Here is just a brief excerpt from Why I am Not a Professor OR The Decline and Fall of the British University:
The more prosaic truth emerges when you scan the titles of these epics. First, the author rarely appears alone, sharing space with two or three others. Often the collaborators are Ph.D. students who are routinely doing most of the spade work on some low grant in the hope of climbing the greasy pole. Dividing the number of titles by the author's actual contribution probably reduces those hundred papers to twenty-five. Then looking at the titles themselves, you'll see that many of the titles bear a striking resemblance to each other. "Adaptive Mesh Analysis" reads one and "An Adaptive Algorithm for Mesh Analysis" reads another. Dividing the total remaining by the average number of repetitions halves the list again. Mozart disappears before your very eyes.
But the last criterion is often the hardest. Is the paper important? Is it something people will look back on and say 'That was a landmark'. Applying this last test requires historical hindsight - not an easy thing. But when it is applied, very often the list of one hundred papers disappears altogether. Placed under the heat of forensic investigation the list finally evaporates and what you are left with is the empty set.
And this, really, is not a great surprise, because landmark papers in any discipline are few and far between. Mozarts are rare and to be valued, but the counterfeit academic Mozarts are common and a contributory cause to global warming and deforestation. The whole enterprise of counting publications as a means to evaluating research excellence is pernicious and completely absurd. If a 12 year-old were to write 'I fink that Enid Blyton iz bettern than that Emily Bronte bint cos she has written loads more books' then one could reasonably excuse the spelling as reflective of the stupidity of the mind that produced the content. What we now have in academia is a situation where intelligent men and women prostitute themselves to an ideal which no intelligent person could believe. In short they are living a lie.
It was living a lie that finally put an end to my being a professor. One day in 1999 I got up and faced the mirror and acknowledged I could not do the job any more. I quit; and from the day I quit, though things were often tough, I never experienced the sense of waste and futility that accompanied working in a British university. By stroke of fate, I am living only a few hundred yards from the institution at which I worked. Sometimes when walking past I see the people I worked with and they look old. Living a lie does that to you.
It is bitter, bitter, bitter, but also revealing and thought-provoking....
[Hat-tip: Deepak over on FriendFeed]
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Perhaps this angst applies in lesser degrees in fields like astronomy, which often have clearer long term research goals and funding directed in large projects based on achieving them. I don't think there is much superficiality in astronomy: your theories know their place, and always must fit in somehow to a larger whole: there are very few opportunities for closed loops. It's easy for an interested student to see a path to mastery of the subject. Would you doubt there are not many incompetent graduates of astronomy?
I don't know computer science very well, but I wonder if its theories or goals are disunified, difficult to understand and measure or derive from physical and mathematical priniciples, and communicate to both students and researchers. If the subject is like that -- so disunified -- then it is the fault of computer scientists, not university administrators if students graduating have such an uneven grounding in their subject.
"don't think there is much superficiality in astronomy: your theories know their place, and always must fit in somehow to a larger whole: there are very few opportunities for closed loops."
Umm, dark matter theory, perhaps?
@Det: I suspect that Computer Science's problem lies not in its structure; but in the economics that surround it.
The situation in CS is roughly analogous to that of astronomy, back when astronomy was still largely a discipline concerned with navigation and astrology. There was the core of talented mathematical astronomers and serious observational experts; but a much larger demand for people with sufficient knowledge of sky and astrolabe to pilot a ship, and people who knew the star charts well enough to cast horoscopes and the like.
CS has its core, essentially a branch of applied mathematics treating the class of problems that computers can be built to attack; but it also has software engineering, concerned with the design and construction of real world systems, programming, the vocational skill of using computer languages to construct things and(depending on how wide the net has been cast) possibly a bunch of computer literacy stuff that ended up in the CS department because there wasn't anywhere else for it to go. Each of these aspects of CS is structurally sound; but they don't all fit in the same department all that neatly.
Under the pressures that the author describes, to graduate students in large numbers, with high marks, in an economically relevant manner, you see a strong pressure against the most difficult and technical courses, and in favor of the easier and more basic ones. This isn't a problem if it is just a matter of there being more java programmers than there are complexity theorists; but if complexity theory is wiped from the syllabus entirely, there is a problem.