That you're struck that this is someone who "doesn't hire faculty members" is exactly the best thing. The academy is so corrupt it should be "shattered into a

That you're struck that this is someone who "doesn't hire faculty members" is exactly the best thing. The academy is so corrupt it should be "shattered into a million pieces and scattered into the wind". H Index ego, P hacking, lazy lies because "no one tries to reproduce", citation cartels, institutionalized systemic academic dishonesty/plagiarism at the highest levels (presidents of top universities and likely their underlings), "reviewer #2", etc. It's all bunk, and most of it is designed to take bright-eyed Ph.D's and grind their soul to bits before they can realize that they can both out-earn and out-produce (in an objective sense) most of their professors by simply leaving the academy. Being ineligible for tenure should be a badge of honor, as the whole system should be abolished and the world would be far better for it - particularly, science would advance far faster. Far more of HN needs to read Paul Feyerabend and actually internalize what "epistemological anarchism" means. The academy does not hold any particularly valid claim to being closer to observing "objective truth" than anyone else. The allegory of the cave/divided line (the primary justifications for a lot of academic wankery) was one of the original lies made by a nascent and authoritarian philosopher class. We should have abandoned these ideas long ago. Oh, and if you leave the STEM fields, the academy goes into full on "charlatan" mode. I go into most social sciences and find a wasteland of footnotes on Foucault and Lacan. That Situationalist International was so successful that the academy is still choked by an obsession with french fashionable nonsense is an indictment of the whole of the academy in the west. It's all intellectually bankrupt.