Each profession has a racket, and one racket of big-time professors at big-time universities is getting PhD students to do lots of highly skilled work for very little money in exchange for ultimately receiving a doctoral degree, something over which the professor has 100% control. The other racket is research funding; tapping into research funding is like winning the lottery. You get lots of money and you get to do whatever you want with it as long as you can call it research. Research need not deliver anything of value, for the reason that it is “risky” and “leading-edge.”