Does anyone else find it ironic that academia is, in some sense, more anti-intellectual than general manager Billy Beane of the Oakland Athletics baseball team?

Does anyone else find it ironic that academia is, in some sense, more anti-intellectual than general manager Billy Beane of the Oakland Athletics baseball team? I'm sure on Hacker News most of your know about MoneyBall: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball Consider this paragraph, and ask yourself why the nation's major universities can not raise themselves to the same level of statistical rigor: "The central premise of Moneyball is that the collected wisdom of baseball insiders (including players, managers, coaches, scouts, and the front office) over the past century is subjective and often flawed. Statistics such as stolen bases, runs batted in, and batting average, typically used to gauge players, are relics of a 19th-century view of the game and the statistics available at that time. The book argues that the Oakland A's' front office took advantage of more analytical gauges of player performance to field a team that could better compete against richer competitors in Major League Baseball (MLB)." It is in some sense ironic, and in some other sense sickening, that our nation's universities continue to hang on 19th-century views of status and credentials, when other professions, even sports, have moved onto more objective, measurable metrics.