In my opinion, there's a much worse issue than universities being an ivory tower bubble. They are extremely corrupt. I don't say this lightly. I've spent more t

In my opinion, there's a much worse issue than universities being an ivory tower bubble. They are extremely corrupt. I don't say this lightly. I've spent more than a decade as a grad student in several top institutions. It's hard not to become insane. I've seen many of my fellow students and postdocs going mad, literally. I've seen people holding papers they had been sent for review, copying and testing their ideas, and then rejecting them to send the same stuff for review themselves. Once you become reasonably well cited within a subfield, all stuff is sent to you for review. You become the gatekeeper. It's a winner-takes-it-all game. I've sent a paper to Nature, which got held up because our reviewer was about to send the same stuff to Cell. After a year of intentionally slow reviews, our paper lost novelty and went into a different, but still good, journal within the Nature Group. This kind of stuff can wreck your career. My previous principal investigator got expelled from the University for serious misuse of funds. I reported him because he used all my funds for travelling to all sorts of exotic locations instead of the experiments we had to do. It took years of reports from other people and extremely serious incidents to get him kicked out. Most of the times, political leverage and interconnections give principal investigators more or less carte blanche. I could be writing all night, but I would rather not because I will go to bed upset. All biomedical departments, where tons of money is handled, are full of charlatans and scammers. It's sad. My prior probability of decency is only high for pure math and less flashy fields. CS is much better too.