Academics, or at least, the universities which hold them, are a good thing.

They perform a valuable public service by keeping the sort of people who become academics safely locked up and occupied producing research, rather than wandering the streets in mobs hassling strangers with bizarre esoteric rants and attempting to do real jobs. Of course nobody really likes academics; the wonderful thing about academia is that you can succeed in spite of having personality flaws which would otherwise render you unemployable.

One of the most important skills you learn in university is the ability to learn from a lecture course in spite of the incompetence/disinterest of the lecturer. If you happen to get a good lecturer it's a bonus, not a necessity. The payoff is that you get to learn from the people who are the world experts in their field. What is more useful, a tedious lecture given by someone who is an expert on the subject, or a really interesting lecture given by someone who doesn't know what they are talking about?

Oh, and don't be too dismissive of pure research for research's sake; if we only ever researched subjects with an obvious short term application most of modern physics, from quantum mechanics to basic electromagnetism and all the good stuff that comes from it, would not exist. I bet the same is true of other disciplines.