All human activity is full of scams if you cast your net wide enough. Insofar as academia contains scams, the distinction is that they have a much lower profit margin.
> Sayre's law states, in a formulation quoted by Charles Philip Issawi: "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." By way of corollary, it adds: "That is why academic politics are so bitter."
How does one compute the profit margin of academia?
You look at the bad actors (in this case and others) and see how much money or equivalent they're getting out of their work. My general view is that it's much less than you could obtain with a PhD and similar effort applied to other fields.
Got a citation for that, academic?
Yet they still demand we take them with utmost seriousness...
not really, maybe you're thinking of medical doctors