Rejecting higher education

J. M. Coetzee profiles the poet Les Murray, and writes, in relation to his views on higher education:

Though he has at various times held university fellowships, Murray has little good to say about universities, particularly about what goes on in the literature classroom. Academic literary critics are, to him, heirs of an Enlightenment hostile to the creative spirit. Behind its mask of the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, he sees the Enlightenment itself as a cabal of rootless, disaffected clercs scheming to grasp power, usually by controlling the fashion for what may or may not be said in public (“political correctness”). Universities have been turned by the Enlightenment into “humiliation mills” that grind out generations of students ashamed of their social origins, alienated from their native culture, recruits to a new metropolitan class whose Australian manifestation Murray dubs “the Ascendancy.”

I can't say I agree.