This might be how it was before, but in a lot of fields, your success going forward is directly proportional to the valuation of the impact of your work so far. This as you note invites perverse incentives.
So it is also part of that process that someone there provides the politicians good reasons to spend money. Now how to do this sanely is complex question, but it is step of process that needs to exist. Or we might end up funding astrology and likes...
Their jobs are to instruct. As part of that these other roles developed and became expected.
However, like healthcare, privatization got to a point where the money made a difference more than the research and other roles. This is not a failure of capitalism, business, or anything of that sort; it was just a problem of taking things that were considered important out of the equation, because they were not understood or justified; and we’re allowed to scratch our heads over this and wonder why, but it’s simply that it happened; things sometimes fail.
Should we guard against this?
Probably, yes.
Could it be crowdsourced?
Probably, yes.
And if we’re talking about public universities, these researchers are already crowd sourced.
The comment I replied to read as if they meant academia, not academy.
It seems like we're already having a crisis (ie the collapse of ecosystems) and in any case it shouldn't take a crisis to get supposedly-responsible people to think ahead and do risk mitigation etc. I mean, I have no scientific qualifications or special training other than curiosity and a willingness to plough through papers and follow citations, and it disturbs the hell out of me that I seem to have a much better grasp of environmental and fiscal systems than most policymakers. This idea that we should sacrifice all our institutions built up over centuries on the altar of economic competition (knowing the existence of perverse incentives and short-termism) is clearly Not Working.