Academia Is a Beautiful Fucking Mess

A shitty love letter to Academia’s absurd circus

Live footage of Reviewer #2 creating more problems. Photo by Borja Verbena on Unsplash

Ah, Academia, a place I imagine as a sort of classiness that doesn’t care how many papers you upload there, how many researchers you follow there, how many references, citations, footnotes, and whatever the fuck your advisor wants to include, how many revisions, paraphrases cause one sentence or even one word, I mean, JUST ONE WORD can be flagged as plagiarism by Turnitin cause… I don’t know, maybe billions of people can’t use that word except for you?!

It doesn’t matter, you would never even think about meeting a mysterious anime-protagonist-be-like professor walking among the bookshelves while thinking “I want to be like them one day.”

Well, well, well. I saw ivory towers and dusty libraries, and I found a bureaucratic paper machine. I spent months thinking, noting, analyzing, and writing an argument about philosophy or film, only to discover the final boss was structuring my reference list.

That’s right! Some trouble over serial commas and hanging indents, while some jabroni is off actually arguing ideas.

Basically, I always imagined Academia as a Letterboxd-style film log for artsy-fartsy pretentious people, you know, people who think they’re smart because they’ve read a ton of books and believe the best way to watch a movie is through a literary perspective.

Yes, I was a freshly minted grad in that department.

Wow. I never thought entering academic publishing would mean waiting for a holy grail email that turned out to be nothing more than the spam folder’s wicked twin.

I waited to be “discovered,” only to find out the inbox was full of scams and phishing links, presumably some candy asses trying to hack my godforsaken Facebook. Again.

By the way, I still scroll Facebook for edgy memes while “admiring” my government’s so-called achievements.

And of course, OF COURSE, nobody told me that my first battle (besides tagging along to my professors’ seminars or lab work with my dad) was about knowing how to survive absurd formatting rules.

No matter how much research you do, how many theories you master, or how much brilliant perspicuity you have, they don’t give a fuck about your revelation that you will save the world. They only care if you used the right template.

You could spend weeks drafting a valid argument, then get crushed by an asshole who thinks your references are AI-generated, your citations are irrelevant, or that you didn’t squeeze enough terminology from their favorite mainstream overrated thinker.

That’s it.

So, Academia in a nutshell is like: a PhD juggernaut asks, “Where are your citations?” and you say, “Where is the fun in that?!”

The Publishing Paradox

And yes, I’ve actually crossed over. I’m not just complaining from the outside. I opened an account on those portals, and I uploaded my precious papers.

In fact, recently I published two academic journals titled “The Shadow of Masculinity: Jungian Archetypes and Hegemonic Male Identity in The Lighthouse” and “Unknown Pleasures and the Sound of Existential Despair: An Existential and Hauntological Reading of Joy Division.” Mouthful, isn’t it?

Basically, I analyzed The Lighthouse through Jungian psychology and masculinity theory, and Joy Division’s “Unknown Pleasures” through existentialist and hauntological lenses.

However, that’s not the point I’m trying to tell here, and let’s be honest, it sounds boring as hell, and you’re probably not interested in that, right?

Anyway, I poured hours into writing, researching, editing, second-guessing each comma, downloading who-knows-what from sketchy journal archives (pray it wasn’t a virus because my laptop is on borrowed time), and wrestling with ideas from books and random essays I found online.

Then, after all that labor, there sat a PDF on the university repository.

Thank, God! “Here is my baby,” I thought.

No hype followed.

The only thing chasing me now was an email from the system: “You have to fix your keywords again, metadata, title, ex, family members, friends of friends…” Imagine training for years to become a pro wrestler, finally getting your moment, and then having your championship celebration screwed by infinite tax forms and administrative hoops.

Yup, a beautiful “Eureka!” followed immediately by a migraine of admin tasks.

It’s like when your dad looks you in the eye and says, “I cheated on your mother.” You just got America’s son-of-a-bitch award for academic achievement.

Meanwhile, there are journals out there treating submissions like 1990s tech: they literally have uploading portals from the dial-up era.

As a wise man wryly said, academic publishers have created portals that will challenge the patience of a saint.

