An Indian-American philosopher on not quite fitting in

I found this interview with Bharath Vallabha at Free Range Philosophers rather interesting. The following section of it stuck out to me (highlights mine):

The professors as people were nice, but they were generally complicit in the deeply ingrained institutional arrogance of academia. It was as if my father as both a non-academic and an Indian philosopher had to bow to them without debate, as if debate itself – a rational dialogue – was only possible from within the Western texts I was being taught in classes.

Often in philosophy classes I would sit in the back rows, or in the corner in seminar rooms. During classes or talks I hesitated to speak out, unsure of how to participate. When I did participate, there was often a kind of frantic, desperate energy to talk about many things at once. All this my professors seemed to chalk up to my “personality”: that I could be withdrawn, combative, not fully at ease. But it was not a matter of personality, but of institutional structures. I was always trying to connect the philosophy I was doing at home with the philosophy in the classrooms, and in this the professors were no help at all. They were giving an ultimatum at every turn: our way or the highway. Most of the time in my classes I was trying to figure out how to respond to that ultimatum.

It seems to me that a lot of this parallels the rhetoric around political correctness, wherein certain activist academics insist that things can only be spoken about one certain way (with a lot of their most-vocal opponents doing the same but from the opposite side of the political spectrum).

I think that the pressures from such groups also lend themselves to the style of very verbose communication when aiming to speak out about sensitive topics - i.e. When I did participate, there was often a kind of frantic, desperate energy to talk about many things at once - as often the most sane positions require a lot of nuance. This, and my belief in inattentional blindness, are two of the key reasons why I look at denunciations of various forms of -splaining to be one of the most toxic movements in politics of the past few decades.

It feels like it's been a running refrain around here the past while but once again: not everyone thinks like you.