FormerPhysicist

I had a paid internship in college, many years ago, where I basically spent three months twiddling my thumbs waiting for a project, and when I finally got one, it was creating an MS Access database to count SLOCs. If they were that concerned with productivity, perhaps they could have given me something useful to do.

the publish-or-perish rat race is one of many factors degrading academia. Couple that with steadily declining numbers of tenure-track faculty, making the glut of PhD students and early career faculty ever more desperate to pull all the stops to secure a meaningful career, and it really shouldn't be surprising to see a lot of misconduct. People are desperate.