Add to that that professors have always had managerial and mentoring responsibilities without receiving any formal training for it, nor these being made an explicit – or explicitly valued – part of their role (and too often, that extends to teaching). The quasi-apprenticeship model of becoming a researcher always had all non-research practices as its big blind spot/hidden curriculum.

Thanks for the plug, Ian. I think it's important to keep in mind that this transition towards office work has been going on for a long time. In 1938, Martin Heidegger held a lecture in Freiburg about metaphysics and modernity. It was later published as "The Age of the World Picture" and can be found in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (Harper, 1977). Here's a passage that inspired mine.

"The decisive development of the modern character of science as ongoing activity [Betrieb, hustle, business ... i.e., office work]," he said, "also forms men of a different stamp. The scholar disappears. He is succeeded by the research man who is engaged in research projects. These, rather than the cultivating of erudition, lend to his work its atmosphere of incisiveness. The research man no longer needs a library at home. Moreover, he is constantly on the move. He negotiates at meetings and collects information at congresses. He contracts for commissions with publishers. The latter now determine with him which books must be written." (125)

In a sense, that's what happened to Ferguson, he gave up his erudition for something with an "atmosphere of incisiveness". Punditry.

The golden age of academic creative freedom, I think, has almost always been an elusive luxury of the idle rich. Galileo had to spend many of his days playing the patronage game, tutoring the children of the rich, following the same sort of bizarre-but-everyone-agrees-on-them rituals that inform modern day bartering ("$10!" "What, it's only worth $2!" "$8!" "$4." "Fine, we'll settle at $6"). His was a life of getting in the right place at the right time, being careful not to offend his patrons while balancing his quest to find richer more powerful ones to latch on to.

Pavlov ran his lab like an industry machine, sort of the platonic ideal of the manager academic, inputting grad students and churning out ideas and papers in industrial-level wholesale.

It's (for the most part) been the idly rich, the wealthy amateur academics like Darwin who already could afford not to worry about securing patronage, grant money, paid positions, and so forth. Those, or the friars and priests (like Mendel) who had the leisure time to do what they wanted.

I think we've always sort of yearned for a perceived freedom that's only rarely existed. It's a bit like the musician who's hit it big and, stifled by the difficult touring and recording schedule, yearns for the "freedom" of pre-fame, selectively forgetting the various minimum wage jobs, dirty couches, and difficult landlords that happened to go along with it.

Until I showed up at Rice, my experience had been diametrically opposite. Scholars were being sidelined on operations and admin in favor of people with no understanding of what scholarship was.