Exactly it's often just slightly less explicit, emphasis on slightly.

Academia is toxic because again it is being measured. If a university cannot determine the quality of faculty other than counting publications and impact factors, the university itself is seriously lacking quality, alas there is a plague of it.

I wonder if it is directly related to the bloom/infestation of university administration sizes and top salaries.

I'm of the opinion that a university ought to be something like what you'd think a temple to discovery and knowledge ought to be, instead of a mill for producing credentials for students and a shitty game for faculty advancement.

if I had a billion dollars... (to the tune of the Barenaked Ladies)

It's always been this way to some degree. Every now and again a messiah comes along that illuminates and exposes a new way of thinking, and academia goes through a revolution. Then the weaker minds establish boundaries based on the teachings of their fearless leader, the leader dies, and academia settles back into it's natural state of dogmatic adherence to ideas it understands but can't expand upon.

There will be another Einstein. There will be another Darwin. And they will change everything. It is only a matter of time.

But I doubt they will come from China. While many a genius may be born in China, they may as well have been born on Mars because it is not a country that rewards exceptionalism and original thinking.

Also... I'm still trying to imagine what Dijon Ketchup would taste like.

Universities themselves are chasing university rankings, which count publications and impact factors. Does a 17 year old kid or their parents know how to judge a universities quality? No, they use prestige (rankings).

Nobody has time to read everyone's papers, or evaluate someone's knowledge thoroughly, so we fall back on things like degrees, impact factors or university prestige.

Once you realise academia is all about signalling - being able to quickly judge people - everything makes sense.

I agree that the incentives behind "publish or perish" are quite problematic. However, this does not seem equivalent to directly earning cold hard cash for each individual paper.

I don't see what's so magical about cold hard cash compared to other economic incentives that eventually translate to cash too.

In any Western university there's people fighting for tenure, which tends to hinge on publishing high-impact papers. This is an enormous economic incentive. The difference between getting tenure or having to leave academia and starting an industry career at a disadvantage can be measured in dollars, and it's large. In fact, even without measuring anything, I think it's quite clear that the overwhelming majority of people in this situation would take tenure over a $10K cheque. So it's disingenous to say that the Chinese incentivize publishing more because they pay cash.

If anything I find that the system of paying cash is more transparent, and it may be somewhat more balanced than others. For example, in Spain people fighting for tenure have a very large incentive for the reason mentioned above (and a PhD has zero or even negative value for most industry job offers here, so the value of the incentive is really huge). Youngish tenured professors have a not so large, but significant incentive (there are salary supplements one can get linked to journal publishing in 6-year periods. They are not too large -around €100/mo- but each one you get is for life, so for professors in their 30s we can be talking about more than 30K for publishing a few papers. This is pretty much cash for papers too, but no one bats an eye because we are Western, I guess). A full professor 5-10 years away from retirement has practically no incentive at all, by the time they can get another of these supplements they will be retired or almost retired so they won't get much, if anything. So it is quite common to see professors in this situation just not doing research at all. The distribution of incentives would be more uniform with cash.

To sum up, I think the outrage many people in the West express about Chinese universities paying for papers is pure hypocrisy. Either giving economic incentives to paper publishing is a good idea or it isn't. If it is, I don't see anything wrong with the incentive being cash, and if it isn't, we should probably criticise our own systems as much as the Chinese's.

Eventually, I think the criticism of the Chinese way boils down to prejudice. The whole mysticism about cash is an excuse to not say "incentivizing publication in the West is good because we are going to publish good papers, incentivizing publication in China is bad because they are dishonest and are going to churn out lots of crap if they are incentivized to publish".

I could be wrong, but I would have guessed we were onto the next phase by now, that could be labelled: "Brilli-ant rhymes with grant"

That tenure would come from earning grants. Now keeping the grant gravy-train running smoothly does require churning out papers, but it is not the papers themselves that would be so important.