This made me chuckle because of some of the truth in it:

What universities actually do, however, is publish papers nobody reads in journals nobody can afford, in order to make their numbers go up in ranking systems nobody understands, so they can attract research funding and student enrollments so they can pay people to publish more academic papers.

Yes and some number of those students leave the university with new ideas and connections. Maybe some of their papers were an exercise to focus their expertise? Not saying universities are the only place that one can find new ideas and connections with the world either.