“So, given your perspective, would it then be a fair assessment in saying that if it's not practiced in a university or in academic setting then it's not science?”
No. That would concede the meaning of science to the general usage or the usage currently most in power. A small discussion in the Socratic style is the most cogent, and a discussion can be not only with others but with ourselves. The status of the principle of the cogency, why some talk impresses one as making sense would come into question. On the whole, to ask this question, one does well to think through from the origin in the thinking of episteme with the first Greeks, but not only because of that origin in empirical terms.
The relationship between the understanding now in power, and what is most cogent to the most talented with respect to the question and its subject matter, is, in my view quite linked. So, in practice, I am almost tempted to say yes. This is at least so to the extent that while the fact / value distinction remains very powerful, it is flanked by very strong regimes of thought that threaten to overturn it (without achieving the necessary cogency, though, their failure to take over could, in theory, be explained by the violence of financial or power games as well).
“Who decides which views are "cogent" and which aren't?”
One could say empirically this is rather like the question why the works of Kafka about the year 1922 or so were considered so striking as to be worthy of translation into English though the English speaking public had not heard of him and had no demand that he be made readable for them. There seems to be an element in the cogency of works that is, so to say, independent of human beings as such, or better, of mere authority and power. The current view stems ultimately, in a large part, from Nietzsche's writing which he made when not an academic, but which were taken up by Simmel (probably the most cogent single proponent of the current regime of thought) and others, for instance.
“discoveries are NOT science.”
Science in the vernacular means experimental science. What science is as such is a philosophic (or Western) question about a law of what all things or objects or phenomena or beings are (and, in the Greek sense, always will be).
“So if one does not specialize in this discipline one cannot be a scientist? It must be a mandatory course in University then!”
It’s questionable though what the issue is here. My own view is that there are views concerning a law of things that are more cogent than others. And so the field is legitimate. In other words, on the standard that physicists build things that are part of daily life as are phones and trees, the fact / value distinction operates to separate lower and higher order questions. The total questioning of the distinction is possible, and very vigorously in existence, but as a scientist in the vernacular sense, such a discipline is useful in the sake of the limited goal of that (natural) science, which is scarcely limitable.
I am speaking from a human perspective of a person who is suffering a major identity crisis. The definitions are so ambiguous it's hard to determine whether one is a scientist, or a philosopher, or an expert, or a logician.
It's difficult to know which box to shove oneself into...
The vernacular meaning of science is co-extensive with the “hard sciences” and theoretically bounded by the idea of experiment and measurement of physical things. When one says, and this science of “facts” is the Science, one speaks dogmaticly. The dogmatism becomes clearer when one speaks of “nonsense”, and all that is not experimental science is nonsense.
From the ordinary point of view Science in the current understanding, since about 1900, is limited in this way to guild work, to handicraft, to making things. All theory is subordinated to the results and need not be true in itself. The practical result is the near worship of “facts” rather than possibilities or what should be and the discussion of why it should be.