> What society wants from Academia isn't something you can grind for. Ground breaking research and great education isn't something that comes from working 80 hours a week (most of the time).
I once read a theory, I think it was in the book "At Home: A Short History of Private Life" by Bill Bryson, based on an observation (the accuracy of which I can't confirm or deny, some of the things in the book stretched credulity) that a surprising number of inventions in England were made by rural clergymen. The theory went that these people were usually the well-educated sons of wealthy families, who were parked in some small village that needed a priest, where they had almost no responsibilities apart from occasionally holding mass (they didn't really need to prepare sermons themselves, they could just buy a big book of sermons every now and then and read from that). So they lived lives of leisure and relative luxury, and some of them took an interest in science and technology and actually advanced the fields they got interested in.
The core idea behind academia is probably based on a similar observation: there's a small set of people who will do amazing things if you just let them figure things out without setting goals for them or applying pressure on them to produce something specific, so let's just give these people a decent wage and leave them to their business. But identifying who is a good candidate for such an arrangement isn't easy. In the days of the rural clergymen, this was essentially left to chance (after a basic intelligence filter of having to study to enter the clergy). We don't want to leave it to chance, so we set all kinds of goals and metrics to identify good candidates. But these metrics can be gamed, and for some academics gaming the metrics essentially is their job.
I once read a theory, I think it was in the book "At Home: A Short History of Private Life" by Bill Bryson, based on an observation (the accuracy of which I can't confirm or deny, some of the things in the book stretched credulity) that a surprising number of inventions in England were made by rural clergymen. The theory went that these people were usually the well-educated sons of wealthy families, who were parked in some small village that needed a priest, where they had almost no responsibilities apart from occasionally holding mass (they didn't really need to prepare sermons themselves, they could just buy a big book of sermons every now and then and read from that). So they lived lives of leisure and relative luxury, and some of them took an interest in science and technology and actually advanced the fields they got interested in.
The core idea behind academia is probably based on a similar observation: there's a small set of people who will do amazing things if you just let them figure things out without setting goals for them or applying pressure on them to produce something specific, so let's just give these people a decent wage and leave them to their business. But identifying who is a good candidate for such an arrangement isn't easy. In the days of the rural clergymen, this was essentially left to chance (after a basic intelligence filter of having to study to enter the clergy). We don't want to leave it to chance, so we set all kinds of goals and metrics to identify good candidates. But these metrics can be gamed, and for some academics gaming the metrics essentially is their job.