I have a hunch that I can't confirm so I want opinions and insights on it.
First some relevant facts:
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Philosophy has been separated from science. Nowadays, the era of physicists and mathematicians being also philosophers at the same time has ended and the modern average STEM student has hardly been taught any philosophy. In fact, some famous modern physicists have very poor opinion of philosophy.
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The 20th century streak of breakthroughs in science, especially physics and engineering, has ended, and relatively little (in comparison) has come from some the 21st century's major research paths such as the search for dark matter/energy or for a theory of quantum gravity.
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The time during which the first two facts of the list transitioned to their modern state, the 20th century, was a time during which the capitalist order was shaken and afraid, while socialist theories and philosophy was getting verified and confirmed to be correct in the real world.
My hypothesis is therefore the following:
As socialism's successes were starting to seriously challenge the bourgeois theories of capitalism, bourgeois academics started to see science graduates practicing and engaging with philosophy, particularly economics graduates, as a threat.
But they couldn't tell economics students and no others that they didn't need philosophy, not only would that look suspicious but the intersections between economics and other sciences would have come back around to bite them eventually.
So they took the decision to convince all science graduates that they didn't need philosophy, that it didn't matter if their hypothesis aren't grounded in reality as long as the math gives the right answer.
Capitalist academia essentially condemned philosophy to only be studied by language and/or art academics and actively started to paint philosophy as being separated from science.
What do you all think?
It has made it worse but the mechanisms are different. Science and engineering under capitalism has had a few major thrusts over the last century:
Capital itself doing the research to create products that require less labor and therefore temporarily increase their own mass of profit. Industrial capitalism's marriage to applied research.
Universities and independent consortia providing a link to academia that does similar work, often funded by industry, but doing basic research. The premise being that some tech doesn't come from myopic applied researcg, it comes from 1 in 50 basic research ideas and they want in on the ground floor. This also creates a researcher worker subclass that can transition to industry, preferably the company that funded them.
The state became more involved as part of an anticommunist push. It pumped much greater amounts of capital into centralized, coordinated work than industrial capitalists could ever muster.
Imperialism depemds on technological advantage, so there is coordination between capital and the state there.
Philosophy was not a driving force for any of this. Capital is front and center. Capital has no interest in anticapitalist thought, including some aspects of philosophy, aside from sometimes producing propaganda against it when it looks a little threatening. Without piles of cash, the study of philosophy is left in the margins. The cash drives who gets attention, including by faculty and administrators.
Even the small number of lefty academics was too scary for the feds so they did several red scares and purged them. In that vacuum you get a liberal shift.
Finally, the CIA used cutouts to fund and promote anticommunist thought of various kinds through academics and journalists. They don't need to convince the academics to be anticommunist, they just need to ensure anticommunist academics have an easy time becoming influential.
During all of this, liberalism became increasingly hegemonic in these circles and even outside of them. Most academics participate in this project without even knowing it. It just seems natural to them to study their field and follow the money that lets them do things in it. Rarely do they actually have sufficiently independent thought that they receive ire from funders, but they are always aware of what gets them money and what doesn't.
Finally, much of social sciences was sanitized during the red scare. Many fields have Marxist concepts, they just don't get recognized as such, they are robbed of their revolutionary character. So academics will study a topic and succeed in it but have wrong ideas about how it works, as you do not need to actually understand the philosophy of your field to engage in the heuristics of research methodology and oiblish results.