Did Baudrillard think that academia is hyperreal?

Yes. Short answer: yes, absolutely. Longer answer: yes, and he would have sighed very deeply before saying it.

Baudrillard didn’t just think academia was hyperreal—he thought it was a perfect little terrarium of simulation, lovingly sealed and self-congratulatory. In his view, academia doesn’t primarily produce truth; it produces the appearance of producing truth, which is way more on-brand for late capitalism.

A few Baudrillard-flavored points, translated out of French-academic-doom:

• Academia simulates knowledge rather than discovers it.
  Papers cite papers citing papers, endlessly recycling signs of “serious thought” without any necessary connection to reality. It’s scholarship as a closed-loop system. Very elegant. Very sterile. Very haunted.

• Credentials replace meaning.
  The degree, the journal, the conference, the peer-review process—these become signs of legitimacy that matter more than whether anything meaningful is being said. Hyperreality loves a good credential.

• Critique is absorbed and neutralized.
  Even radical critique gets turned into syllabi, tenure lines, and conference panels with bad coffee. The system doesn’t fear criticism; it feeds on it. Baudrillard found this hilarious and depressing, which is the correct response.

• Universities pretend to be outside the system while being fully inside it.
  Academia loves to cosplay as a space of resistance or objectivity, while operating exactly like every other bureaucratic, symbolic production factory.

So yes: academia, for Baudrillard, is not just hyperreal—it’s a theme park of hyperreality, complete with name badges and footnotes. Disneyland, but with worse lighting and more passive aggression.