Illiterate academics. I know the breed intimately.

Years ago, I encountered a PhD candidate's writing that was so horrendous, so indecipherable, that she (a black woman in sociology) had her dissertation ghost-written and got away with it. Now illiterates have a tool they can use to overcome this minor inconvenience..

Once she catapulted up the ranks to tenure, her written communication was consistently and embarrassingly opaque. TAs re-wrote her syllabi. She was a rising academic star with all the proper diversity criteria, and writing at the 7th-grade level didn't slow her advancement.

Now "lived experience," personal narratives reading like a bunch of Tweets strung together, or like they were written by a teenager with Tourettes, qualify as master's theses.

A perfect illustration of the state of contemporary academia.