I'm slightly confused about the Academy (Heros) and Academy Embassy mechanics.

1. Prior to building the Academy Embassy and after discoverying the Academy and it's associated system (which at that point was owned by another empire), I found that I could not interact with the Academy because I was not the "owner" (according to the pop-up tooltip).

2. Ok, fine, so I need to build the Academy Embassy then, right?  Well, I built the Academy Embassy, and still cannot interact with the Academy, tooltip still says I am not the owner.

Could someone please explain how this is supposed to work?  Can you only interact with the Academy if you are the owner?  Or if you are the owner *and* have the Academy Embassy?  (if so, then is there any point to build the Embassy if you do not own the Academy?)

Any help explaining the overall Academy mechanics would be greatly appreciated!

Ok thanks for the clarifications, it makes sense now.  By "interact with", I meant either view or recruit the current heroes from the academy.  I could see that there is a button in the UI for accessing the academy, but it wasn't quite clear to me how to activate it.  Initially I thought that maybe that was achieved by building the academy embassy, but (obviously) I found that was not the case.

First game today with Sophons where Academy was just 2 clicks away from my starting system. Suppose there is no way currently to reshape the destroyed planet and colonize it?