Yesterday, I've had one of the, or maybe even the worst academic experience of my life.
I've had a dubious pleasure of meeting an example of the most arrogant, dickish, entrenched old guard of an academician one can imagine.
I don't know what pissed me off more: whether it was the fact that he, in blatant disregard for the simple job he was supposed to do, and for which he cashes a fat check, being a professor and all that, did not seem concerned with lecturing the students about the subject matter, and instead talked in lenght about his hilariously campy life experiences, interspersed with even more hammy bits of "good advice", delivered in a condescending tone from the height of his age and position(he was once the dean of our faculty etc.).
Or whether it was the arrogant douche that emerged from his self-ingratiating stories, always abusing his status, bullying his way through life, and being too full of himself to ever leave any room for auto-criticisim or modesty, and which resonated strongly with his in-class behaviour, as he browbeated the students into quietly listening to his "lecture".
Or, if it was the creeping realisation that the upper echelons of the Polish academia might in fact be made up largely of such buffoons, as I've met a similar kind of a "distinguished" persona during my previous adventures with higher education. I did think it was a rare specimen back then, dismissing all the stories of reactionary, narrominded arseholery occupying the universities that I've heard of as fearmongering exaggerations. I fear I might've been wrong, and that I'll just have to suck it up.
In the end, as I have to admit to myself, what pisses me off the most, is that I've sat through all this farce, without protesting with a single word, as I should have done, letting myself be intimidated into complience with the bullshit that was being served there.