Comment by RunSet

The emphasis on quantity while neglecting quality calls to mind a passage from EWD1175[0]:

> My second warning remark is that I shall refuse to discuss the academic enterprise in financial terms. The first reason is that the habit of trying to understand, explain, or justify in financial terms is unhealthy: it creates the ethics of the best-seller society in which saleability is confused with quality. The other day we had to discuss the professional quality of one of our colleagues, in whose favour it was then mentioned that one of his Ph.D.s had earned lots and lots of money in the computer business, and few people seemed to notice how ridiculous a recommendation this was. We also know that the financial success of a product can be totally independent of its quality (as everyone who remembers for instance the commercially successful IBM360 should know). The second reason for my refusal is that the value of money is a very fuzzy notion, so fuzzy in fact, that efforts to understand in financial terms always lead to greater confusion. [Remember this, for it is quite likely that this afternoon will give you the opportunity to observe the phenomenon. Note that money need not be mentioned explicitly for the nonsense to emerge, a reference to "the taxpayer" can do the job. The role of "the taxpayer" then invariably leads to the conclusion that of State Universities at least the undergraduate curriculum has to be second- or third-rate.] The final reason for my refusal is that the habit appeals to the quantitative mind and I come from a culture in which the primarily quantitative mind does not evoke admiration. [A major reason that we considered Roman Catholics to belong to a lower class was precisely their quantitative bent: they always counted, number of faithful, number of days in purgatory, you name it.....]

[0] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EWD117...