Professor Discovers That He...Is A Professor

At the age of 40, this professor claims to have realized that he was socially awkward, could not related to most of his colleagues...able to "dive deeply into complex research tasks," "focus intently" on certain things...in short: he's basically a professor.
   No, wait: he's...NEURODIVERGENT! In fact: AUTISTIC! The most fashionable neurodivergence of the whole fashionable category!
   And now it's his "identity": "I now understood that (a) I was an autistic academic and (b) that identity was vital to how I existed in the world, whether I had known it or not."

   The Chronicle of Higher Education turned into Tumblr so gradually that...etc. etc...

   Actually, the CHE pretty much sucks--but that's because academia sucks...

   So...professors used to be awkward, introverted nerds...but then academia corporatized, and it became cool to be cool...and being awkward and introverted might just get you accused of something, Jack. So now to survive, ya gotta come up with some bullshit about how your scholarliness is actually woke. So...autism!

   James D'amore, you may recall, plead autism to try to save his job at Google. Which I thought was a humiliating cop out. Fuck 'em. Don't play their game.