It doesn't have to be a conspiracy. People in academia, especially high income professors, are part of the establishment themselves. They have no own incentive to research and talk more about Bitcoin.

It kind of always happens to new projects and specific projects. In the first years of smartphones becoming mainstream academia was slow to catch on. They were afraid of wasting time on something before they new for sure that it wouldn't be a short lived fashion that could be part of the wider "Embedded Systems" umbrella. They also didn't want to have an "iPhone-lecture" or study only iPhones....