Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals

That is an honest and good question. I won't say I am such a person, but perhaps I can shed some light.

Academia is an elite, powerful, and privileged institution. Of course it is not a monolithic institution, but a conglomeration of many individual institutions that share a common culture. Any cultural entity like this is going to attract deserved and undeserved criticism.

Any powerful cultural institution like this will fall into corruption (literally rotteness), again like every other big cultural institution. This is a charge that has been leveled against academia since universities first arose in the late middle ages. The chancellor of my university at my time went to prison for misappropriation of funds. Currently (and for years now) my alma mater (a public university) spends some amount of its resources on what some people might consider frivilous make-work (i.e. unneccesary jobs creation) while raising tuition as part of the general runaway education inflation, which is far higher that the core inflation rate. (No citation. I'll trust most readers will grant this asseertion.)

As part of the culture, academia is strongly associated with some political trends, and the status quo, and strongly opposed to others. Of course not everyone is going to like that fit.

At the highest levels elite academia is strongly associated with elite government, media, business, etc.

Professors are generally people who like to talk and tell stories. This rubs some people the wrong way, and not all professors are as smart and as good story tellers as Feynman, for instance.

Just some of the things that might trigger some people.

Probably because of the growing student debt problem (which is spilling over into the rest of society and will probably be a factor in the next economic crisis), the tendency of some employers to demand college degrees for jobs that simply do not require them, and the feeling by many hackers who did not go to college that they are not receiving the respect people with their skills deserve (this may be a justified feeling).

Interesting that you mention farmers crops. Should crops produce with government subsidies also be publicly available for free?

Suicide, quite simply.

They should be available cheaper than if they weren’t subsidized, proportional to the degree of subsidy. Which is usually the point of subsidizing something’s production.

Whereas basic science is almost entirely tax funded, making a pretty good case for it being a public resource.