Why Academia Feels Like a Factory

Academia often rewards routine over originality, producing work without real impact. To fix it, we need risk, ownership, and a return to meaningful, skin-in-the-game work.

There’s a kind of trade no one talks about — the kind you make without realizing it. You give up your authenticity, your internal compass, your curiosity — and in return you get to belong. That’s the real check most people cash when they step into academic life. Not the salary. The trade of soul for safety.

What you notice first isn’t laziness. It’s something subtler. A kind of quiet mediocrity. People doing just enough. Submitting papers just before the deadline. Writing in a voice that’s neither theirs nor anyone’s. Measuring output in units that have nothing to do with reality. No one’s cheating, exactly. They’re just not doing anything real.

It starts to feel less like a community of thinkers and more like a factory. Not one that builds anything, but one that’s still running anyway — grinding out paperwork, grant proposals, citations. You could almost admire the machinery, if only it produced something you’d want to use.

The Productivity Illusion

There’s a trick built into the way universities work. It looks like people are busy. There are conferences, seminars, publishing deadlines, office hours. The calendar is full. But when you actually look for insight — ideas that cut through fog, experiments that matter, even questions that feel alive — they’re rare.

Most people are just mimicking the forms of productivity. Writing papers that read like slightly reshuffled versions of the last one. Conducting studies designed to confirm what’s already assumed. Teaching students not how to think, but how to comply.

It’s not that they don’t care. Some of them care a lot. But they’ve internalized a way of working that rewards the wrong things. Don’t get in trouble. Hit your metrics. Stay inside your lane. And if you’re ever tempted to step outside it, remember: the tenure committee doesn’t like surprises.

Assembly Line Thinking

If you grow up inside this system, you start to think this is what doing work looks like. Show up. Follow the protocol. Meet the requirement. You stop asking why the system exists in the first place. That’s what happens when you mistake the structure of work for the substance of it.

It’s the intellectual version of an assembly line. You’re handed a small, defined task — a sliver of a subfield inside a niche domain. You’re told to do your part, publish your paper, and pass it along. No one’s allowed to touch the whole machine. No one even asks if it should exist.

Worse: this mindset spreads. New students mimic what they see. They learn fast that doing more than expected — or doing something different — rarely pays off. It’s safer to write like everyone else, think like everyone else, act like everyone else. It’s not just conformity. It’s fear disguised as professionalism.

What Academia Forgot

The tragedy of this system isn’t just that it produces low-quality work. It’s that it takes in smart, curious people and teaches them to be timid. Somewhere between orientation and tenure review, people stop asking questions like “Is this interesting?” or “Is this true?” and start asking, “Will this get published?”

But ideas don’t work like that. You can’t schedule breakthroughs. You can’t engineer originality inside a bureaucracy designed to avoid risk. What you get instead is safety — the kind that dulls your thinking.

It wasn’t always this way. Some of the best academic work came from people who ignored the official incentives. They worked on what they cared about, even if no one else understood it yet. But that kind of courage is rare — and getting rarer — in a system that penalizes deviation.

If you want to see the contrast, talk to someone who’s worked in industry. Not at a bloated corporation, but a startup, or a company that actually ships things. They tend to think differently. Not just faster, but clearer. They’ve had to make decisions under pressure. They’ve had to solve real problems. And most importantly, they’ve had to answer to users — not committees.

In the best cases, the industry forces clarity. You can’t bluff your way through a product launch. You can’t write your way out of a broken system. And if your ideas don’t work, someone tells you. Usually fast, and usually loud. That’s painful — but it also means you learn.

What Real Work Feels Like

When people have skin in the game — when their reputation, or company, or paycheck depends on the quality of their ideas — their standards go up. They write differently. They think differently. They stop doing what looks productive and start doing what is productive.

That’s what academia needs. Not just more funding or better rankings. It needs contact with reality. It needs to stop being insulated. And it needs to attract people who aren’t afraid to work without a script.

The best students — the ones who might’ve done something bold — are often the first to leave. They look around and realize the reward for originality is an extra year on a postdoc. That’s not just bad for them. It’s bad for all of us. Because the whole point of institutions like universities is to support the kind of thinking that can’t happen anywhere else.

But that only works if the system is willing to change. And right now, it’s still running the factory.

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Conclusion: Making Real Things

You can tell when someone’s doing real work. There’s a kind of energy to it. It’s messy and nonlinear and often unpopular. But it matters. And once you’ve tasted that kind of work — the kind where what you’re building could actually fail, but might also matter — it’s hard to go back.

If academia wants to be useful again, it has to stop mimicking productivity and start building systems that reward it. It needs fewer policies and more builders. Fewer metrics, more skin in the game. And above all, it needs to remember what real work feels like — and how much it matters to protect it.

Because once a place loses the habit of doing real work, it takes a long time to get it back.