> the modern university education lacks exactly the same thing that your 1 paragraph of letters does – nuance

Where do you get that? My experience is very much the opposite. What I see from university educations is far more nuanced and sophisticated than what I see anywhere else - far beyond HN, fwiw.

I’m not even going to take a specific stand or call out the specific things that make me loose hope for the future. But if you don’t notice that activism and books praising activism (as opposed to seeking knowledge and revealing truth, or even just having deep knowledge of craft, like medicine), are a large part of modern academia, then we live in two different worlds.

How do you define activism? I think activism is very much about the truth - it's a means of putting a challenging truth on the agenda when otherwise it would be ignored.

MLK said that people don't change their minds (maybe not exactly his term) in the absence of tension. There's plenty of history that they will ignore things for generations if they can. Look at what's happening with climate change, for example - and instead of acting to stop the problem, many in power are acting to deny it and to suppress anyone who points out out.

> if you don’t notice that activism and books praising activism (as opposed to seeking knowledge and revealing truth, or even just having deep knowledge of craft, like medicine), are a large part of modern academia

What in academia do you have experience with? Any at all?