i'm not gonna disagree with that entirely but likely they paid for their education and whatever amount of tenure they got was probably merited and you can't really say a bad thing about a university that would tenure these kind of people as professors.

it does have bearing that the education system was not the commie rathole it is now before the 80s. it was less commie. more of it was privately funded. less of the research was paid for under the table to sell products to get approved by the FDA.