[bluenose69]

I've never known an administrator who had even the faintest clue what science was all about, let alone what previous was 'good' or what projects would have 'real world effect'. If they had insights on such things, they would likely be working in science, not administration.

Indeed the mess we are in is because of administrators who think organizing academics is like organizing work on an assembly line. They find something quantifiable and insist on more of that. Papers are quantifiable, so they go for that. To try to get at quality, they count citations. Always it's counting, and I'm not sure if that's by analogy to the assembly or because the administrators are challenged to do much more than count.