The stakes are pretty large now. You are judged on the number of publications, positions, citations, etc.

It’s not even about philosophical disagreement as much as future career

I've heard that some universities set aside $5-10 million whenever they grant someone tenure. It's a fiscally prudent accounting measure. And it's also a measure of how valuable the contract can be. (Of course one still needs to do some work soooo....)

I wonder if that's the amount to endow a chair or something, because $5m is well within the "never work again" FIRE amount - but perhaps a tenured professor not only has his salary, but that of his assistants, etc.

Goodhart's Law strikes again.

Corporate KPI-chasing culture ruins everything. “Publish or perish” has hit such an extreme level.

I imagine most academics would gladly not participate in this game if their entire livelihood didn’t depend on it

Institutional design needs legibility to track people's reputation at scale. The problem is that these metrics are often poor substitutes.

The difficulty is that nobody knows how to. My guess is that if you want good signaling, you'll need to find something that is difficult to fake. My guess are evolving benchmarks that measure many things in multiple dimensions, but benchmarks were easily gamed.

You can have it without benchmarks that can be gamed, but then it's basically down to "this feels right" and you have to trust the leadership to not be discriminatory, etc.

I think an awful lot of people would rather receive their livelihood without being subject to measurement.

How should they be judged then? Any metric can be gamed. And if it will be kind of qualitative assessment then politics will be 10000x more important. The system is clearly broken but I’m not sure if alternative is not even worse.