Wow. No offense, but I can't imagine this guy with a real job. The self-entitlement is insane. I really think there's a forest for the tree problem with a lot of academics. The few I know get massive entitlements, days off, benefits, etc. I work in IT, worry about layoffs, get minimal holidays, have on-call, and generally get treated like an idiot savant because no one likes techies and techies go against the corporate 'sales guy' culture that dominates so many companies.
I wish my biggest problem was being forced to stay in Hawaii. On top of it, I went to some pretty good schools and honestly half my professors were loathesome misanthropes. I can't imagine where they would fit elsewhere. They'd be destroyed in corporate culture in a new york minute.
Perhaps I am suffering from a 'grass is greener' mentality, but sometimes it helps, i think, to remember where you came from and what you have. Some problems are real and others just aren't.
I really wonder if the real issue is the ease that someone can enter many phd programs. With massive private/public loans and universities hungry for money, we might have long ago hit a tipping point of being too generous and letting a lot of people in who otherwise would have been unacceptable for phd programs, especially in the humanities. Of the academics I know, maybe one is a stellar thinker, the rest are just upper-middle class milquetoasts who wanted an easy life.