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What set him off, though, was his recognition that he probably wasn't going to get accepted anyway, whatever the quality of his work, because the gatekeepers aren't interested in the old-fashioned kind of scholarship that he does. Last year, the papers accepted in these two different forums were not about seriously scholarly topics, but about the kind of shallow takes on politically approved topics. My friend writes that this was "the final nail in the coffin" for him, the one that reveals that he has no place in the academy. He said he is glad to have learned this before becoming dependent on a university paycheck, but it grieves him to have devoted so much of his life to mastering his subject only to arrive at the end of his studies to find that his field has become as politicized as other humanities fields. He writes:
Comment: Academic authoritarians: The perversion of scholarship