Historically lots of academics were sponsored by the nobility, right? Say what you will about Taco Bell, I’ll take their sponsorship over a bunch of pretentious thugs and hereditary gangsters.
Consider: the 1954 coup in Guatemala, the Coca-Cola death squads, Nestle's reliance on slave labor for cocoa (through a scheme of indirection that is common among other companies), etc.
There's plenty of thuggery in the dealings of megacorps, and plenty of pretension in the sponsorship of a professorship by such a corporation
Not an especially precise or traditional equality.
Most, but not all, noble and titled aristocracy had a landowner in the family, young aristocrats with older siblings would rarely inherit the land titles.
On the flip, relatively few of the landowners were part of the nobility. Many of the grand landowners were, of course, but certainly once the merchant class started earning serious coin and commissioning all the best gardens on large estate they purchased from poor nobles, well, that relationship started to fall away.
The English aristocracy might have disagreed 1000 years ago, but nobody cares what they thought because the French (Normans, mostly) would shortly prune those noble family trees quite aggressively.
