You do have to be careful when forming ideas under conditions of adversity. Often, it's just kicking at the pricks, attempting to keep the stinger (Canetti) at bay.
I was cafeful not to form dogmatic opinions, but after many years of subsequent work, I think I can trust my understanding of what I saw when, as a method actor from New York, I went to a (top-ranked) Midwestern law school, and understood that there were some peculiarities there. I then transferred to another (top-ranked) school back in New York, and I learned something completely different. (While actually devoting myself to the work, incidentally, taking as many credit hours as I could, getting strong grades, and briefing every case.)
Subsequent work has been instructive. I'm confident that my keeping to the academics then wasn't illusory, and it is what a scholar within the larger academic tradition would have done. And I learned some other things about the culture during that return to the university. Many of the authority figures in the Midwest were like the police officers who would stop me from time to time on spurious bases, mainly because they wanted to keep the bicyclists and pre-dawn runners under control. At least they explicitly used the phrase "I want to teach you a lesson." And there's a long story there, about the land-grant state universities built in the 19th c. by nativist legislatures some distance from the cities, and their relationship to the immigrants drawn to them from the cities. Every institution is but the lengthened shadow of its founders, as Santayana said in his lectures on the university.
As to the culture of the continent writ large, I have come to the understanding that there's a lot of wrongdoing going on inside the prosperity brought by these industrial forms, perhaps largely because the postwar industrial forms are strong enough to function whatever the condition of the culture. But there are relics and useful things within these places. The old basketball gyms at I-----. The immense, usually empty, library stacks at I-----------. Useful things are there, but you won't find them if you think as the people of our time think.
They said, "You have a blue guitar / You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are/ Are changed upon the blue guitar."
Caesura.