Academia is an elite, powerful, and privileged institution. Of course it is not a monolithic institution, but a conglomeration of many individual institutions that share a common culture. Any cultural entity like this is going to attract deserved and undeserved criticism.

Any powerful cultural institution like this will fall into corruption (literally rotteness), again like every other big cultural institution. This is a charge that has been leveled against academia since universities first arose in the late middle ages. The chancellor of my university at my time went to prison for misappropriation of funds. Currently (and for years now) my alma mater (a public university) spends some amount of its resources on what some people might consider frivilous make-work (i.e. unneccesary jobs creation) while raising tuition as part of the general runaway education inflation, which is far higher that the core inflation rate. (No citation. I'll trust most readers will grant this asseertion.)

As part of the culture, academia is strongly associated with some political trends, and the status quo, and strongly opposed to others. Of course not everyone is going to like that fit.

At the highest levels elite academia is strongly associated with elite government, media, business, etc.

Professors are generally people who like to talk and tell stories. This rubs some people the wrong way, and not all professors are as smart and as good story tellers as Feynman, for instance.

Just some of the things that might trigger some people.

In my case it's related to the continual drumbeat of news stories that seems to show them being transformed from bastions of free inquiry into centers of political indoctrination. It's been reinforced in the last couple of years by a friend who sent his sweet, friendly, apolitical hard working daughter to a liberal arts college, and she returned as a politicized tattooed pierced foul mouthed social warrior who despises her family and home community. While that anecdote has applied for generations it seems to have become more rule than exception. There are an increasing number of parents who feel that sending their kids to college amounts to parental malpractice.

This "chip" may sound like a form of bigotry in that it paints many remaining fine scholars with the same broad brush, but you can't enroll in just that part of a school.

While the STEM fields that most publish in Elsevier are less affected by this trend they seem to be moving in that direction. Simply researching human intelligence, sexual dimorphism, heritability or a constantly shifting range of other topics has become career threatening. The idea that merit should play a predominant role in hiring is becoming scarce in faculty hiring committees.

I'm a product of a university but looking back I see that my degree did little for me in terms of either increased human capital or of signalling, in that I learned to code outside of class and my degree is of ever less value in getting hired. If I could go back and whisper in my high school ears while I was applying to college I might say "skip it". And that's separate from the ideological angle.

Meanwhile it has become much more expensive in the era of federal financing. Both sides of the cost benefit ratio are moving in the wrong direction.

The net result is that I've come to discount the value of universities. If they were all closed tomorrow it would be both a great loss and gain, and I'm not sure which would dominate.

If I don't like academia, it's from my experience in academia. Doing good research won't guarantee you a position. On the contrary, what seems to matter is bringing in a lot of money via grants and publishing tons of papers in recognized journals. This better be done steadily too. I know one guy who didn't get tenure at my university, likely because he had a year or two without any publications. Personally, I think a year or two without publications might be necessary for some longer-term projects. So the system has a short-term bias built in too.

You can be a jerk to your students and thrive in this system. (I'm sure other grad students and former grad students can think of copious examples.)

This seems to be because most people, even other researchers, can't evaluate the quality of work in other fields. I'd go farther than that and say that most researchers don't even know what good quality work should look like in their own fields. So instead they look for proxies like the sheer number of papers published, amount of money brought in, impact factor of the journals published in, how a researcher follows trends, etc. But these are weak proxies at best, maybe even anti-correlated with good research.

I'm sure that tenure track positions are great once you have tenure, but it's a lottery at best, and I think the processes of getting a PhD and tenure select for people who are unlikely to take risks, or teach them to avoid riskier research. So if you have tenure, you're less likely to do the sort of bold research I think is so valuable. I would hesitate to call most research even "incremental" as most researchers do a shallow review of their field, so they can't really build on anything. More like "spinning your wheels". If I became a professor and got tenure I'd probably never advance from associate to full professor, as I'd immediately switch my research strategy from "safe" research before tenure to higher impact research after tenure.

Couple that with a disdain that some technocrats have for unquantifiable, soft social sciences, or the politics shared by most people studying them.

Now, couple that with the various well-documented, objective problems that academia has.

Shake it with ice, and you get the comments that you are calling out.