Agreed! What I'm trying to get at is that there's two ways you can think of academia: 1) roughly the set of people in traditional institutions, and 2) a basica

Agreed! What I'm trying to get at is that there's two ways you can think of academia: 1) roughly the set of people in traditional institutions, and 2) a basically unorganized set of people that happen to come together through working on related problems, in related ways. 2) is arguably the purer view of academia, and in that sense, it's as strong as ever. I agree with you that there's deep, serious problems with 1), and they have to do with Pournelle's law, (in the US) with Bayh-Dole, and a litany of other hard, nasty problems of social life. But, even in that case: is that any worse than other cultures?