joke, a hollow shell of what it once was. Run by petulant children, grifters, and bureaucrats who are feasting on the carcass of a once great whale.
The University Has No Soul
Academia is supposed to be about the pursuit of knowledge, pushing the boundaries of human understanding, discovering timeless truths, and debating ideas that have shaped civilizations. But in modern universities, that pursuit is openly mocked.
I came into my PhD program expecting to engage with the great works that built the world we live in today. I figured there would be deep discussions about history, philosophy, literature the big questions. Nope. Statistics courses. Research methodology. Maybe one half-decent philosophy class buried under 60 credits of technical bullshit. “Well you can go to a teaching university”, yes one that no one has heard of nor values.
And God help you if you bring up the classics. The second you mention anything written before 1950, some self-righteous idiot will start foaming at the mouth waiting for the perfect time to say “Eurocentrism” like a newly minted New York Times reporter. The implication is always the same: if something was written by a white guy, it must be “problematic”. (“Problematic” is such a cringeworthy word). Never mind the fact that these works shaped the modern world, how dare you notice.
Does anyone find it funny that a group of new-age academics called their forefathers elitists for reading difficult books, only to become less intelligent versions of them?
But the goal isn’t the elimination of eurocentricism. It’s like when a climate change cult burns down electric vehicles. Their goal is to tear down what’s great so they can replace it with their garbage, or you know, nothing. It’s not about quality; it’s about the ancient egos I can’t have competing with mine. And that’s why the university, once a beacon of human achievement, has been hollowed out into a paper-writing factory that produces little value and unemployable students.
Nothing about this system encourages intellectual curiosity. You’re not supposed to read widely, question deeply, or think independently. Everyone complains about the “publish or perish” system, but they don’t do anything about it. The result? Universities don’t create innovators and instead create credentials, so now students are older and in more debt when they get their bachelor’s.
Even Shakespeare Is Under Attack
Shakespeare is one of the greatest writers in human history, he must go. His works have influenced everything from literature to philosophy, and naturally, how we think about storytelling. You don’t have to love every single play, I honestly barely understood them until I took a course at the Peterson Academy. Now I’ve picked up a copy of The Arden Shakespeare Timon of Athens. After reading it is now completely obvious to me why he has to go. No modern writer can outdo him, he must go.
It’s gotten so pathetic that institutions dedicated to preserving his legacy are now actively undermining him. The Shakespeare Museum in England is cucking up to the idiot academics.
Yes, the Shakespeare Museum in England has bent over backward to appease the “decolonization” crowd. They’ve started downplaying his significance, inserting identity politics into his analysis, and acting like he’s just some outdated relic we need to “re-evaluate.” Imagine bowing down to people who hate you. Pathetic.
That’s the real motivation here. It’s not about “diversity” or “representation” or whatever empty buzzword they’re using this week. It’s about burning the past to the ground so they can replace it with their own garbage. Maybe if you don’t read anything good you’ll finally like their new rendition of Snow White. Or maybe you’d prefer a book that tells you’re evil for being white. Gotchu fam.
Nobody will be studying the “brilliant” political theory of some Marxist professor 400 years from now. Nobody will be dissecting the god-awful paintings of art school students, being sold for millions by money launderers. I’ve seen residents filled with glee, as the city tear down modern art Lego houses to rebuild the thing that was there 100 years ago.
We are living in a time of unprecedented mediocrity: Never have so many, been given so much, to make so little.
Academia: A Factory for Meaningless Degrees
Universities used to produce scholars. Professors were once intellectual giants, but now they’re exhausted research drones who don’t give a shit about teaching (But they think they’re good at it). They barely read outside their niche, refuse to provide meaningful feedback, and still reject your work for reasons they can’t explain. The PhD process isn’t about learning; it’s about hoop-jumping. It’s also about giving your students grades they didn’t earn so you can get back to research.
And what’s the end goal of all this? A career built on writing articles that you used every trick in the book to publish, submitting grant proposals for outlandish fishing expeditions, and attending conferences where people complain that there are too many white people in the room (Yes this happened, pretty uncomfortable to sit through considering I’m one of the people she wanted to get rid of). The modern university isn’t about education. It’s an expensive, soul-sucking bureaucracy, and racism, where the most ambitious thing you can do is make a study, run it 50 times before you register it, and then publish the results you knew you would find (And no one can replicate).
Where Is the Scholarship?
