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The obvious answer would be to cut 90% of it and only keep the high quality stuff, but the entire problem is that there's no reasonable metric to measure how impactful research actually is without waiting 200 years. And all the ones that people have hacked together are gamed so the useless stuff is actually on top rather than on the bottom.
Going for economic value isn't the worst you could do really. Universities went to shit when States figured out they were important and tried to keep them afloat with free money. What really needs to happen is that universities have skin in the game again and actually have to maintain relevance instead of coasting on their established reputation. Only the fear of death can push institutions to shrink instead of grow. And sometimes not even that.
Disagree. You can't precisely measure quality, but smart generalists can separate bad articles like "How Young People Portrayed Their Experiences in Therapeutic Residential Care in Portugal: A Mixed Methods Study" and "Missandei deserves better": A case study on loving Blackness through critical fan fiction" from the kinds of humanities academic work you might want published. One can tell the difference between 'this might be valuable' and 'this definitely isn't'. The problem is the people funding this stuff aren't doing that.
You can't do this at scale because power can't be destroyed.
The day you pick someone to do this is the day that person goes on the road to the corruption that led us here.
Academia was once run by people who were good at detecting bullshit. And then people got free money for producing garbage that follows the theme set by the State.
Remove the free money and stop using the results of academia to prop up the running class. No less than that will fix it.
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