Agree!
It really goes back to two questions: (They are related too!)
1. “How do I measure academic (college & university) contribution\production?”.
The difficulty of coming up with metrics to decide tenure always comes down to someone’s judgment. Which leaves the “judging person\committee” open to all sorts of lawsuits.
2. Pressure to rapidly increase the number of women & minorities in the faculty lounges (and to some extent in the student body!)
The pressure to do it “now now” is enormous. Letting time sort it out is not allowable. So its increased by creating a myriad of questionable academic disciplines. “Studies this & studies that” where intellectual (or any sort even emotional!) discipline is a dirty word.
Unfortunately, your question “How do I measure academic (college & university) contribution\production?” is now, in a lot of places, tied to publishing work.
There are a lot of people who have to push something out to get that checkbox. And a lot of things pushed out of people’s brains to satisfy this resemble something pushed out the other end of the body!