Interesting essay. I think the idea of flexibility is good in general: for example, I know of a case where a scientific programmer position on an academic project cannot be properly filled because the salary is far below the market; this is well understood by the project leader but cannot be fixed due to strong regulations of fund allocation.
However, I'm wondering what would this model lead to for PhD students that want to stay in academia? Already in the current system, there are not enough tenure positions for everyone, in the Compton model it seems that there will be even fewer, which would discourage some amount of people from following an academic route.
Interesting essay. I think the idea of flexibility is good in general: for example, I know of a case where a scientific programmer position on an academic project cannot be properly filled because the salary is far below the market; this is well understood by the project leader but cannot be fixed due to strong regulations of fund allocation.
However, I'm wondering what would this model lead to for PhD students that want to stay in academia? Already in the current system, there are not enough tenure positions for everyone, in the Compton model it seems that there will be even fewer, which would discourage some amount of people from following an academic route.