At the very least, this guy is eccentric. He'd have to be. Nobody gets anywhere in academia by rocking the boat. It's an intensely political business; even aft

At the very least, this guy is eccentric. He'd have to be. Nobody gets anywhere in academia by rocking the boat. It's an intensely political business; even after you have tenure, you can still lose your research funding (which kills your "summer salary", lowering your take-home pay by 25% or more), your lab space, your future publications in prestigious journals (which can be anonymously torpedoed by your peers) and, most important of all, the services of the talented grad students and postdocs who actually do all your work for you. Meanwhile, once you have a PhD, you're untouchable by most employers -- considered too theoretical and expensive for "practical" work. This depends a great deal on what your Ph.D. is in and how you treat it. I've never had this problem, but I got my Ph.D. in EE, with a focus on semiconductor device fabrication. Nobody ever accused me of being "too theoretical" and there are actually quite a few industry employers that specifically look for such Ph.D.s. A very smart friend of mine studied theoretical solid state physics, but then got a job right out of school as a process development guy at Intel. Voila, his "theoretical" reputation was instantly laundered away! Of course, if you spend the five years after getting your Ph.D. "teaching courses on contract, or jumping between dead-end, low-paying jobs" people will begin to conclude that you're hopelessly in love with the academic lifestyle. And that's too bad. The academic lifestyle is fun in many ways -- for example, your ambitious and hard-working colleagues from China and India are often really nice, really smart people! -- but it's a terribly one-sided romance.