Once upon a time, scholars read books. Lots of them (All of the charlatans reading this just rolled their eyes). That’s dead. Today’s professors don’t know anything outside their narrow specialization, and academia actively discourages intellectual curiosity. No lay theories in my classroom! If you’re not publishing hyper-specific research, you don’t belong. Universities don’t create scholars anymore. They create tenure-chasing bureaucrats who know how to game the system. And the grievance studies papers they write are quite literally designed to divide us; then, when we analyze the data, we find they completely missed obvious confounding factors. Guess all those statistics classes didn’t pay off.
There’s no room for people who are passionate about knowledge. A professor who can discuss Plato, Confucius, and Dostoevsky is now seen as outdated, while someone writing a 300-page dissertation on the “Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose.” gets a degree from Cambridge. The academy has completely abandoned its mission, only the people in it don’t see it.
The Age of Grifters
Academia, art, and culture are now run by frauds who produce nothing of value. Even they don’t believe in the garbage they push. But as long as they can convince enough people to pretend it’s meaningful, they stay in power. The entire structure is built on keeping the right people in charge, protecting the right narratives, and making sure no one asks real questions.
It’s all a scam. Empty credentials, meaningless art, and performative bullshit. The people running this mess don’t have any real talent, so they keep everyone distracted with garbage that no one actually enjoys. Even the people making this shit secretly hate it. But they can’t stop, because once the illusion shatters, they lose everything. The university is a joke, and everyone in it should be ashamed.
I find myself flabbergasted by how clueless academics are. Dr. J.D. Haltigan has been regularly documenting on his X feed just how clueless academics are to both the general public’s opinion of them, as well as the students they graduated. I would like to put this in plain language so the most educated people in the world can understand: The average person thinks you are brainwashing young adults, ripping them off for $20,000 a year, neglecting them for your research, and indoctrinating them into Marxist ideology. I tried to tell this to my garbage advisor once and I could see his head inch closer and closer to the sand as I attempted to break his frame. But academics aren’t having it, they live in Neverland and they’ll be damned if they have to become a real boy.
The Only Solution: Become the Person They Aren’t
The modern university is too far gone. It won’t fix itself, and the people running it sure as hell aren’t going to fix it either. The only real solution is to do the exact opposite of what they do. If academia has abandoned real knowledge, then the only way forward is to reclaim it for yourself.
I was offered another chance in a different department, but instead, I left the system and joined a program that is giving me the freedom to learn. I’m done wasting my time jumping through pointless “problems” with my research. They’re not real problems. They’re manifestations of the ego of a group of would-be-know-it-alls. Now, I can get to running studies, instead of being forced to change my research question because some idiot who knows nothing about political ideology wants a change. In addition, I’m in an intensive German class, and taking an Latin course at the same time. The extra free time from not listing to morons also gives me time to read the classics. Not because I have to, but because I want to. None of this is required for my psychology PhD, but that’s the point. Real learning isn’t about requirements. It’s about discipline and genuine intellectual curiosity.
This isn’t to say every professor in the university is useless or even unintelligent. A minority of the academics I worked under were very intelligent. A select few were also very educated and extremely intellectually curious. I would have loved to work with them, but the bureaucrats. But for the majority, just because you have a 110-130 IQ, that isn’t impressive. The amount of academics who are reticent when I ask for feedback, “Well, that’s not my field of expertise,” yet these same idiots who don’t give feedback on projects are the ones who will tell you it isn’t good enough. How the hell would they know if you can’t even judge the damn thing? The academy is not worthy of Plato’s namesake, the people in it are mostly objectively intelligent. However, they don’t know anything about excellence, they tolerate a culture worse than mediocrity for their students, and they have no passion for knowledge.
I can’t be any more clear about this, because I don’t think academics realize how much 80-85% of the population hate them, so please quote me on this:
The academy has become a disgrace, and those within it should walk its once-hallowed halls with their heads held low in shame.
While the rest of academia spirals further into meaninglessness (Just like Nietzsche predicted), the only way forward is to become the kind of person they despise. Read widely. Learn things you don’t need to know. Their approval is irrelevant, become more educated than them, and we will find the answer to the new university system as we walk a path of self-education.
I know a lady getting a PhD in "Educational Leadership". It's literally five years of learning how to be a cog in the educational bureaucracy.
This is true.
The graduate students in mental health are emerging with marginally passable knowledge, few skills, and even less critical thinking ability. Scant few graduate as anything more than automatonic regurgitators of rote talking points and tropes, and what knowledge they do possess about the profession is merely memorized for the purpose of passing an exam. They cannot apply it in real life, and forget about diagnostic skills altogether.
It's so bad.