Dignity is the fundamental problem that they're bemoaning. When scientists and other intellectual positions are funded beyond scraps and subsistence wages, they start to ask questions about societal power structures. When they're afforded political voices, they start applying their critiques to how their own institutions are run - rather than keeping their heads down as busy worker bees for the business vectoralists. And critiques/conclusions where they've gone cloyingly overboard then serve as convenient straw men that demonstrate how "out of touch" they are from "the real world".