Academia was always broken. Despite the current undeserved reputation as academia being open to debate and new ideas, the opposite has always been true. Academia has its sordid history of dogmaticism and hero-worshipping. And progress in knowledge usually advanced in spite of academia rather than because of it.

Go read about the battles between Newton and Hooke or even Newton and Leibniz.

The doctor who first suggested washing hand to cut down on infections in the 1800s was ridiculed and mocked by surgeons.

Scientists who brought up germ theory were mocked as quacks by doctors and scientists who rigidly adhered to the miasma theory as gospel.

Of course white supremacy was accepted "scientific fact" for a very long time by academia and anyone who thought otherwise would have been viewed similarly to a flat earther today. You could argue that white supremacy would still be "scientific fact" were it not for ww2.

My personal favorite is Georg Cantor who was mercilessly attacked by his fellow academics within math and even without for his theories on infinite numbers.

"The objections to Cantor's work were occasionally fierce: Leopold Kronecker's public opposition and personal attacks included describing Cantor as a "scientific charlatan", a "renegade" and a "corrupter of youth".[8] Kronecker objected to Cantor's proofs that the algebraic numbers are countable, and that the transcendental numbers are uncountable, results now included in a standard mathematics curriculum. Writing decades after Cantor's death, Wittgenstein lamented that mathematics is "ridden through and through with the pernicious idioms of set theory", which he dismissed as "utter nonsense" that is "laughable" and "wrong".[9][context needed] Cantor's recurring bouts of depression from 1884 to the end of his life have been blamed on the hostile attitude of many of his contemporaries,[10] though some have explained these episodes as probable manifestations of a bipolar disorder"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Cantor

"charlatan", "renegade", "corrupter of youth". Isn't it interesting how academics attack each other like religious people attack each other? The odd thing about some of the attacks on Cantor is that it came after his death and after he had PROVEN his countable and uncountable infinites.

The history of academia is as nasty and vicious as any other institution. And its gatekeepers and heroes as petty and pathetic as any you'd find anywhere else.