At the top of the forum pages, you have some text thay may look like this:

Subtopic post | Global Warming | Forum

I keep trying to click these as a way to navigate the forum and realizing how useful it would be for them to be links.

You mean the page title. I guess I can see what you mean
The breadcrumbs are beneath it usually.

the page title is output by your wp theme though we can control the text in it…   we cant put links in there because it goes to html meta tags and browser title too...

if its bothersome, I would just remove it from your forum page template…  or you could change the seo options to remove components of it... but again would affect the other mentioned areas...