It's worse: IME in grad school, the field is politicized beyond reason. It was a very depressing realization.
- The main focus of my advisor was a life-or-death struggle with a researcher at distant university over the number of angels that dance on the head of a pin - utterly inconsequential, self-justifying research and counter-research that ultimately served nothing more than to keep the 'publish-or-perish' wolf from the door. Just enough math was involved to keep it from being sociology.
- A grad student with an engineering background was dismissed for discretely pointing out that the measurement tools for one professor's lab's flagship experiment series were an order of magnitude too inaccurate for the measurements they were being used to perform. This was commonplace - another was warned for pointing out (privately, not in public) that requiring us to pass all our submitted papers through TurnitIn was also signing over our legal rights to anything we submitted as part of our coursework (which could potentially cause publication problems)