What you say is true... but that's also why American academics is widely viewed as corrupt and unproductive, ridden with fraudulent con artists, and falling into the same kind of failure mode seen in, for example, Soviet science under the regime of Lysenko.

Now if you wanted to rise to a position of academic power under the likes of Lysenko, you'd want to follow this careerist path, you'd want to observe Lysenko, sing the song that Lysenko wanted to hear, and you'd be rewarded appropriately.

That's the way of authoritarian bureaucratic institutionalism, not the way of high-quality science. It also doesn't really matter whether the structure is 'capitalist' or 'socialist', it's all about who sits at the top of the hierarchy in such systems. Crushing independent thought is what they have in common.