What is your definition of "academic research"? Not all research is academic, so take a moment to think about what that means for you. I'll give you what I thin

What is your definition of "academic research"? Not all research is academic, so take a moment to think about what that means for you. I'll give you what I think it is in the next paragraph. 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 completely agree. Many universities are majority funded by the US federal government. The proportion of money a university receives from federal student aid and federal research grants is wild, even for a state-run public university. Without those funds, the people currently employed at a university will lose their jobs, so a university will attempt to work with those funding sources as much as possible. How do universities increase incoming federal student aid dollars? Enroll more students. How do universities increase incoming federal research grant dollars? Submit more grants. Though their phrasing is different, these two goals are what drive the modern university administrator. Let's set aside the student enrollment situation and just focus on the grants. Federal research grants come from major federal entities, such as the DHHS, NSF, DoE, DoD, and others. When a professor receives a grant, the university take a sizable cut of the grant. Some here have said that R1 institutions take 70%, and that seems reasonable to me. So, for every grant that a professor receives, the university receives money. As such, universities select for professors who can write grants and get them. Federal grants are often focused on big problems, and these big problems require lots of technical resources, interdisciplinary collaboration, and personnel. These problems aren't unimportant, but they aren't "game-changing" concepts; by applying for a competitive federal grant, everyone is playing the game. One important note about grants is, they typically require regular updates on results and a flow of publications. So, you have a situation where universities tend to select for professors with grant-seeking behavior, and those professors ensure the universities receive grant dollars. If a professor is sitting around playing with ideas which might become game-changing philosophy and mathematics, they probably aren't publishing papers, which means they probably haven't received a grant, which means the university isn't getting grant dollars from that professor. As a result, in the eyes of the university, professors who publish more are better, and professors who publish less are worse. I don't want discredit the professors who do very good work on grant dollars. It's just becoming more apparent that the current organizational structures of the modern research university is breaking down. For example, though I don't personally agree with doctoral students forming unions, I understand why they're doing it: professors try to maximize doctoral student output by paying them a pittance. As I said in other comments, 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, (2) universities immediately pay the existing doctoral students better, and (3) universities explicitly select for doctoral students interested in an academic career. Of course, this approach has financial risk for the university, so the political cost of implementation may be too steep for some. However, it should, in time, naturally fix the problem.