[joppy]

It seems to me, still, that a lot of these problems you bring up can be addressed by universities changing their hiring policies. Which makes sense: academics ultimately rely on universities for their income, and so it is the hiring policies which are setting the perverse incentives. And I don’t think changing hiring policies would be an incremental change, it would be a huge change (and not likely to be made by any university any time soon, since students rank universities on similar metrics to how universities hire staff — a prestigious university will lose prestige even if it changes its hiring policies for the better).

[meow1032]

> academics ultimately rely on universities for their income

Sort of, a huge portion of income is from grants, particularly after the first few years from being hired. More importantly, a huge portion of the University income is from grants. When a researcher recieves a grant, there is an "overhead" percentage that goes to the University. Universities hire, in part, to maximize those overheads, which means getting the researchers with the best chance at getting big grants.

Changing the hiring process may affect how PHD students act, but once they're "in the system", they are subject to all the same problematic incentives.

[tejtm]

> academics ultimately rely on universities for their income

In my decades at it (digital side of bioinformatics) the cash flow is in the other direction.