Another dense paragraph from Noam Chomsky that you will no doubt skip over and I don't blame you.

Today I sent off another graduate school application, and to mark the occasion I thought I'd share some of Noam Chomsky's thoughts on academia. (Why not my own thoughts on academia? Because I am lazy.)
This particular chunk is taken from the middle of a conversation in which a woman is asking Mr. Chomsky to comment on the "anti-intellectual" nature of our culture.

The fact is that if you're at a university, you're very privileged. For one thing, contrary to what a lot of people say, you don't have to work all that hard. And you control your own work-- I mean, maybe you decide to work eighty hours a week, but you decide which eighty hours. That makes a tremendous difference: it's one of the few domains where you control your own work. And furthermore, you have a lot of resources-- you've got training, you know how to use a library, you see ads for the books so you know which books are probably worth reading, you know there are declassified documents because you learned that in school somewhere, and you know how to find them because you know how to use a reference library. And that collection of skills and privileges gives you access to a lot of information.
But it has nothing to do with being "intellectual": there are plenty of people in the universities who have all of this stuff, and use all of these things, and they do clerical work... That's in fact most of the scholarship in these fields-- take a look at the monographs sometime, there's not a thought in people's heads. I think there's less real intellectual work going on in a lot of university departments than there is in trying to figure out what's the matter with my car, which requires some creativity.