One of my professors did his graduate work at Yale, and echoes your sentiments about it being a toxic environment.
He stated that Yale's prestige allows the university to garner top researchers and their associated egos. As a result there was significant academic politicking and very little collaboration, at least in the CS department.
so little collab, such fiefdoms. Some faculty in math and cs there were pretty cool though.
That said, theres definitely a lot of subfields in computer science that just have toxic research cultures period.
One time in grad school (at another such uni), a professor or two chewed for sharing a research problem I was working on and stumped by! I wanted to collab with folks to come up with a solution sooner, thusly advancing science faster and moving on to new research, but NOOOO, apparently the moment you share problems, in some research communities its kosher to just wander off with this newly learned problem and scoop your potential collaborator?! (Of course the solution is to accept that risk and if they do scoop rather than collab after you disclose the problem, never collab with them again!)
He stated that Yale's prestige allows the university to garner top researchers and their associated egos. As a result there was significant academic politicking and very little collaboration, at least in the CS department.