I could say that this experience soured me on academia. Unfortunately, the record shows that I had never been sweet on it in the first place. The professors who got me my fellowship and brought me to the University of Virginia were openly contemptuous of regular academic opinion. They probably felt that my main qualification for graduate work with them was the fact that I had always been down on the academic bureaucracy. I gave academia hell while I was in college.
Academia likes to think of itself as a collection of true intellectuals.
But our society has allowed social science professors to create a completely inbred bureaucracy. In the real world, it would be astonishing if social scientists had turned out to be anything BUT an inbred bureaucracy. If a physics professor has a theory that doesn't work, experiments will soon show him up. If engineering professors are allowed to push idiotic ideas, bridges fall down or planes crash. In the real sciences, there are practical limitations on silliness.