I will concede to you that I was too general in my comment. As an academic myself (with nearly a decade on the senior circles of higher education in a highly developed country), I absolutely agree with you that the main goal of academic work is the pursuit of knowledge. To be honest, I wanted to use the term "academic issue" more as a way to express that the issue is disconnected from the more practical issues of the real world, rather than to mean only the formal, academic world. I was inaccurate in that. You can pursue academic interests and discuss academic issues outside of the university; I think of it as an interchangeable term with "philosophical", for example.
I also agree with you that these issues happen outside of academia. It just so happens that I perceive this specific problem as being academic. The fact that I argue that this is an academic problem does not imply that this only happens in academia (one example does not necessarily generalize to the whole).
And yes, obviously, running towards extremes is not confined to academia; however, my point was that it is more-or-less ok to do it in academic work as long as you do not try to force your extreme views back down to the rest of society (which most academics don't, or if they do, fail). Actually, I'd argue that there is no better way to do it. Research often means pushing things to extreme, and most of its results die gracefully and are replaced with something else that is more reasonable for the current times (or simply gets forgotten). Don't take this wrong, as if I believe that research is useless. In the same way that a startup dies (and must die) if it cannot offer a feasible, interesting, useful product, research also dies (and must die) if its results make sense but are not applicable. No problem there.
The problem begins when the academic issues (whether they are discussed in the university or not) which are being pushed to the extreme in order to test the waters are then being pushed down society's throat aggressively like this, without regards to whoever they trample over on the way. These academic issues are being forcefully, steadily introduced into public and private institutions that have a very real, concrete power over how many people act, behave, work, and communicate. These are (in one way or another) governing agencies that, while they are not the police so to speak, still have under their belt lots of different means and tools to enforce certain things over large groups of people. This is extremely irresponsible of those who think of themselves as drivers in this movement.