I used to also think academia served something of a civil function, sort of like monasteries in the Middle Ages. The ivory tower a sort of Sacra di San Michele, removed from whatever worldly endeavours.

I still think that's true, with some caveats.

The caveats are that I think the analogy between monasticism and academia still sticks: both were the self-appointed arbiters and gatekeepers of scholarly knowledge in their times. Both made money from external resources but maintained the first goal was always their primary end.

What's interesting is that with the more I've read on monasticism, what keeps coming up is the public opinion of monasteries. Many thought the monastery and its estates were charitable, but others in higher worldly positions thought the monasteries were useless siphons...

...taking the intelligence of society and wasting it away behind closed gates, turning smart men into farmers to whom many powerful men had to pay lip service, if only because at the end of the day, they held the books (and hoarded money neither the state nor church could touch).

@nntaleb talks a great deal about how Medieval scholars and theologians certainly had long and important conversations about the world: yet no matter how close we get to the answer, the gender of angels is of no consequence to most of humanity.

I often draw similarities between what's happening with Open Science and what we saw that led to the end of the monastic system. The largest gains the monastic system had was towards it end, when it was in the business of copying and selling books. It had monetized its knowledge.

In the late Middle Ages, new institutions began to form and copied their own books. These were the universities. Knowledge now had competition and when 1440 came with the printing press, monasteries were on their way out the door.

Quotes from Umberto Eco

With pre-prints, Open Access journals, free software like R, and open datasets, science is more open to outsiders than ever. I wonder what the implications there for academia are, if any, and what might end up replacing it, if anything.