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on the question of who owns taxpayer money: i dont know if you ever read thoreau's "on civil dosobedience" or not--but one of the arguments run out there--which still holds--is that no single person or abstract double of a person can know where exactly their particular monies go once they are paid into the tax system--so ownership arguments, like thoreau's anti-war arguments, that rely on such claims as their point of departure are moot.
public universities have boards of trustees who already operate in your representative function--the extent to which they are informed about what goes on within the normal processes of production that comprise what the university actually does is more often than not laughable--unless it happens that a particular trustee has a particular interest in a given field, in which case the situation becomes variable. but in the main, it would seem to me that creating another layer of mechanisms for "accountability" is redundant.
since tenure decisions have to pass through a whole series of administrative hoops to be finalized, up to the provost, who operates as a kind of intermediary between the university as administrative entity and a fiscal entity (and so is accountable to and interacts with the financial oversight of the university, which includes the trustees) they are already subject to the kind of review you call for.
why is it necessarily a problem if an academic makes statements that provoke or offend anyway? if there are not problems with the sources material, and no problems with the logic according to which they are assembled, then where would the problem lay? and if there is one, again, how does your "accountability" argument not amount to a rationalization for censorship? again, there are already numerous professional organizations that do (in principle at least) monitoring operations, that outline and enforce academic (NOT political) standards...how would what you are talking about not be redundant again at this level?
and who would mointor the monitors? how would you assure, for example, that a conservative ideologue (to keep with this--it could come from elsewhere just as easily--but the argument is itself a conservative bugbear, so) does not make statements that try to impugn the academic rigor of a given piece because he or she does not like its conclusions?
as for the question of why an academic gig is not like a corporate one: you can figure this out.l start with the lack of profit. move from there. this is not rocket science. the inverse--the attempt to crunch these types of work into each other, seems either uninformed or disengenuous to me (here i refer to the argument--which you did not invent, lebell--rather than to you personally)...
if somehow this question remains a mystery, i would be happy to write more about it once i have a bit more time to devote to the matter. (there are other issues you raise in your post as well that i glossed over for the same lack of time reasons)
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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