Fucking professors who got their PhD 15-50 years ago. They have no idea how different higher ed is now. They have no idea how barren the job field is, they can not grasp how little these PhD students get paid compared to cost of living.

And the old ones are the fucking worst. They don’t realize that they have lived/are living perhaps the most charmed existence of any humans who have ever lived. They got to study some obscure field that is their passion and live comfortably while doing so. They existed in this complete sweet spot of American history; while the U.S. and state governments were still funding universities adequately and these institutions weren’t overfilled with frat boy business majors and shitty professional degrees. And when you explain that, no, I can’t do this unpaid summer internship because I get paid like 20,000 a year and need to work a restaurant job so that I can afford rent and have food in the refrigerator, they act you you just stabbed their mother in front of them. And not to mention they’re hanging on to their jobs until their 80s, when their field, the technology, and the academy has passed them by and then they’re kicking the ladder out from behind them. l could go on for hours about these old fucks.

Edit: Not to mention how easy these people got jobs. I was talking to an older faculty member in my grad program and he mentioned that he was hired ABD to a tenure track job at an R1 Big Ten university back in the late 70s. Same guy couldn’t grasp why we would get pissed that his seminars went 30-45 minutes over schedule every week.