Academia is a cult?

I would really like to respectfully listen to the points of view of the author, but I do not like myself manipulated by this excessive over the top clickbait headings. I hope that we can all return to a more civil discourse without resorting always to the most extreme polarised positions that go by the phrases "influence" and "persuasion" these days.

Hah, I thought it would be funny to add that "left as an exercise to the reader" bit, a habit from my Math days.

Two things.

First, reading, writing, and arithmetic are no longer college level skills. That combined with computers means that the bar for government clerical work is much, much lower. The result is that in the 1920s a Philosophy grad would be extremely useful to a county government because of their general liberal arts education, nowadays a high school diploma does the trick. Doubly so now that everyone can use a computer to some degree or another. Without the critical function of providing clerks, Universities have lost a large amount of their value proposition to the government.

Second, since the 1970s both political parties have shifted away from the government as all of us striving together, to a necessary evil at best. The right has been extremely effective at villifying government action and government spending in particular. With that context in mind, it is not surprising that the right would aim to not only cut government spending on higher education (something that their religious wing also likes) to save on the tax money, but also to "starve the beast" in general.

Also, the 1970s were kinda crazy, and academia came out of that looking kinda extreme.

In my experience there are multiple cutls within academia and they operate at different levels. In finance, for example, there is a cult of "efficient market hypothesis" and another cult of "behavioral finance". The two groups don't appreciate each other much although publicly they love to say how much they respect their colleagues from the other group.

You’re gonna get downvoted because this is HN but really this article is clickbait designed to exploit a growing epistemological crisis in the west. The author is just describing a group with a history and traditions. While cults are also groups with tradition and sometimes history it’s well disingenuous to say THAT is their defining feature.

EDIT: I’d just like to be clear that Academia has definitely got serious issues. But a person who establishes PhD level credentials in Marxist social analysis at the top of the article sure does spew a ton of words about material conditions without ever naming capitalism as the issue and instead blames “academia.” Oh, professors and grad students are terribly overworked but also they are administering a cult?

I don't agree with this. A cult requires two things: your money and your loyalty. Neither gets your that far in academia. Look at all the people trying to get into Harvard. Many applicants would willingly pay way more than the tuition if to be guaranteed a slot (if Harvard slots were put to auction, I imagine bids would be very high), but so so few are accepted despite being able to pay. Scientology will accept anyone that can pay. Rather academia is more like professional sports in that it is very competitive and many try-out and few make it to the pros.