Years of innovative thinking from highly intelligent individuals wasted by tenured illusions of grandeur and beaten into institutional submission to serve the status quo...
Thing is, he's the equivalent of a grad student, which is the official place to start your apprenticeship in learning Science, which is what he was doing (see what he does praise the PI for). The only people in a lab who are lower in status are undergraduates and technicians.
Clearly higher learning institutions can, have, and do serve an important role in modern society. As one would expect from a concentrated collection of intelligent, educated people.
Maybe it's not a new phenomenon and just indicative of the information age, but there seems to be a trend where they—large reputable institutions that would have previously been a source of innovative ideas—have become increasingly been a source of suppression (subjugation, even?) of enterprising, forward-thinkers who upset the status quo.