Academia is absolutely necrotic. Between the fact that good scientists spend most of their time writing grants, the fact that most scientists spend their life as eternal postdocs, the rigged publishing game, the increasing balkanization of fields, the fact that most people are trying to protect the status quo rather than overturn it, and the goal of publishing rather than actually discovering, things look very grim.

I think that government needs to cut back on grants, and instead provide better incentives for corporations to do open access basic research. This would still have the problem of producing somewhat obfuscated science, but in general it would push things towards being more interdisciplinary and functional, since corporations could increase profitability by leveraging synergies between basic and applied research.