In The Handmaid’s Tale, right before Gilead takes over the US, women have to have their husbands sign off on their birth control refills. Then they all get fired from their jobs and all their money in the bank gets transferred to their husbands.
I know it’s a tired cliche to keep bringing up the Handmaid’s Tale, but it just doesn’t seem that far out there anymore. Especially the part where everyone just goes along with the changes and learns to live with them. Margaret Atwood based everything in the book off of real events in wold history. So there’s that.
Like the other response to this said, it’s a little more complicated than “the status quo is easier” or “intelligent doesn’t mean smart.” This is a deeply ingrained system that’s existed for a long time, and if you don’t operate within it, you don’t get to work in academia. You won’t get to conduct your research to begin with, much less will you get to the point of publishing it without cooperating with these institutions. There are also powerful regulatory bodies like the APA and AMA who control just about everything in their field. You pretty much have to work for a university, and US universities are of course greedy and corrupt in their own right.
It would be like unseating the DNC, ending the electoral college, and expanding the two party system in America, but on a smaller scale. Plenty of Americans know that these things need to happen, but it’s not something where you can just wake up one day and make the decision to overthrow the system as long as you just try real hard.