buddy,
You cite a potentially unhealthy aspect of those professions that is probably real, although from my experience there are plenty of natural showmen among the professoriate, as well as persons like myself who more modestly enjoyed transmitting their knowledge. But you are right, the nastiest of my colleagues wanted to be left alone, free of any responsibility to the mass of taxpayers whose support kept the doors open.

What I always thought attracted the nutcases to academia was that they didn’t have to be team players. My big disappointment when I joined a faculty in 1976 was that we were apparently expected to behave as scorpions in a bottle. I would have been happier in a little private enterprise as part of a team figuring out how to turn out more widgets. The absence of widgets, the nebulous nature of academia’s products, is what allows the egocentric viewpoint. Ditto politicians? I would be interested in bogie’s evaluation about whether this applies in Hollywood.