And of course, you would be free to fund such studies with your own money, but so much science is taxpayer funded or subsidized in various ways that the ROI has to be treated as important.
"That's academic" is already a mild insult meaning useless or irrelevant, but that perception never had any impact on academia so far. The risk for the academy is that negative feelings grow, and then people start wondering why they're paying for so many studies where they're either shoddy or obvious. The justification for public funding is really only studies that:
a. Yield non obvious conclusions.
b. Correctly.
c. And which wouldn't have been funded by industry.
It's possible that the set of such studies is small, and in some fields there are probably zero such studies (e.g. my bête noire, twitter bot research).
Today the risk to academia is low because the political elites in western countries have all self-selected through credentialism and university based social networking, more or less. But all it takes is a populist candidate to get a big enough base and universities may find themselves in the firing lines, with little in the way of defense. It'd be better to prune the obvious studies now.
"That's academic" is already a mild insult meaning useless or irrelevant, but that perception never had any impact on academia so far. The risk for the academy is that negative feelings grow, and then people start wondering why they're paying for so many studies where they're either shoddy or obvious. The justification for public funding is really only studies that:
a. Yield non obvious conclusions.
b. Correctly.
c. And which wouldn't have been funded by industry.
It's possible that the set of such studies is small, and in some fields there are probably zero such studies (e.g. my bête noire, twitter bot research).
Today the risk to academia is low because the political elites in western countries have all self-selected through credentialism and university based social networking, more or less. But all it takes is a populist candidate to get a big enough base and universities may find themselves in the firing lines, with little in the way of defense. It'd be better to prune the obvious studies now.