Kant clung to his university, submitted himself to its regulations, retained the appearance of religious belief, endured to live among colleagues and students: so it is natural that his example has produced above all university professors and professorial philosophy. Schopenhauer had little patience with the scholarly castes, separated himself from them, strove to be independent of state and society – this is his example, the model he provides. 

— Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator.” It is interesting to think of other examples of this distinction — and especially other major thinkers who share this inability to function within standard institutional structures. In a long essay about Kierkegaard in the New Yorker in 1968, Auden wrote, 

Like Pascal, Nietzsche, and Simone Weil, Kierkegaard is one of those writers whom it is very difficult to estimate justly. When one reads them for the first time, one is bowled over by their originality (they speak in a voice one has never heard before) and by the sharpness of their insights (they say things which no one before them has said, and which, henceforward, no reader will ever forget). But with successive readings one's doubts grow, one begins to react against their overemphasis on one aspect of the truth at the expense of all the others, and one's first enthusiasm may all too easily turn into an equally exaggerated aversion. 

(Auden wrote this essay specifically to ensure that his own earlier fascination with Kierkegaard did not pivot to “an equally exaggerated aversion.”) Such thinkers don’t fit in universities because they can’t or won’t obey the codes of the academy. Almost all successful academics are code fetishists, for good reasons (e.g. the maintaining of professional and disciplinary standards) and bad (turf management and the performing of power). Truly original thinkers will either shun environments so code-dominated or will be driven out of them. 

But: not only original thinkers. One can be not original at all but rather unoriginal in the wrong ways, usually in outdated ways, and be equally in violation of the codes. Exhibit A: Jordan Peterson, who was comfortable enough (if neither productive nor influential) in the academy until he started vocally resisting recently developed guidelines of academic life in favor of defending some ideas that he thought had been unjustly forgotten.