"If the writer is the hired man of an "information industry," his general aims are, of course, set by the decisions of others and not by his own integrity...

Although, in general, the larger universities are still the freest of places in which to work, the trends which limit the independence of the scholar are not absent there. The professor is, after all, an employee, subject to all that this fact involves. Institutional factors naturally select men for these universities and influence how, when, and upon what they will work and write...

The independent artist and intellectual are among the few remaining personalities equipped to resist and to fight the stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely living things. Fresh perception now involves the capacity continually to unmask and to smash the stereotypes of vision and intellect with which modern communications swamp us."

--C. Wright Mills. 

That was some sixty years ago. You suspect that the situation has considerably deteriorated. Apart from a few straggling oldies the university is probably little other than an appendage of some corporation or the other.