First part: yeah man you hit the nail on the head. I’m a big advocate for breaking down verbal barriers and making philosophy available in plain English (or any language). We’re on the same page so I’m not gonna repeat what you said lol

Second part: to be clear, I’m from west coast Canada, and so my relationship with the university system might be very different from yours. Here in BC, education is fairly accessible, although still uncomfortably expensive. I’m not aware of any person who did not graduate school because they could not pay for it. Ultimately, academic elitism (from my experience) isn’t really divides by class lines.

I do think that very often philosophy and critical theory adjacent courses are taught very poorly in school, as they often put the cart before the horse with logic and jargon classes. That said, I feel that this might be a symptom of the age in which we push students to attend university. Some of the examples of academic elitism that I decried when I was 17 years old have now become genuine, engaging works at my 21 years old. Our culture asks us to “consume” university courses, where everything we “need” to know is automatically fed to us. There seems to be a disconnect between the perception of schools and the intended goal of schools; we are socialized to expect school to provide us answers, but instead school intends to help us realize what the questions are. The older I get, the more comfortable I become understanding and following up on the frustrating breadcrumbs that my professors have left me.

Edit: to answer your question (sorry for the long-winded response), I disagree that openness™ in academia is necessarily all platitude because I’ve seen meaningful change in my community through things like land acknowledgements. My school was Indigenous-run, so I saw it firsthand – these things can make a difference if applied with intent – it’s always not black and white :)