The problem is that academics rely on and benefit from a traditional awe and prestige of the educated individual, 'renaissance man,' 'man of letters,' furthered by the heavy institutional backdrop afforded by universities and schools within social systems solidified by various forms of meaningless rankings.
It is doubtful this was even viable coin in antiquity but is rather a kind of meme successfully implemented since early modernity. The advent of the written language and the entrepeneurship of religions undoubtedly played an important part as well.
This scenario is, however, completely out of touch with current reality. There is no need to afford academics special prestige. As a matter of fact, demonstrably, they often muck things up with poor theory abandoned by themselves shortly after it was the craze within their field. Then something new comes up which they then sell as enthusiastically to their constituents: their students, the public, themselves.
It all contributes to a mindset oddly detached from reality but which consequently focus the larger part of their energies onto efforts to strengthen their position within the academic system as they themselves as insiders are fully aware of the transient nature of what actually ought to be the source of that traditional awe and prestige.
Awe and prestige becomes artificially inflated by social positioning within the system, dependent upon that system, not grounded in qualities and virtues independent of it.
To compond matters: today's educational factories excreet hordes of graduates schooled in this existential mindset, not fit to contribute anything beyond further solidification of this artificial state of affairs. Apart from these hordes there are thankfully graduates who will actually be productive and who will only sporadically be affected by the attempted mindcontrol during so much of their college experience.
What emerges is essentially a rampant, complex, two-faced Ponzi scheme: one, intellectual, in which supposedly critical observations are constantly morphed into something preposterously new but of course nothing more than an add-on; the second, the economic underpinning, enabling the whole circus to keep reproducing itself by inflating costs and by sucking in novel funding from any source possible.
Underpinning is here the correct term: funding is constantly being pinned and unpinned - it is not a foundation. Hence, the double Ponzi scheme. When, then, you have a federal government deeply embedded with the educational system, all the components of the scam are readily at hand.
