I might go even further and suggest that a strong research culture implies not everything will be productive. I swear somewhere here or elsewhere I read a stor

I might go even further and suggest that a strong research culture implies not everything will be productive. I swear somewhere here or elsewhere I read a story that one of the major quantum computing contributions that accelerated the field was essentially the result of a faculty member spending several years doing nothing but teaching and thinking about the problem, with no grants or anything but salary. Maybe it's a myth or I'm misremembering it though; I've tried searching for it (to confirm or disconfirm my memory) with no luck because of the volumes of irrelevant results. Also, history is an interesting example, as it seems one of the first sets of experts everyone seemed to turn to with all the events of the last few years are historians. "What happened with previous pandemics?" "How did past pandemics effect economics of the time?" "What did people do then?" "Is this the first time this situation occurred?" So forth and so on. The more "unprecedented" the problem the further back in history people will look for precedents and guidance. It also seems implausible to me that the same sorts of history research could happen by hobbyists as happens at universities, just due to time and funding constraints. There's a lot of problems in academics at the moment, at least in the US, but I think 2/3 of it is actually coming from outside those in the field (pick your field). Administration problems, federal incentives, state incentives, private incentives (yes, corporate management requiring useless degrees or offloading employee training elsewhere to decrease investment costs and its consequences) etc etc etc