FWIW his blog post struck me as narcissistic in tone. A martyr gazing at the stars, assaulted by the world. And the bit about grad students too terrified to pu

FWIW his blog post struck me as narcissistic in tone. A martyr gazing at the stars, assaulted by the world. And the bit about grad students too terrified to pursue research because of some ostensibly bad criticism on the internet is comical. You cannot become a good academic if all it takes is a little criticism from somewhere to deflate you, if you need constant validation to function. If you do, you will become, like many academics and people in general, a conformist out of fear of losing approval. This is not to valorize contrarians (who still operate in terms of what others think), but to say that an academic must be honest and pursue the truth and be able to defend his arguments against or ignore bad criticism and concede valid criticism. If you cannot survive the meat grinder of criticism, if you lack the spine and the thick skin, you won’t flourish. It’s not for you, at least not until you mature.