We need to be clear what, precisely, we're railing against. If it is the bureaucratic procedure and apparatus through which 'impact' is defined and evaluated, then I am 100% behind Michael and the comments that his essay inspired. I agree especially with his observation that:
...the real problem is the requirement to quantify what cannot necessarily be quantified, especially in the arts and humanities.
As usual, the entire system appears to have been designed around STEM disciplines. It is a relatively straightforward facts-and-figures exercise to determine if your new medicine cures cancer or not, if you have proven Fermat's last theorem or not, or how many of the type of bridge you designed have been built and how many of those fell down within ten years. But trying to determine what sort of effect your book on the ethics of film restoration has had on society at large is a different kettle of fish altogether, and the kinds of evidence we would tend to look to (have the ideas and arguments in it informed cultural life more generally, have they provoked debate, etc. etc.) are so inherently subjective that the bean counters would throw them out before you can say 'National Co-Ordinating Centre for Public Engagement'.
However, I do believe that the principle that academics are accountable to the society that pays their wages (be that the taxpayer, the student fee-payer, the private sector business who buys their professional expertise on an ad hoc basis, or, as in my case, all three) is a valid and important one. Furthermore, I'll stick my neck out and opine that as a discipline, we have to some extent lost sight of that collectively. I'm sure we've all been in a social situation with people outside our profession who, before we revealed our occupation, opined that 'We need to keep the science and engineering departments ... but we can close down all this media studies crap rightaway - it's a waste of money and the students will just end up flipping burgers at McDonald's'. It happens to me all the time. We do need to start to understand why the formal study of contemporary popular culture in general, and of cinema and broadcast media in particular, is so widely perceived among the general public as being intellectually shallow, a drain on the economy and equipping students with irrelevent and unnecessary skills. Simply rejecting the idea that we are under any obligation to justify what we do - and especially if we do so with reference to the work of scholars that is so abstract and advanced that only other academics can really engage with it, e.g. Adorno and Durkheim - is just going to make the problem worse, not better.
For some reason, no-one is seriously suggesting that English literature departments be closed down because very few of their graduates end up making a living writing novels, or that music departments be closed down because hardly any of their graduates end up conducting Bruckner at the Festival Hall. But the 'we need plumbers, not film directors' assertion is regularly trotted out, largely unchallenged, from both ends of the political spectrum (as Michael's essay suggests, it is a view held as much by Mirror readers as those of the Mail). This situation needs to be addressed, and urgently.