Whoops. Yep, that must be the one - arts academics are much more likely to produce such self-aggrandising pieces in my experience and much less likely to have anything interesting to say. As far as I can see, modern academia in the liberal arts is akin to modern art - an exercise in self-promotion with almost no objective criteria which allows one to sort the rubbish from the insightful, hence the former propsers. I mean the entire basis of post-modernism is basically a headlong rush away from empiricism and a consequent infinite license to bullshit (cf sokal).

You must be lucky to have entertaining physics lectures. Mine were fairly boring.

Oh, that one was a wildly unusual exception. However, some of the quantum physicists are pretty entertaining as the field is open to wildly different explanatory models and you can get good and wacky if you want. Having said that the mathematics are not for the faint-hearted.

You must be lucky to have entertaining physics lectures. Mine were fairly boring.

Very little genuine research happens at PhD level nowadays in universities. Almost all funding is tied to business plans / industrial sponsorship which really means that research must have a maximum 2-3 years to market threshold (which is closer to development than research). The problem at undergraduate level is that many curicula are now defined by the needs of industry - the science programmes at DCU or UL are glorified job-training schemes. The macro-problem is the dominant relationship that business has with third level education which allows them to define fairly narrow parameters on research and skews the focus towards their products (see the recent BMJ macro-study of funding in medical research for the empirical evidence).