Specifically, have there been any recent efforts by the academic community to impart a simplification of English spelling and the English alphabet?
You know,
knife = nife
queen = cween
city = sity
phlegm = flem, etc…
Which letters could we eliminate entirely?
I guess you’d have to define what you mean by recent. Omniglot has a number of pages describing various alternative scripts. One such for English is the Deseret Alphabet, developed in the 1850s. More recently, some words have had their spelling simplified, at least in the United States. One such word seems to be kidnaper, which I learned to spell those oh so many long years ago in elementary school as kidnapper.
I think the academic community has passed the torch of setting the standards of language on to others. Nowadays newspaper editors and advertising copywriters are more likely than academics to be making the rules of what’s acceptable. If we start accepting “lite” and “tonite” as proper spelling it won’t be because academics said so.
I doubt very much things will change at all quickly (nor do I see any good reason why they should). I’m certain most people have no great desire to learn to spell all over again.
Wouldn’t it be kween and sittee?
Simplified spelling would lose some of the richness and history, as would simplified grammar.
It would permit the feeble-minded to lord it over the pedants–an intolerable comeuppance, particularly since pedants own the language. 
It would diminish the ability to use written language as a proxy for educational level or linguistic IQ.
There are some useful heterographic homophones that would get turned into homonyms.
In any case two linguists=three opinions so I think we are stuck.
I wil let yoo no if I chanje mie minde.
To be honest, I think people who push for simplified spelling are also pedants, just a different variety.
On the subject of pedants, have a look at this:
This has very little to do with the OP, but one word that particulary annoys me is “Queue”. Its got 5 letters and the last 4 do nothing !
So–four of the letters in “queue” are just waiting in a queue?
Melvil Dewey, of the Dewey decimal system, was part of the spelling reform movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was actually born “Melville” and would have preferred to be “Melvil Dui”. He was into the metric thing, too. And the mackin’ on the ladies thing.
You might start by looking at the Simplified Spelling Society.
It was started by academics and scholars in 1908, but I haven’t heard much from them recently.
Here’s one of their leaflets from their website:
http://www.spellingsociety.org/aboutsss/leaflets/ns90.php
That brings up one of the problems of simplified spelling. Some words get pronounced differently in different parts of the world, and while Mr Dewey doubtless pronounced his surname “Dui” most of us brought up outside the US pronounce it “Dyui”. So, in this reformed-spelling world, should “schedule” be written as “skedule” or “shedule”?
I was tickled by the spelling while reading The Journals of Louis and Clark. The book is a collection of accounts by various members of the party of their adventures - basically letters back to Jefferson on how they were faring and what they were learning/finding. Any given day might be told through the eyes of a number of the members. Each of them (with varying levels of education), have tremendous spelling incosistencies form one account to another, and even within their own writing. Turrible for terrible. Moskeeto for mosquito. Seems like spelling used to be less important, as long as you were getting your point across.
But that would be pronounced with a long A, kidnāper rather than kidnăpper. We may not have enough consistency in English spelling for some people but one fairly solid rule of thumb is that a vowel followed by a single consonant is long but if you double the consonant the vowel is short.
Plus, I’ve never seen kidnaper untill today, so it doesn’t seem to have caught on that much. 
Well, you know that reputation librarians have! Remember that scene in It’s a Wonderful Life where Clarence tells Never-Been-Born George what his wife is doing since she never married? On the director’s cut the scene goes:
GEORGE: Where is she?
CLARENCE: She’s just about to close up the library!
GEORGE: That WHORE!
Then there’s the scene where the strippers and prostitutes are being herded into a paddy wagon. Two versions were shot, one with just Violet Bick being pushed into the wagon and one with both her and Mary being arrested.
Drawbacks to “simplified spelling” include:
People would still have to understand the old spellings to be able to read the zillions of books, etc., that were printed before “spelling reform” took hold.
Some words are spelled the way they are because they were taken from other languages that spelled them that way. If the spellings were changed, they would no longer match their origins, which could be confusing for people familiar with the language they came from.
It would make reading harder and slower, at least until people got used to the new spelling. (When I see “knife” I instantly know what that cluster of letters denotes. When I see “nife” I have to stop and figure out what the heck that means.)
Enough people would think the “simplified” spelling looks stupid, and/or are perfectly happy with the way things are now (“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”), that there would be major resistance to change. (Speaking of resistance to change, look how hard it was to get the USA to go metric.)
They do indeed make interesting reading. But I believe the mail service west of, say, longitude 100 was not too reliable in those days.
It is an eye-opener to read in the beginning of Chomsky and Halle, Sound Patterns of English" that English spelling is by and large quite appropriate for English. They follow that with reasons. One reason is that words often change pronuncation when modified. Compare “finite” and “infinite”. English spelling is morphological rather than phonological. A real reform would make the whole of earlier literature inaccessible, for example.
Among other objections are that English has too many vowels (22-24 depending on dialect is what I have read; I have never tried to count them), so we would want to introduce a host of accents or something. Then there is a question of dialects. I would want the ends of “sad” and “bad” spelled differently, but I understand that they rhyme in most dialects. It just opens an ocean of difficulties. And would no longer work in a 100 years.
Arbitrarily simplifying a grammar is impossible, just as it would be to complicate it. While it’s true we could say, for example, that we’re going to abolish “whom”, and “make” everybody use “who” in all contexts, when we do so we already are already following syntactical rules that perform the same function that the “-m” ending used to.
Regarding the OP, one fairly prominent example of a spelling reformist in the late 19th and early 20th century was Melvil Dewey, who devised the Dewey Decimal Catalog for libraries. Some editions of the catalog in the 1920s were published using the reformed spelling.
Mr Dui has already been mentioned. I have copies of some of the editions of DDC with reformed spelling, including “Filosofy” on one page and “Philosofy” on another. So Mel couldn’t make his mind up, even within one word, about issues like replacing “ph” with “f”.
It was in fact Mel who first reformed the spelling of “player” to the simplified “playa”. So don’t be hating.
I can’t find a cite right now in a hurry, but I know I’ve read that at an ALA conference on a river cruise he tried his act on the wrong young librarian and she broke his arm.