I think you may be confusing vague with unclear... The inclarity, and multiple verticals seems more like an example of Goodhart's law than anything else. Summ

I think you may be confusing vague with unclear... The inclarity, and multiple verticals seems more like an example of Goodhart's law than anything else. Summarized, the goal of academia is and (for most of time in whatever form it took) is to produce and disseminate new knowledge for human society. Creating new knowledge is what we now call research. Publishing papers isn't a raison d'etre...it's a metric for that. I'll note that Ernest Boyer is far more articulate on this than I am...