I’m sceptical of your decision to treat tenured and non-tenured faculty alike. As tenured faculty, this has long seemed to me to be perhaps the most important distinction.
More generally, what you write here is not very consistent with my own experience of academia (which is in mathematics and in Europe, though I have friends and collaborators in other countries and fields, so I am not totally clueless about how things work there).
Some points I am not seeing in your post are:
For many academics, being able to do their own research and work with brilliant students is their primary motivation. Grants etc are mainly valuable in how they facilitate that. This makes for a confusing situation where ‘losers’ in the original LCS model do the minimum work necessary for their paycheck, whereas ‘losers’ in the academic system (as you seem to be defining them?) do the maximum work that is compatible with their health and personal situation. Not only is this conceptually confusing to me, it also means that all other things being equal, the more `losers’ one is in academia the more impressive one’s CV will tend to be. Which is I think the opposite of the situation in the conventional LCS hierarchy?
The fact that I ‘perform peer review for nothing at all’ apparently makes me clueless. But this is weird; it does not go on my CV, and I do it because I think it is important to the advancement of science. Surely this makes it a `loser’ activity?
Acceptance of papers and awarding of grants is decided by people external to your university. This makes a huge difference, and I think you miss it by writing `So we might analyze this system at the department level, at the university level, or at the all-academia level, but it doesn’t make much of a difference.’.
Perhaps the above makes it sound as if I view academia as an organisational utopia; this is far from the case! But I do not think this post does a good job of identifying problems. I think a post analysing moral mazes in academia would be interesting, but I’m not convinced that the LCS hierarchy is an appropriate model, and this attempt to apply it does not seem to me to make useful category distinctions.
I’m sceptical of your decision to treat tenured and non-tenured faculty alike. As tenured faculty, this has long seemed to me to be perhaps the most important distinction.
More generally, what you write here is not very consistent with my own experience of academia (which is in mathematics and in Europe, though I have friends and collaborators in other countries and fields, so I am not totally clueless about how things work there).
Some points I am not seeing in your post are:
For many academics, being able to do their own research and work with brilliant students is their primary motivation. Grants etc are mainly valuable in how they facilitate that. This makes for a confusing situation where ‘losers’ in the original LCS model do the minimum work necessary for their paycheck, whereas ‘losers’ in the academic system (as you seem to be defining them?) do the maximum work that is compatible with their health and personal situation. Not only is this conceptually confusing to me, it also means that all other things being equal, the more `losers’ one is in academia the more impressive one’s CV will tend to be. Which is I think the opposite of the situation in the conventional LCS hierarchy?
The fact that I ‘perform peer review for nothing at all’ apparently makes me clueless. But this is weird; it does not go on my CV, and I do it because I think it is important to the advancement of science. Surely this makes it a `loser’ activity?
Acceptance of papers and awarding of grants is decided by people external to your university. This makes a huge difference, and I think you miss it by writing `So we might analyze this system at the department level, at the university level, or at the all-academia level, but it doesn’t make much of a difference.’.
Perhaps the above makes it sound as if I view academia as an organisational utopia; this is far from the case! But I do not think this post does a good job of identifying problems. I think a post analysing moral mazes in academia would be interesting, but I’m not convinced that the LCS hierarchy is an appropriate model, and this attempt to apply it does not seem to me to make useful category distinctions.