[AstralStorm]

1) No. Whatever people make, other people can destroy. You could get rid of Stalin any time you wanted, if even by running away or making him irrelevant. With various degrees of difficulty involved.

And for every Stalin, you brought in a few Buddhas and Gandhis.

2) Again, that depends on how you approach innovation which has little to do with age. What would have to be instituted is probably rotation based on tenure, similar to presidency terms. If a professor is still deemed innovative, they can stay in charge.

In fact, such a system would be vastly superior to the current one where once tenured, a professor is almost immovable for many years. It would also help with the publish or perish part if extended to lower levels - you'd get more chances.

Most importantly, if the basic needs are met, you just gained access to a huge pool of genius engineers and scientists by sheer numbers. Imagine if, say, Feynman or Hawking or Knuth or even Leibnitz and Newton were still around, and cooperating... No matter the academic structures.