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Academia will not reform itself and will not stop trying to overthrow the government, constitution and society that produces and funds it. They will at some point be brought to heel, either by the government or the people. Some president sooner or later will realize all the money and land being sucked up by organizations of useless traitors and fake "scientists", and just take it. That is, if the people don't turn up with pitchforks first.
Whenever and however that happens, exactly nothing of value will be lost. Academia is underwater morally, politically and scientifically. It is fundamentally compromised and incapable of even describing the problem. The above report is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
No, whatever is done about academia will cause lots of collateral damage to things like medical and engineering research.
Given the rate at which things are going, it seems likely that whatever will be done about academia won't actually be done until 2040 at the earliest. The demand for medical and engineering research seems likely to be high enough such that, with the advent of AI and the self-discrediting of academia over the next 14 years, that lots of medical and engineering research will happen in non-academic institutions, allowing for collateral damage to be minimized as the research can still continue at those places. Having that research be done through proprietary or intellectual-property-protected means is probably the biggest downside.
There's something darkly funny about the prospect of the profit motive of the cynical businessman being far more valuable than the truth motive of a good-faith academic for producing actual knowledge or useful research.
Darkly funny? That is just obvious reality, and always has been.
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This is ultimately the lesson that needs to be properly taught as to why capitalism outperforms the alternatives. The profit motive, or greed if you prefer to phrase it in a negative way, is not in and of itself good for society, but it is reliable. Which is why it is a good platform to build upon, to align incentives with goals that are prosocial. Fear is the closest alternative, which is why regimes that reject capitalism will tend to reach for fear as their source of motivation for prosocial actions. It's not perfect though, and its inferior to greed; when abused the stick loses its sting. But "truth" is so far off that it's hilarious to think anyone serious would think it could do the job, especially when profit, power and influence are on the table for the taking if you were just bend your principles. And you won't even notice you are bending them, your brain will make it very easy to believe that "truth" aligned with whatever your employer wants to hear, whatever your political tribe wants to hear, whatever your peers want to hear.
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Scams like Theranos aside, you generally need something to sell to make a profit, and you need something that at least sort of kind of works to get people to actually buy it most of the time. Or as Ghostbusters put it:
"Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything! You've never been out of college! You don't know what it's like out there! I've worked in the private sector. They expect results."
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Damn, what do you think might happen? Will quality of research get so bad that half of all studies won't replicate? Will doctors start pumping kids full of hormones, and chopping off body parts for no reason? Will AI engineers allocate significant resources to making it more stupid?
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It isn't my sense of things that academia contributes much to medical and engineering research. Maybe Johns Hopkins and MIT do, but not "academia". 99% of universities produce exactly nothing of any scientific, cultural or literary worth.
I don't know about medical, but for engineering, the competitiveness level for professorships is so high that there is quite a lot of talent distributed pretty widely. If one looks around for, I don't know, top quantum researchers, you might be surprised how widely you'll find them. There's still a lot of garbage being published, sure, but that's more a product of the incentive structure demanding more more more in terms of publications. Moreover, while academia hasn't been entirely immune to the general homogenization effects that happened to much of the rest of society, there are still somewhat distinctive flavors that can be seen. For example, (being a bit reductive here), one could say that there's something of a "Berkeley way" of approaching learning problems that is more distinctive on the west coast. Obviously, some of their successes filter over to other folks, but they have sort of a different mindset (purely technically speaking, not about their weird political bubble).
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Do you think such damage could plausibly be within three orders of magnitude of the damage the current system has recently produced?
If "lots of collateral damage to things like medical and engineering research" is a problem worth considering, maybe it behooves the system to fix the problem in a more discerning and deft manner, rather than simply allowing it to fester to the point that outside intervention becomes inevitable? And if the system is constitutionally incapable of fixing the problem... what is there to do but simply accept the costs?
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Doubtful - things that provide real value will be continued elsewhere, in corporate R&D labs if needed. The real losers would be expensive but legitimate research with no practical application, like particle physics or astronomy.
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