I dislike some of my professors for one reason. They don't have real jobs. The professors I do like aren't all that interested in making a name for themselves or pushing technical
bullshit in order to create
FUD in their students.
The good academics really care if their students are learning and do not push any political view down their throats. But, sadly alas, they are few and far between.
Below is one of my favorite passages from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. I think it accurately describes a lot of academics (particularly on the humanities side), and what they did when they pushed any other formal moral thought system aside in the 20th century.
"To translate it into UNIX system administration terms the post-modern, politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz. society) with no documentation or instructions of any kind, and so whose only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce certain rules with a kind of neo-Puritanical rigor, because they were at a loss to deal with any deviations from what they saw as the norm. Whereas people who were wired into church were like UNIX system administrators who, which they might not understand everything, at least had some documentation, some FAQs and How-tos and README files, providing some guidance on what to do when things got out of whack. They were, in other words, capable of displaying adaptability." (pg.585-86)
From
Cryptonomicon
Neal Stephenson