[jltsiren]

"In the exact same subfield" is the key point. The academia is small. If a topic has enough direct monetary value to justify substantial spending in it, the industry will usually do better work. Academic research works better in topics that don't have such monetary value, at least not yet.

The academia lacks consistency, but I wouldn't characterize it as toxic. Many individual labs and departments are toxic, but the academia as a whole isn't. The same freedom that lets individual PIs pursue their own directions in their own ways also lets many of them create toxic work environments. But curtailing the toxicity is difficult without sacrificing the freedom the academia depends on.

[nextos]

I don't agree curtailing toxicity would sacrifice freedom. The toxicity I was referring to translates into power abuse, bullying, data fabrication, and all the different kinds of misconduct that emerge in systems where there is no control, no filtering, and no skin in the game. Actually, I think freedom and creativity would flourish if academic misconduct was pursued more actively. I have worked at a few top departments, and academic misconduct led to extremely low efficiency and resource waste. Everyone was either fighting or demotivated. Huge multi-million projects didn't get anywhere. Some minimal guardrails are needed.

[jltsiren]

If you are a PhD student or a postdoc, you are probably working in a PI's lab and often funded from their grants. It's also common that nobody else at the university understands the project well enough to replace the PI as your supervisor. That creates incentives to avoid reporting abuse and to tolerate unhealthy levels of toxicity, as the likely alternatives are switching to a new lab (and delaying your career) or leaving the academia.

[nextos]

True, there are incentives to avoid reporting abuse. I think in cases where abuse is reported, universities tend to support abusers because they are the ones who bring in grant money. Furthermore, internal control systems are not independent, and they tend to be linked to senior faculty members, who are the ones usually breaching the academic code of conduct.

In many cases journals have retracted articles after evident image manipulation was discovered. University committees rarely take disciplinary action against fraudsters. In some prominent cases they have even issued statements of support. This is starting to change, albeit slowly. For example, Sweden now has a national integrity board that investigates those types of breaches, much more likely to be neutral as it is not closely linked to the investigated subjects.