The Salem witch trials.
McCarthyism
And "Universities" are the mouthpieces of corporations? The people keep electing politicians who are anti-worker-protection laws. They're purposely choosing corporation-owner-friendly legislators. This is not the fault of universities.
Of course it's a complicated issue, but it's not my University friends doing public outreach for kids that's to blame for not doing enough. It's the authoritarian public school system, it's that we allow people to be shitty parents and pass on generational trauma/poverty, it's that the foundational mythos is you can do everything yourself (even though 99.999% of people don't live somewhere nor have the skills to be self-sufficient) because the government and rich owners like keeping people divided.
We all become 'the public' in some context.
Were the witch trials really a problem of the public? The church and judicial authorities monopolized the knowledge of the Bible and used it as a tool to maintain ruling order. Couldn't there be a perspective that sees it the other way around, that the elites used the public as a tool instead? When you study medieval European history, education was handled by the church. The authority to identify 'witches' ultimately rested with the church, and that actually makes me think that the public was the educated one.
Regarding the Scopes Trial, frankly, I don't know much about it. So I can't offer a lengthy rebuttal. I can't casually criticize something I don't know about.
But I think your comment shows how the problem of stratification that we're thinking about actually applies