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Coming to this late, but like @George_E_Hale, I find your thesis both persuasive and not, because you accurately identify the rot in academia and yet cherrypicking the worst and most woke activists to represent every single person who goes into academia for the love of history, literature, or journalism is rather unfair.
I think the problems with academia are multifarious and go well beyond "leftist capture."
I'd distill them down to the following:
Academia used to be for the wealthy. You had to be rich to be able to go to college to study Anglo-Saxon poetry or ancient Greek pottery, and expect to be make a living afterwards. There were only so many professorships available to teach more academically inclined scions of wealthy families. When that landscape changed (in the US, largely due to the GI Bill after WWII, but also due to the general liberalization and tearing down of class barriers that occurred after the war), the market didn't. Lots of people still thought studying Anglo-Saxon poetry or ancient Greek pottery sounded like fun; the number of professorships did not scale.
But for a while, academia could still coast, because the very fact of being accepted into university and graduating was a sign of intelligence and industriousness. In high school, I was still being told by school guidance counselors that "Lots of companies will hire you just for having a college degree; they assume you can learn." This was already becoming no longer true. I don't know if school guidance counselors still say this, but if they are, they're lying.
The reason for that is, well, a college degree was seen as the ticket to a good job. Therefore everyone should get a college degree. Therefore denying anyone the opportunity to earn a college degree was unfair. Therefore college should be accessible to everyone. I don't think we need to go over the many, many observable negative consequences of this. It's well-trod ground that touches almost every aspect of the culture war.
So, here we are. College degrees are largely seen as worthless (or a minimum barrier to entry), the government has shoveled money into ensuring everyone can go to college, and universities have eagerly sucked up all that money in the form of ever-inflating prices. And we have all kinds of bombs ready to go off.
The solutions are both simple and obvious, and completely infeasible. Do I agree with you that academia should be "razed to the ground"? Well, I think we should still make space in the world for a few scholars of Anglo-Saxon poetry and ancient Greek pottery. But maybe not so much space.
As a side note, I liked to draw as a kid (had dreams of becoming a comic book artist) but put down the pencils for decades (I went to college for "a good job.") Revisiting some of my old drawings, I realized I was both better and worse than I remembered. And recently got an urge to actually Learn Art.
I've watched a lot of YouTube videos from professional artists who largely agree with you that art school is pretty worthless. Art instruction, among other things, is more accessible than ever before. Free YouTube tutorials are abundant, but there are also online ateliers and coaches who are vastly cheaper than art school. Much like my language studies, I have found more benefit from online tutors and a bit of discipline in my free time than I ever got out of college classes.
The mechanical process explains why college degrees are increasingly common and the floor has crawled up; it doesn't explain why these groups take thousands of dollars a credit-hour and can't teach, and that's the part that's really damning. Yes, presumably some level of penetration of degrees means you'd be trying to teach people to learn who are constitutionally incapable of it, and there's some degree of capability or intelligence required to achieve harder capabilities, no small amount of which I recognize I don't have and may never have.
But then we get english majors that can't write a clear paragraph to save their lives, electronics engineers who've never touched a standalone transistor, so on. The old joke was that modern colleges were training people to become underwater basket weavers, but in the modern day, it's not clear they could do that. These aren't 140 IQ problems.
Nor does it explain the collapse for academics. These are supposed to be the people who care, and have focused, and been selected from the just-doing-it people.
I'm trying to write up the PubPeer equivalent of that big screed I had about the ballistics gel study a couple days ago, avoiding the political side of things, and focusing on just the typos and measurement results and non-reproducable output values and disclosure failures and clearly incorrect models, and it's longer than the culture war screed here! I keep finding new problems just trying to write the old ones in full detail. A good many are independent of the actual political disagreement, and a couple even undermine the political goal (if only by accident). And there's supposedly six adults working hard on this paper over a period of five years!
They made the decision that no one was going to look at their analysis with a skeptical eye. Tbf, that was a reasonable decision. But that says quite a lot about their entire ecosystem.
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George asked about history and poetry specifically; poetry is more or less equivalent to art and similar critiques apply before even approaching the political and social questions, but History has a credible claim to being a serious discipline in our present context.
I do not think I am cherry-picking. My claim: the most significant output of historical academia in the last decade or so that I'm aware of is the 1619 project, and the runner-up would be the Kamloops mass graves controversy. I don't think it's unreasonable to describe both of these as serious sociopolitical events that had notable direct impacts on our society, and that both emerged from and depended on History Academia to do what they did, and that both are understood both within and without the Academy to be Capital-H History.
The claim here is not that the 1619 Project is typical of the average consequence of academic historians; I would guess that average academic historians have little to no perceptible impact on society at all. The claim is that if you ask what Society receives of consequence from its lavish funding of History departments society-wide, these are two of the most significant results. If you disagree, what significant results do you see emerging from History Academia with greater positive impact?
It really is quite remarkable the extent that this is true. 2000-2016 was a true golden age, and seeing the proliferation of skill, knowledge and training was something that filled me with a profound sense of optimism at the time. Even know, in the shadow of AI, it's still not completely extinguished.
The argument I make to the academics in my life is that I love teaching. Education is a profoundly important part of human existence! From the moment we're born, we're learning every day, and the sharing and cultivation of knowledge and wisdom and skill is among the most valuable activities humans can engage in! The reason I'm so opposed to the current system is precisely because that system is doing such a fantastically bad job!!!
Again, I'm caught here between trying to avoid the appearance of a Gish Gallop firehose on one hand, and providing evidence for inflammatory claims on the other. I know an English Academic who teaches honors English classes. They routinely have students in the Honors English class who don't know how a paragraph works. This is in an extremely expensive private university! That student is actively, objectively being exploited by the university! No one cares!!!
...But ranting aside, congrats on getting into art! I've been on a learning kick off and on for the last two years or so, and heavily on for the last six months. Feels good, man! What're you aiming for at the moment? Got any pieces you can show?
Nothing worth showing yet. Right now I am going through some actual Fundamentals courses, learning all the things I never learned properly the first time around, like value studies, one, two and three point perspective, contours and negative spaces, sight sizing, etc.
I am way too old to pursue my dream of being a comic book artist, but I'd just like to be able to illustrate my own stories.
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