nmap, thank you!
In a few concise paragraphs, you have described the academic environment with a degree of clarity superior to anything I could craft in a draft for a post that had rambled along for a couple of pages in Microsoft Word. As the saying goes "That was easy."
FWIW, my experiences are very much in line with your observations about the ambivalence many academics have towards teaching.
Fortunately, I never had cause to challenge a mark I received on a graded assignment or in a class. Even on those occasions where I was profoundly disappointed, I felt that I'd earned the grade I had received. It was up to me to find ways to improve my performance.
When it was my turn to stand in front of classes, I would give so much feedback and have such an aggressive approach towards individual consultations (including mandatory office visits) that students understood why their C+ essay was a C+ and not the A they thought they deserved and that particular C+ was not going to transform itself into any other letter.* No student I taught could make a
credible case that their performance suffered from a lack of academic support.
Then this was all shortly before the students with 'helicopter parents' began to show up in ever increasing numbers.
An observation. It remains amazing to me that social historians can leave no stone unturned in their collective quest to 'recapture lost voices' and thereby describe counties, cities, and towns with such detail that you can hear the blacksmith's hammer but they cannot get their heads around the possibility that the American government is as complex. While I only encountered one outwardly hostile professor ("Why would anyone want to study naval history?" she sniffed on multiple occasions) I received no small amount of skepticism for holding to the belief that maybe...just maybe...
the members of the armed services have never been unthinking golems in service to a bloodthirsty monolithic state hell bent on global conquest.
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* A certain professor now at Penn had an unwritten policy when he was at Cal: if a grade can go up, a grade can go down.