Misguided politics like this is one of the reasons I left the academic world. Universities may have crossed the Rubicon in terms of becoming farcical entities.

Misguided politics like this is one of the reasons I left the academic world. Universities may have crossed the Rubicon in terms of becoming farcical entities. Bloated bureaucracies, commodification of faculty and students, financial structures based on questionable lending practices, focus of form over function (like in this story), and a big bag of other misaligned incentives make me think that universities don’t have a bright future (at least in their current form). The author of this story is no angel — he certainly should have been more careful with that relationship with his former student in several ways. That said, I can’t really see that he did anything worthy of destroying his career. This was just another case of modern-day witch-hunting.