These complaints don't really address the point of this article. Career bureaucrats? An integral part of the supercommunity, dealing with the paperwork that the

These complaints don't really address the point of this article. Career bureaucrats? An integral part of the supercommunity, dealing with the paperwork that their class set up themselves and getting doled out a cut of all the money rolling in for "education" and "research". Unconnected and politically unsavvy undergrads dealing with tuition inflation are losers in this situation, true, but those who are willing to work the system can still get rewarded. And besides, when I think about the cost of my state school, there's no way I could have that much fun at my age for so little money. The library still contains plenty of unsettling ideas, and you're missing the system's neatest trick: they still have so much money and prestige that they can simply co-opt any serious competitors. I'd bet money that the author of this post would take a professorship and a budget at a prestigious university any day if it were offered, as long as they get weakly promised some kind of independence, the same kind of independence a tobacco-sponsored scientist gets.