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How do you create the former without the risk of the latter? And if the latter does eventuate, how do you remove it without making the tower once again vulnerable to fads and markets?
I don't mean this as a gotcha question. I think the current situation is clearly bad, and I'd like to find a better option that still achieves everything we want universities to achieve.
I think like this. Increasingly massive consensus that produces an increasingly universal political pressure, making clear that the only choices are reform or closure. If you are emotionally comitted to the principle that the humanities must remain open as academic departments, then you cannot apply the leverage that will produce reform.
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This is sufficiently abstracted away as to make it pretty much impossible to make meaningful answers to these questions, but one core that's missing is academia being tied to things that are real. Whether you call that "empiricism" or "truth" or "fact" or "science" or whatever, this connection is fundamental to the value that academia offers society/humanity/civilization/etc., and the current state of academia is the result of academics and their leaders for at least the past few decades taking a machete to that connection with abandon.
It's hard to say what controls could have been put in place and how they could have been enforced to make sure the ivory tower's fads don't turn against being tied to reality. But I believe that any way of saving the ivory tower from its many self-inflicted wounds (or hypothetical ways in which they wouldn't have inflicted them on themselves in the past) would need heavy emphasis on enforcing this, since without that connection, the ivory tower provides almost no value to society beyond being a daycare for young adults.
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No worries, I didn't take it as such, but the question is a lot deeper than it looks like at first glance.
Even though I don't think the 2 particular issues would come up here, as it's hard to make money off anthropology, so I don't see how market pressures or short term fads could enter here, generally I don't think there's a systemic solution. We've spent the last 80 years trying to replace human virtue with systems that will force good behavior on bad people, and all we ever got for it was Goodhart's Law up the wazzoo. Whatever rule you come up with will be gamed the same way peer review and the h-index were.
The other solution of a strongman entering and cleaning up house also has issues, in that some people think the ivory tower is also supposed to be isolated from political pressures. There are many reasons why this is at best unsustainable, at at worst impossible, ranging from "you may be not interested in politics, but politics is interested in you" to the frequent theme of FCFromSSC posts: "the only reason something felt apolitical in the past is that our values were largely converged in the past, and we'll never get it back now that we have values divergence".
Now, just because there doesn't seem to be a fix that doesn't risk other issues, doesn't detract from the fact that something must be done. If our attempt to insulate academia from outside influence ended up in the setting up little cults, we have to get rid of the cults, even if that results in other issues.
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