I swear, it's like people pass around the same handful of examples when they want to complain about irrelevant academic research. What they never do is justify

I swear, it's like people pass around the same handful of examples when they want to complain about irrelevant academic research. What they never do is justify the "becoming" part. For over a century, people have complained about university research as 'useless ivory tower activities' (quoting https://books.google.com/books?id=p6T3eo5ltFAC&pg=RA15-PA53&dq=ivory+tower+useless&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=ivory%20tower%20useless&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=p6T3eo5ltFAC&pg=RA15-PA53&... as a 1983 reference I picked arbitrarily from a Google Books search). Go back to the 1950s and I'm sure you'll see similar complaints about the uselessness of academic humanities research.