This mixed-methods study investigates the systemic crisis in global higher education, framing the modern university as an academic "sausage factory" that prioritizes industrial paper production over genuine discovery. Analyzing bibliometric data, mental health studies (n = 23,469), publishing economics, and critical scholarship, we reveal four critical failures: monopolistic control by top publishers, severe mental health crises among doctoral students (depression at 24%, anxiety at 17%), massive overproduction of largely ignored scholarly papers (>2.5 million annually), and the commodification of academic identity via "publish or perish" culture. Ultimately, this system perverts the core purpose of academia. We propose a radical diagnostic framework to reconceptualize universities as sites of authentic intellectual cultivation rather than commodified output. Keywords: Higher education; publish or perish; academic publishing; doctoral mental health; commodification ofknowledge; scholarly communication.
M D Ulhaq (Fri,) studied this question.