I mean this with regard to undergrads, grad students, and teachers and professors in academia, and am wondering how things are for all of them. In my experience as a graduate student and lecturer, academia was awful. My department was hostile to my research interests and seemed intent on mocking them out of me so I could be used for some of the professors' research purposes. Teaching wasn't bad, but the whole package, taken altogether, was terrible and left me psychologically scarred and demoralized. I switched careers to something as far from “the life of the mind” as you can get: heavy industry.
What have been other people's experiences here with academia, as students, researchers, teachers? Is the academy dead as a place for originality and passionate work? Is it setting up undergrads for few job prospects and mounds of debt? Is it outdated?
I've often wanted to defend academia and the idea of the well-rounded liberal arts education that includes both humanities and science, but today's academia (or rather, last decade's in my own experience) has left me disgusted.
Edited for a typo