TL DR; France is the country where Cargo Cult science is born, and that what was Feynman has been warning against, because it it was beginning to contaminate US at his time (has finished by now)

It is called academism: when you respect the look&feel of science more than science itself.

Some very well known moralists that have been making some real scientific breakthrough such as Pasteur, Cuvier have used this to publish pseudo science based on their scientific credit France has hence created some very disturbing pseudo-science backed by academy

Pasteur was a convinced puritan. When the league of virtue came to him to shut down the sinners who where drinking alcohol, he backed a totally un-scientific study to claim absinth was a poison. The prohobition in USA is based on a similar lobbying.

Cuvier who was friend of Linné, after going to a pub by seeing one poor girl from south african born with a dysmorphia made a very nice theory from one sample stating that the «black» where closers to the gorillas than the «whites». Giving racism a «scientific credit».

Than in the early XXth helped by politics, scientific academy claimed that all about crimes could be solved with science, hence the birth of scientific police and «scientific methods to investigate» (CSI) including: using graphology, numerology, the face of the people (based on Cuvier) and extended to say stuff like the facial trait of jews that were more akin to be criminals, polygraphs and shits.

One of our greatest and first she PhD, Marie Curie (who was born polish) was at the opposite of Bogdanov constantly under the fire of criticism of «our scientific institutions» for being too free. (She divorced, had an affair, and above all CLAIMED to be able to do science by herself). Thus French scientific academy have asked the Royal Academy of Stockholm to not give her the Nobel prize in 1906. Stupidity that they happily ignored.

French science had always a tendency to prefer the appearance of science over its content (reading Molière is very informative on the topic), and until recently USA developed itself greatly by abhorring this model (read quicksilver from Stephenson as a good picture) greatly inspired by the «erudition» held by the church.

But after the WWII amazingly USA have been all the more looking like France in its worst part they have been bashing France.

I think the biography of Feynman and the part on the introduction of Fundamental Math is instructive. It is the fundation of the cargo cult story. Or the book of Pr Gleick on dynamic systems where it is described why Mandelbrot prefered to give up on polytechnique (french Ivy league) or even the Sokal scandal can depict a pretty accurate picture of the slow convergence of US academism towards french one.

America's greatness in knowledge is being held down by this: conformism, and giving more credit to institution than they ought to have.