In the third essay of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, he launches into a polemic against academia and scholarliness that is not really less true today than it was when he wrote it — possibly more so. Here is one gem:

And finally, what in the world have our young men to do with the history of philosophy? Is the confusion of opinions supposed to discourage them from having opinions of their own? Are they supposed to learn how to join in the rejoicing at how wonderfully far we ourselves have come? Are they supposed even to learn to hate philosophy or to despise it? One might almost think so when one knows how students have to torment themselves for the sake of their philosophical examinations so as to cram into their poor brain the maddest and most caustic notions of the human spirit together with the greatest and hardest to grasp. The only critique of a philosophy that is possible and that proves something, namely trying to see whether one can live in accordance with it, has never been taught at universities: all that has ever been taught is a critique of words by means of other words. And now imagine a youthful head, not very experienced in living, in which fifty systems in the form of words and fifty critiques of them are preserved side-by-side and intermingled — what a desert, what a return to barbarism, what a mockery of an education in philosophy! But of course it is admittedly no such thing; it is a training in passing philosophical examinations, the usual outcome of which is well known to be that the youth to be tested — tested all too severely, alas! — admits to himself with sigh a relief: “Thank God I am no philosopher, but a Christian and a citizen of my country!”

[Page 187 in the Hollingdale translation.]