Academia is a cult?

Is this a regional thing? I've had interviewers inquire perplexedly from across the table as to why in the world someone with a mathematics degree was seeking a software development job.

Do employers in some parts really salivate over green math/phys grads with not so much as a github profile? Or do these anecdata leave off some key arc to the story where the grad does something substantial to bridge the gap between said major and software dev?

Your last and second-to-last paragraphs aren't entirely congruous are they?

Firstly you argue that "the right" is responsible for villifying government action, i.e. the population at large were basically static in their views until "the right" came along.

But then you say that the same era was kinda crazy and academics in particular (absolutely not a bastion of the right) came out looking extreme.

I'm not sure where you're based in the world, but that description seems accurate for the UK, perhaps the USA but my knowledge of 1970s era America is not so hot.

Rather than "the right" winning some sort of struggle, perhaps the population came to be suspicious of government naturally as a result of observing the craziness of those times. After all it would be strange if times could be crazy and government employees (as all academics are) could look kinda extreme, and that not affect people's views on a large scale.

That's a strange statement. So as a human society who do we all hate collectively in secret but claim to love openly? My point is that the academia as a whole is not a cult but there are cults within academia.

Also that's not the only "measure" by which one can claim existence of cults within academia but it's still something you don't want in the research community. Numerous times I have heard statements like "this paper will never get past XYZ because XYZ doesn't like Thaler/Kahneman/[any behavioral researcher here]". That should never be acceptable in research that's claimed to be scientific. Yet, it's common in academia.

> "... to replace the dying batch, ..."

> I would speculate that longer lifespans may well have a lot to do with at least some of the shifts.

Longer lifespan only indirectly implies higher retirement age.

I should’ve specified, I live in America. I also did not live to see the 1970s in person, so my final paragraph should be taken with more salt than the preceding ones.

> Firstly you argue that "the right" is responsible for villifying government action, i.e. the population at large were basically static in their views until "the right" came along.

To be fair, “the right” is a fairly large section of the population. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that in general Americans are much more skeptical of the utility of government than they were 50 years ago.

I think your last paragraph is plausible, but it’s not my favored explanation.

For me, I think the decline in public opinion towards government programs started with racial integration. Around that time a surprisingly large chunk of white people appear to have willingly degraded their public institutions to avoid having to share with black people, sometimes going as far as literally filling recently integrated pools with concrete rather than share. You also see private Christian schools pop up with the explicit goal of being segregated.

Fun fact, organized evangelical involvement in right wing politics began with segregation. It’s only after the association with segregation became toxic did they pivot to abortion and homosexuality as their bête noire. They’ve tried their best to downplay this though, because it’s kind of an ugly truth.

Within this framework, the anti-government anti-public institution movement got rolling in the 1960s, and started to get a large political head by the 1970s and 1980s. The political turmoil within that period on the left in universities was a response and symptom of that anti-government swing, not a cause of it.

It is for certain possible that certain antics by academia during that time period came across as unpalatable to moderates, undermining their position. I just don’t think it was the cause.