And in any case, if your only criticism of a field is a characteristic that is shared by many fields, then you should either assert that your preferred fix is general to all of them, or explain why it's specific to academia. (For instance, it is not enough so say that medicine should be socialized because of imperfect information alone since imperfect information exists in many other industries and we do not socialize them all.)
"in crisis" is the end state of a pathology, where it has gone untreated for far too long and begun to have ruinous consequences. Academy is in crisis. Other fields suffering from the same pathology are at different points in their breakdown. Some of them will never breakdown, others will enter their own crises sometime soon if they haven't already (and many of them already have).
surely I'm allowed to criticize and highlight social issues without having a "preferred fix" that I'm promoting. I'm not nearly so arrogant as to think I even know what fix would work.
there is a crisis in our society though, and it has many social pathologies underlying it, and it manifests variously in disparate fields that yet suffer from similar pathologies. in the case of academia I feel that it is acutely important to address because of the role the academy plays in shaping elite culture and practices. in the modern world we've elevated the academy to the place that used to belong to Bishops and church scholars. The shaping of beliefs and all of the cascading effects that has on society is now in a state of breakdown and malfunction.
No, things can be pathological indefinitely. I'm not disputing pathology. Rather, no one has justified "crisis", i.e., some reason to think there will be abrupt change, or will not continue to produce as expected.
> surely I'm allowed to criticize and highlight social issues without having a "preferred fix"
I'm not saying that, I'm saying that it doesn't make sense to discuss academia specifically if one's comments apply to a million other fields. This applies to fixes or to just analysis of the pathology.
And in any case, if your only criticism of a field is a characteristic that is shared by many fields, then you should either assert that your preferred fix is general to all of them, or explain why it's specific to academia. (For instance, it is not enough so say that medicine should be socialized because of imperfect information alone since imperfect information exists in many other industries and we do not socialize them all.)