From what I have seen, the answer is that academics are more or less like teachers’ pets that kept going all the way into tenure. Their whole professional being is directed at pleasing their peers at large or their superiors. They’ve been broken into a relatively harsh hierarchical way of relating to their profession. All of their intelligence has been well domesticated and easily controlled for a while now. And it’s not like they’re starving. They’re doing well, but not too well, and scarcely have any incentive to rock the boat while they’re family rely on them and become increasingly reliant on the academic career with their age making it harder and harder to fathom surviving in the real world.
Just think about the amount of time and energy they have to spend on grants to get permission to do their job through sales pitches and papers to promote themselves.
They’re like an influencer that has to re-apply for their job every three years, with the real risk of falling out of fashion every time all the while acquiring few real world skills, which looms hauntingly should the fate, that’s inevitable for most, of being cast out into it befall them.