Publish or Perish

When I was young (in the 1960's and early 1970's) the higher education establishment came under attack as a privileged good old boy network, if you knew the right people you got tenure on a college faculty and were set with a cushy job for life.  In part, it seemed to me, the attacks, while they had some merit, were largely driven by the political right who wanted to undermine the influence of the generally liberal leaning higher education faculties.

The solution that developed was to require professors to publish prolifically in their field of expertise to retain their position on the faculty.

Looking back on what has happened since it appears to this outside observer the solution was worse than the problem.   

It became apparent pretty early on that teaching suffered.  Now it is rare for a professor to actually teach a class, graduate students with little teaching experience do that so the professor can pursue their research.

But the bigger problem that has become more apparent as the years go by is that all fields of human study are being buried under mountains of research findings that are unreliable at best.

Major research studies have announced big breakthroughs with great fanfare, earning their authors tenure and riches, only to be unreproducible by any other lab.  A prominent recent example is that the (probably) billions of dollars that has been poured into thousands of MRI studies to try to understand the brain was probably largely wasted because of huge flaws and assumptions built into the software that found statistical effects where none existed.

The fundamental problem is publish or perish does not align motivation with the public interest.  If an individual has to publish to survive in their chosen field the need to publish eclipses the detached view that is necessary for effective research.   Publishing volumes of useless or misleading research findings forwards the individual interest but makes the search for knowledge vastly more complicated and difficult.