> people still can be harmful even being in good faith
That's a general truth.
You make it sound like people choose academia to somehow cheat the system and profit from free student's work or whatever.
Make a real case for you thesis then.
People choose academia to be within (zero-sum) system and project the same expectations to students, while real life success is about being out of any system.
Hence the harm.
People don't 'choose academia to be within a zero-sum system and project the same expectations to students'. My partner and most of my friends are or have been in academia and the one common thing is a real passion for their subject of choice and industry doesn't offer the same flexibility to focus on it.
Being suspicious of those who voluntarily become academics is odd.
Real life results of academia are largely propaganda (tuition billions well spent).
They are not even good in figuring out why/how things work and replicating success (additionally proven by Soviets).
Your language of choice - Clojure according to your HN bio - works on a product where important parts (e.g. Generics and the Java collection framework) were done by academia. One of the most popular compilers (LLVM) was done in academia (and still is in parts!). Most of the optimizations compilers use were done by academia.
Your work stands on the work of countless academic researchers and you run around "What did academia EVER do for us?" - the Monty Python sketch about Romans comes to mind.
This is especially laughable, since I have seen how that works on practice: take something everyone already does, write 1000 of PhDs on that, add to academic history book, now wikipedia and voila.
If any of IT projects came from academia to the market, it's only because certain people were picked up by businesses that were onto something already.
That's a general truth. You make it sound like people choose academia to somehow cheat the system and profit from free student's work or whatever. Make a real case for you thesis then.