[Top19]

@justabystander wow your reply was long and very detailed and you put a lot of effort into it.

Let me add one more point, and see if what I said merges with what you said. If not I'm completely wrong.

A lot of books, like The Idea Industry by Daniel Drezner and also Science-Mart by Philip Mirowski say that the cutting of university budgets since the late 60's has led to such an undermining of their stability that Academics have had to engage in a stupid, pointless, survival battle of numbers, conformity, and politics. I'm sure the politics was there beforehand, but they make a convincing case that critical thinking and independent research is much more possible when you're not afraid of losing your funding all the time / scared in general about your job.

An additional point to this is that a lot of individuals see the cutting in college funding as the GOP's revenge for the 1960's, because a lot of the behavior of that era was seen as coming from college campuses. UCLA was actually free up until 1967 when Governor Ronald Reagan began the process of charging tuition.

So in conclusion, academia does have a lot of terrible things about it, but I think say 60% of it is fixable simply with a better relationship and funding style between universities and the government.