The state universities, despite the intuitive Saturday-football notions of what it must be like to be there, are actually peculiarly dangerous places to be now. The reason for this is that they are consciously creating a social mechanism with some portion of the students who are in attendance. This has very little to do with scholarship, as one usually thinks of scholarship. (Outside of scientific technology, in which the university is explicitly committed to fostering discrete social mechanisms outside of the university.)
Part of the difficulty in the humanities is the imitation of positivism. (The disciples of Comte were angry at how broadly that term was used in the academy in the context of other fields.) Since scientific papers analyzing materials according to the assumptions of a particular field are knowledge for that field, the form of those papers is taken to be a verification of intrinsic value by those in other fields. The danger comes in the fact that the explicit purpose of the exercise is now the creation of the social mechanism, so this art of pseudo-postivism has been refined by explicitly political social networks as a social form in itself. And as the social form is entirely artifice, there's a significant danger of corruption.
But if you sidestep the frenzied mimetic in which you simply use the same words as the others and say things that make you popular there, it's possible to use your time there to do some real work using the legacy assets of the place, such as the (book) libraries and (basketball) gymnasia.
The danger is particular to the state universities because, to put it bluntly, there is usually a great mass of fungible students to be dealt with according to the rules of the place, largely without concern for external social networks or internal mechanisms contrary to the prevailing norms. In America, the state universities exist to teach the young folks a lesson or two. Mostly by faculties recruited from the more prestigious schools to the east or the west.
But the work can be done. Just don't expect it to be recognized. For the simple reason that no one will be looking to find it. They have different purposes in mind.
(Preemption: this is not the Aesopian sour grapes from being refused a dissertation defense -- the point is that there were always two completely different sets of grapes at issue.)