It's difficult to make ranging generalizations about academia for the same reason it's difficult to make them about society at-large: massive variation of experience. Still, we can try.
A HN commenter once wisely stated: "Building things [in academia] is fine, but of course it's not academic research - which is defined by the creation of game-changing concepts and philosophical structures, some of which happen to be mathematical."
I agree. Academic research is not expensive. Today, most research performed in academic environments is about building things. Why? Federal grants (NSF, NIH, DoD, etc.) drive the vast majority of academic research efforts these days. The department with the most federal grant dollars pay their students the best, so you can easily have a history doctoral student getting a $20k/year stipend while a biomedical engineering doctoral student getting a $39k/year stipend. Most (not all) university research being performed today should be performed in structured, professional research institutions, not in academic research labs led by a professor.
A good deal of faculty dislike working on federal grants, but financial pressures from the university demand their participation in the system. This situation creates a feedback loop of frustration, narcissism, and negativity. Perhaps the federal government is exploiting the academic environment by using it as a source of cheap labor. Problem is, the output is often shoddy and takes way longer than it should. Similar to the hospital systems, there's little incentive to fix it from the inside because many people financially benefit from the broken paradigm.
If you're unfamiliar with the Dark Triad [1], it's a psychological theory of personality included three traits: Machiavellianism, sub-clinical narcissism, and sub-clinical psychopathy. I've been left with the impression that the modern academic environment naturally selects for Dark Triad personality traits.
A solution which should help fix the culture is: (1) universities significantly reduce their total number of incoming doctoral students for the next twenty years, and (2) universities immediately pay the existing doctoral students better. Of course, this approach has financial risk for the university, so the political cost of implementation may be too steep for some.
I was about to post something similar. A lot of the issues emerge from bad incentives. As the saying goes, "form follows finances", and once you understand the finances here, you can understand how it can go wrong.
In short, the funding agencies incentivize PIs to just get as much funding as possible and to assign the research to lowly paid students and postdocs. Students and postdocs largely have no funding of their own and are in a vulnerable position here. The PIs have little time to conduct research of their own since they have to spend a lot of their time writing grant applications, etc. PIs who can get the most funding are rewarded the most in this kind of system, since ultimately they are not conducting the research themselves and what matters in the short term is getting a lot of peer-reviewed papers published to appear productive (quantity over quality). It also leaves them with a lot of power over their subordinates, who depend on the PIs for almost everything and cannot readily disagree without jeopardizing their careers.
That said, in my experience, most PIs behave honorably and are decent people, but given the incentives I just discussed, the current system readily attracts PIs who are only good at getting a lot of funding (and not that good at research, experimental design, interpersonal relations, personnel management, developing a unique and narrowly-focused research program, etc.). I intend this criticism to be directed towards the system as a whole and not at any one individual. I think that if the system were different, even the problematic PIs would behave better.
Agreed. I know of a single academic faculty who leads engineering research efforts with 40+ research faculty, 4 dedicated administrative staff, and 200+ doctoral students. Most students rarely interact with the PI and are really advised by research faculty. This one lab houses close to half of the doctoral students in that department. Now, I've never talked to the PI, but I imagine he's a decent enough person.
I have a strong feeling that academic research will lose its way since financial incentives attract money-driven faculty and disincentivise the pursuit of fundamental, academic research questions.
On the other hand, you'll get poorly-baked fundamental ideas from the faculty, like the idea that Wikipedia is the best source of knowledge because social consensus is the best way to figure out the truth, an idea which is explicitly advocated by a tenured faculty member at a major university and is clearly false because people are capable of lying. Empirical validation of mathematical models is actually the best way.
A HN commenter once wisely stated: "Building things [in academia] is fine, but of course it's not academic research - which is defined by the creation of game-changing concepts and philosophical structures, some of which happen to be mathematical."
I agree. Academic research is not expensive. Today, most research performed in academic environments is about building things. Why? Federal grants (NSF, NIH, DoD, etc.) drive the vast majority of academic research efforts these days. The department with the most federal grant dollars pay their students the best, so you can easily have a history doctoral student getting a $20k/year stipend while a biomedical engineering doctoral student getting a $39k/year stipend. Most (not all) university research being performed today should be performed in structured, professional research institutions, not in academic research labs led by a professor.
A good deal of faculty dislike working on federal grants, but financial pressures from the university demand their participation in the system. This situation creates a feedback loop of frustration, narcissism, and negativity. Perhaps the federal government is exploiting the academic environment by using it as a source of cheap labor. Problem is, the output is often shoddy and takes way longer than it should. Similar to the hospital systems, there's little incentive to fix it from the inside because many people financially benefit from the broken paradigm.
If you're unfamiliar with the Dark Triad [1], it's a psychological theory of personality included three traits: Machiavellianism, sub-clinical narcissism, and sub-clinical psychopathy. I've been left with the impression that the modern academic environment naturally selects for Dark Triad personality traits.
A solution which should help fix the culture is: (1) universities significantly reduce their total number of incoming doctoral students for the next twenty years, and (2) universities immediately pay the existing doctoral students better. Of course, this approach has financial risk for the university, so the political cost of implementation may be too steep for some.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad