[WS:} This is true, but the Bourdieu in me wants to add a qualification - it depends on the discipline. It is true not because this is is an inherent attribute of college education, but because certain disciplines favor it, and these disciplines happen to dominate college education at the moment. I suspect that if, say, liberal sciences dominated college education that argument would not necessarily hold.
Another reason is the quality of academic writing per se. A lot of literature that does not go with the analytical/systematic drift is written in extremely dense and difficult to parse prose that few bother to digest. case in point, someone on this list (shag?) recommended a book "Inside the Mouse" - which "deconstructed" Disney World. Had it not been for the recommendation I would have stopped reading at page 10, but I suffered through over 100 pages of dense, difficult to parse pomo jargon before reading a short piece by a pedestrian labor economists describing in plain English horrible working conditions in Disneyworld. One chapter in the whole book!
Contrast that with the prose of JK Galbraith who does not waste an opportunity to take shots at the conventional economic wisdom, yet his prose while addressing highly technical subjects is nonetheless crystal clear and easy to understand by anyone with an average level of competence in the English language. If everyone could write like Galbraith, I am reasonably sure that the influence of alternative modes of thought on both academic instruction and public discourse would visibly improve.
Wojtek