What Academia Continues to Degenerate Into

Perhaps "decay" might be a better term...strictly speaking, "degenerate" means "to return to an earlier state," but academia is hardly doing that. Rather, it's rotting and corrupting itself, irretrievably. Mr. Sailer's characterization is spot on. I was in the middle of this academic food chain. As a UC Davis graduate student, I would have eventually, had all gone optimally, landed a position at some dump like Cal State L.A., PC-Valhalla.

[Most students] don't understand it's all a big pyramid scheme. The Harvard professors' graduate students become the UCLA professors whose graduate students become the Cal State LA professors whose students become the schoolteachers who browbeat their more gullible pupils into believing that everybody should go to college, no matter how obvious a waste of money and time it will turn out to be.