Addendum, on the tenured.

My one art school colleague who wears women's clothes was saying that the thing that never makes sense to him is the named chairs who ascend a bit into these mid-level administrative positions where they have to do the central admin's dirty work.

"It's not that much money," he was like, "and it's not like you can lose your job, so why do it?"

I then shared my perspective, that many people who get tenure love authority and that's what gets them through, and many of them have no ideas beyond the half a project that they milk to get beyond the line of permanent job security, so they face endless decades stretching out before them and they already love the system and they have very little true moral sensibility, so why not.

He then said something which another friend had said recently, that people who are tenured will put up with anything in order to attain a future where they can study what they study, even if that future is not all that it's cracked up to be when they get there, and that's part of why academic culture and academic outcomes are so bad.

"Can I say it?", he was like, dramatically. "The problem is tenure."

He then said that he thought recently about our conversation when the whole Avital Ronnell scandal was breaking out, that you get hazed by these people so you can enjoy the reward of seeking their approval and being in their company for the rest of your life, where you're in these little dinner parties with each other and everyone's that person, except outside of that circle, no-one really knows who you are, at least in academia.

"It's like this musician's Facebook post I read," he was like, and he said that it was this whole thread of comments from people who were on the verge of making it in this little musical subculture that he's a huge long-term fan of, and basically what everyone was saying was that they got far enough along in that world and they realized that it was a little clique of psychopaths who controlled everything, and they were like, "No, I don't want to be that, and I'm okay with making music for myself," and they just checked out from that whole subcultural rat race so they didn't have to become a monster.