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As another scientist, the problem is that it has been working less and less well, with ballooning costs to boot (especially including the entirety of university funding).
On the teaching side, I've been now long enough part of academia, and have seen it from both the student and the teaching side, over more than a decade now, and it's obvious that the standards just keep going down and down. Professors openly admitting that they let everyone pass in the oral exam anyway, so why even bother making the written exam hard? Students just whining until they get their way, and the administration takes their side. Entire new courses with even lower standards are created, lest the "Nursing Sciences" may feel disadvantaged by the mean old boys club of math and statistics.
On the research side, it becomes harder and harder to even try to conduct neutral investigations. Everything that can possibly be judged politically has to either directly include assurances that you're a good person with good politics, or you have to live in fear that activist-scholars will go after you. Jesse Singal has examples that are close to the platonic ideal of course, but you're extremely mistaken if you think this just limited to specific topics.
I'm working in genetics, and it often feels like almost everything about it is politisized. IVF and embryo selection have always been opposed by the conservatives of course, but nowadays the left will be much more dangerous to your work. A colleague of mine works on a certain kind of serious, inheritable and debilitating diseases. She is being pressured by left-wing activist-scholars from the humanities to drop the topic since exploring the genetic background assumes these diseases are bad - which is ablism - , the money ought to instead go straight to left-wing support structures. Nevermind that most of the patients themselves hate the disease and are thankful for any attempt of fixing, even if only available for their kids. Do you think they get in trouble for this egregious breach of scientific conduct? Of course not, they get support from the administrative and cheers from the media. One of my PhD students is an Egyptian curious about his heritage, and we are investigating what the genetic differences we found functionally do. But even here we have to walk on eggshells since implying that different groups from different places with different conditions might be genetically different in meaningful, functional ways is a big no-no. Well, only for humans, for any other animal it's perfectly obvious and only a creationist would disagree.
And apart from the science itself, the AA hiring is also madness. I personally know not just one, but two cases of a female professor getting their position with just a single publication. I haven't had to work with them myself, but everyone who did has told me that they have been wildly out of their depth and very difficult to work with. Committees that make lists by publications and other measures of competence, and end up taking number ... eight because that's the first one that fulfils whatever quota currently in need of filling.
This is not mild productivity decreasing, these are the big dangers that have been bogging down science for decades. For a different field, just look at the nuclear renaissance going on in certain countries right now; we could have had that in the 90s for the entire world, but fearmongering and green extremism has thrown us back so, so far. Instead, we ideologically wasted so much on trying to turn solar and wind into essential generators through complicated battery schemes, while they are much better suited to simply being supporting energy generators for specific times & places. Michael Magoon has a whole slew of good articles for lay audiences on the topic, but the basic economic case is currently being proven by demonstration in my own home country, germany, which has managed to utterly ruin its own energy production through ideological mismanagement. Even just keeping the old nuclear reactors would have been better than the insanity we've went through. We didn't just move more slowly; We actively moved backwards, and are now depended on the countries around us who invested correctly.
The only part I agree on is that I do not like Trump and don't think he is likely to really fix things. But I also do not trust academia to fix itself. If anything, I expect it to get worse.
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