Academia is a horrible industry and it's really just CTD (circling the drain) at this point. It's sad, because basic research is important and right now, there's far too little of it being done. Teaching the liberal arts to the next generation is also an important and catastrophically underappreciated job. I think that only about 1 percent of the population (if that) is in-tune enough to see how bad it is that academia is failing, because we rely on it for so much and yet we've allowed it to fall into a state where (barring seismic social changes) it seems to have no future.

All of that said, the ivory tower brought that upon itself. Or, to be more precise, the tenure system killed it by allowing older generations to cannibalize their young, not only by refusing to retire, but by blowing off the work that kept academia relevant. At some point, academics began to openly cop the attitude that research and publication were the real work and that teaching and outreach were just grunt work. The tenured people didn't even bother hiding this shitty attitude, knowing they couldn't get fired for it as long as they had the connections to get their papers published in a timely fashion. A generation later, you had state legislators who went to college but remembered 200-student lectures and professors who obviously didn't care about undergrads, who didn't think much of the experience for that reason, and who cut funding for state universities and public research grants in response, because they saw no value in higher learning or what academia studies because it had never been really shown to them. The big crime here is that, due to the tenure system, the people who originally copped that attitude (being established and hard to fire) kept their jobs and it was the rising generation (which played no part) that got stuck with an imploded job market. A tenure system allows the established generation to put a funnel over the next generation and shit right into it.

What I think is hilarious about academic conceits about "life of the mind" is how opposite it is to the truth. Academics portray non-academics as philistines concerned only with money. In fact, they think about money all the time, whether they're grad students who don't have enough of it, or writing grant proposals, or trying to manage their careers in a collapsing industry. On the other hand, those of us who've left academia think about money much more rarely: it gets put in our bank accounts every couple of weeks, and we don't have to constantly write grant proposals to make that happen. Sure, we have to roll our eyes through meetings about "quarterly KPIs" when the unambitious don't care and the ambitious only care about their personal careers and visions... but that's way better than having to fret constantly about fucking grant proposals like a high school student mashing out a five-paragraph essay about some dead famous person and what it means to him personally. It's hard as hell to have a true life of the mind no matter who you are, but most modern academics are hyperspecialized and so enslaved by the grant-money treadmill that the main difference between them and corporate serfs is that they work 3 times harder for half the salary.