Concern with status can actually foster truth-seeking, and not just interfere with it. You can be the star who discovered something new, you can expose someone else's status as undeserved, and simply maintaining your own status (in a truth-seeking community) can motivate you to take extra care with what you say and do. The social emotions are not inevitably a source of noise and error.

(And by the way, your own comment is an intemperate denunciation. I hope that a little sober reflection would lead you to conclude that maybe modern academic philosophers do have a professional interest in truth after all, and that even if they are collectively doing it badly, your particular diagnosis is factually wrong.)