Is Graduate School a Cult?

So, on HSA, somebody started a thread by posting a link to this article, entitled: Is Graduate School a Cult?

Which started a round of jesting which led to me finding an excuse to use a  serious quote, one of my favorites:
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Daniel wrote:

............ Tsheej wrote: Ah, you see, they've been successfully indoctrinated...they're defending the cult! Ah, you see, Tsheej has been successfully indoctrinated... He's creating his own cult! If a graduate school denies every other point of view out there that disagrees with their own, "indoctrinating" the students... How different is that from you, Tsheej, denying ever other point of view out there that disagrees with your own? Only one I see (saying both statements are true) is that the grad school has a bigger student base. (I mostly mean this in jest. Certainly, graduate schools and Tsheej are entitled to their opinions. I just had to point out the ironic. I mean no personal attack on Tsheej, either. ) -Daniel

The difference here is that Tsheej is an individual, and a grad school is an authoritative (authoritarian?) group. Any self-respecting individual should defend their own point-of-view. To quote G.K.Chesterson:

"At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic and blasphemous statement that he may be wrong. Every day one comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one. Of
course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view."

That is a very different matter than a group insisting that all it's members not deviate from a narrow-minded viewpoint. Now, whether or not graduate schools actually do that, I am not qualified to say. However,
the suspicion that they might do just that, amongst many other suspicions, kept me out of them.