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Let's say you're stuck on a deserted island with a small group and the only one of you who knows anything at all about food preparation is Sylvester Graham. Obviously, most of you are going to hate whatever Sylvester cooks (I'm assuming for the sake of argument that he can't be reasoned out of his position that spices are evil), so what then do you do? You could kill him in his sleep to rid the world of his bland slop, and you would be happy at first, but then you might all starve. Or you could ask him to teach you how to cook and try to figure out yourself which elements are intrinsic to the process and which are just his kooky ideology talking, all the while continuing to eat his terrible food.
For the latter course to be preferable at least two things have to be true: the activity in question must be intrinsically necessary or valuable in some way and the existing gatekeepers must possess some special knowledge that cannot be trivially rederived from first principles in the event that they all drop dead. In the case of Sylvester, perhaps some of you argue that since everyone eats it should be easy enough to figure out how to prepare food on your own, and others argue that only Sylvester knows which plants are safe to eat and which are poisonous and that this is information you can't afford to lose. In the case of the Academy, its defenders would have to make the case that America's economic prosperity is dependent on its activities and that the Trump administration's attacks will harm that capacity in some demonstrable way e.g. capricious defunding of federal grants leads to a mass exodus of scientists to Europe, causing the collapse of the American phamaceutical, chemical, energy, etc. industries because PhD's take years to train and cannot be replaced on a dime.
You’re assuming n this question that no one else can learn to cook. Or t go back to the original question, that no one other than trans-positive progressives can run museums. Libraries, or university departments. Which is not true. What is true is that through the selection process, open conservatives are weeded out, and that the constant DEI shibboleths mean that any conservatives are cowed into silence.
Destroy and rebuild works better simply because the people in power positions in those institutions have no intention of allowing anything to happen. Graham won’t be giving cooking lessons to his enemies. In those cases, it’s simply better to get rid of him and even if at first you burn the roast, you learn quickly, rather than suffer the harm while getting nothing from him.
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First of all: lmao. I did not know the connection from Graham (crackers) to the rest of the cereal craze. Kellogg's Cereal Cure All Dietary Sanitorium was built on the pillars of greatness. Bedeviled spices be damned.
I will think of Graham when I seasonally sully his crackers with delicious, sweetened cream cheese filling and fruit.
Some areas can make the case better than others. Regardless, I don't believe this admin is committed to a root-and-stem method that leads to a mass exodus or a system collapse. It continues towards a (somehow) calculated oversight. The verdict is out for me as to whether they'll do a good (or any sort of lasting) job for the R&D parts. Social sciences, which I was thinking of, is another matter and mostly outside of the administration's reach for what they've shown.
If I'm picking up what you're laying down, then I'll say that "willing, interested, and put in the effort" is intrinsically valuable. Knowledge Producers do produce things I won't, can't, or don't want to. They do so as a privilege that society bestowed on them, sure. Is can't/won't/don't-want-to a skill issue? Also, yes. Some amateur historians do great work without institutional support. I bet there's a number of hobbyist anthropologists I find more interesting than esteemed academics in the field pushing the ideological laden theory of the day. I am no utilitybot. I don't want to kill all men who wear glasses. We can afford to pursue and enjoy things other than maximizing our chances to go to Mars. All men have a desire to know, and that's good. Knowledge Production is good. It can be boring, uninteresting, or stuffy, but it shouldn't be in a position to be scorned generally.
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