You know the deal: you sign in with a password you changed three months ago (and have forgotten). Title page, abstract, tables, figures, my mom, your mom (yeah, I know, it never gets old), etc. must be a separate file, uploaded one by one via a clunky, web-2.0 uploader.

So much for just hitting “Send.”

If your idea survived that torture chamber, now your baby sits in peer review purgatory.

In my experience, the average time from submission to publication in social sciences is about 14 months or less, and that might be optimistic nowadays.

You might think “peer review” means people making your paper better, but get this: peer review appears to have a relatively small influence on the content of manuscripts.

After a year of waiting, you get back a report: “Looks good, but fix these 17 citations and throw out your conclusion.”

Talk about a bang for your buck.

Academia Loves Complicating Simple Rules

The funniest thing is how Academia demands you to be creative but still hands you a massive rulebook.

Basically, they would say, “Be original. But obey the structure. Question existing ideas. But make sure you know everyone who challenges them before you. Create something new. However, the format is exactly the same as what others use.”

In other words: “Think differently, but please use Times New Roman, 12-point font, and the correct citation format.”

Our brain might wander into the riddles diarrhea, but it first has to figure out if the bibliography needs a hanging indent.

Rules about how to write outweigh the actual thinking. There’s a style guide 90 pages thick for just making your margins acceptable.

You could propose a chef d’oeuvre theory, and your editor will say, “Nice, but can you restructure it into bullets and grade levels?”

If Academia were a video game, the first tutorial level would be to learn how to punctuate. We’re so busy arguing about commas that we forget to actually give what we thought.

It also cracks me up how seriously academics take every single idea. Honestly, I respect that. Ideas are important.

But from the outside, academic arguments look downright ridiculous.

Two brilliant people can spend a decade (no joke, a decade) debating the meaning of one paragraph in a novel. Normal people would bend over and say, “Wait, you’ve been discussing one paragraph for ten years?”

The academic response is typically along the lines of “Yes, because that paragraph reveals the profundity about society, identity, power, and the human condition.”

And you know what? Sometimes they’re damn right.

That’s the beautiful bullshit of it. Academia is literally a place where you can say that this fictional character symbolizes a cultural contradiction, and everyone else will nod seriously and say, “Fascinating. Please continue.”

Meanwhile, outside the ivory tower, someone is wondering why everyone is so invested in imaginary people who don’t even exist.

Academic Language Gets Ridiculous

Another riot is the way academics talk.

Complicated ideas deserve precise words, sure, but sometimes, it feels like everyone’s trying to win a spelling bee in Klingon. A regular person might say:

“People feel disconnected from society.”

But in an academic paper it’ll read:

“Contemporary subjects experience fragmented relationships in complex socio-cultural structures.”

Brother, they could have just said: “people feel disconnected.”

There are moments when academic writing is simply a wizard duel. Everyone throws huge dictionary-fireballs at each other to prove who’s got the most magical vocabulary spell.

(“Look at me, I conjured Wingardium Hauntology! How cool is that?”)

The funniest part is you know what’s happening, but nobody admits it. We’re all nodding as if this is necessary.

Despite all the razzing, I have to admit that Academia works because we care.

Behind every dry paper was someone who spent months or years thinking about one question. That is actually pretty damn amazing.

Essentially, a researcher is saying that they’ve looked at this tiny corner of the world, and I believe it deserves attention.

The problem is when the mess becomes more important than the meaning. When scholars care more about sounding pretentious than actually communicating ideas, something’s gone horribly wrong. Knowledge shouldn’t be trapped behind needless walls just so we can one-up each other on citation styles.

Why I Love Academia

Look, I’m fucking tired of it, I swear.

Academia is slow, maddening, with some arcane traditions and enough paperwork to make a printer give up on life.

But that’s also why I can’t quit it. It’s one of humanity’s greatest weirdos that people get together, tear ideas apart, and try to understand the world better.

It’s imperfect because we are and that’s what keeps me here.

So yes, Academia is a beautiful fucking mess. It’s a place where I can spend years of my life studying absurdity, and still have plenty of absurd shit left to laugh about.

It’s ridiculous, exhausting, wonderful, and for all its bullshit, I’m proud to be one of its weird, card-carrying members.