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> Once you make it to professor, you need to use the connections and the prestige to get the big grants to hire lots of PhDs and postdocs yourself to continue the cycle.

It is certainly strange that the final goal of academia is basically to create an org. Totally different from the image of the idealized scientist to me. But this does allow a lot of people to work in science. It probably allowed me to get my foot in the door when I wouldn't have otherwise.

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The problem is that the people who advance are not the people who are good at science, so you end up with top down direction to chase fads while promising leads get passed over. When the fads don't pan out, the PI will push their postdocs to find something to publish just to keep publication counts up, and it doesn't matter if the articles are bunk because the lab is part of a citation ring so the authors influence will only continue to increase.

That organizational structure has been called a pyramid scheme.

Or a tumor :)

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