"You are ostracised and isolated. You muddle through, teaching on fixed-term, part-time, zero-hours contracts, a low-paid disposable commodity, writing papers, chapters and articles in what little spare time you have, and believing what you’ve been told, that success is based on merit, that talent is the most important thing, and that if you work hard and hang in there you’ll get there in the end."
I know exactly how the system works in academia. Try being anything other than a Bolshevik and you quickly find out that the machine will identify you and terminate you via a subtle, imprecise but very effective means of shunning, avoidance, and other forms of covert hostility until you give up and go away. It is the same in the corporate world as well, just not fully activated there yet.
Screw the small-minded people doing this. No matter your academic qualifications, what does it say about you as a human being if you can't understand and accept that other people have different ideas and different opinions and that they can't just be ignored or swept away just because you hold onto a bunch of foregone conclusions that you simply accept as right? That's never been right, not ever.
Universities are supposed to be a marketplace of ideas but instead are conformity factories. I have this to say: That is an echo chamber and although people feel secure inside there and smug about it, all such echo chambers eventually end.