Back when I was younger and less cynical, I wrote a little piece called ‘The Price-Waterhouse Method’, which suggested, sarcastically, that we turn over tenure files to an accounting firm, with instructions to accept or reject based on the bottom line. It was (several people told me) a rather good piece, and I was proud of it. I thought, at the time, that tenure committees should evaluate scholarship, and the focus on research funding that existed even back then was unseemly. Ten years on, I’ve changed my mind completely. This is why:
Research costs money; often a lot of money. We can be as idealistic as we like about the search for knowledge, the exploration of the universe, and so on, but someone has to pay the bill for all this idealism. And we pay the bills for most research with federal research grants.
Let’s look at some typical costs. An annual stipend for a graduate student in Chemistry or Physics, at the moment, is $20,000 - $25,000. My university charges an extra 26% for fringe benefits, a couple of thousand dollars for tuition, and 46% for ‘indirect costs’ — the tax they impose on all research grants to pay for their own overhead. Add it all up, and it costs $40 K a year at my university to pay for a graduate student. And our costs are comparatively low.
Graduate students are baby scientists. They are the ones who will come up with the fresh ideas when my generation are old fogies, and they do most of the hands-on, bench-top research. They’re essential, both now, and for the future. A university faculty member who is not training graduate students is failing to do part of his job.
Nowadays, however, a Ph.D. is seldom considered adequate training for an independent researcher. Most Ph.D.s do several years postdoctoral work before embarking on an independent career. No one gets rich on a postdoc., but they cost more than graduate students (though they’re usually more productive, also.) And someone has to support them, on a grant.
The equipment I use in my experimental research is an NMR spectrometer, and research grade NMRs start at about $500,000; a state of the art instrument costs several million. Someone has to buy that equipment. Starting assistant professors always get a ‘start-up package’ that covers their equipment costs — $1,000,000 is not unheard of these days — but later in one’s career, to stay competitive, one needs updated equipment, and that generally comes from grants.
Aside from these, there is materials and supplies, computers, publication costs, software licenses, travel expenses to conferences or to national labs to use specialized equipment, and so on, and so on. It all costs money, and that money comes from research grants. At private universities, one is often expected to pay oneself, from a grant, for the part of the time one is doing research; even in a public university, in most cases, any salary one earns for the three summer months usually spent in the lab. comes from a grant.
So when a scientist goes up for tenure, and the tenure and promotion committee, to use, just for example, Iowa State’s rather delicate phrase, inquires whether the candidate has
a high likelihood of sustained contributions to the field or profession and to the university
what they really mean is
Is he or she bringing in the bucks? And is he or she likely to continue bringing in the bucks?
Why aren’t we more explicit? Well, in my opinion, we should be, but priorities and costs vary across campus. After all, Classics professors don’t need multi-million dollar grants to be effective Classics professors. The University needs a generic statement. I think also, though, there is a false sense of delicacy involved, a sense that grubbing for research dollars is somehow indecent, and shouldn’t contaminate high-flown statements of ideals. This is silly. Faculty need to be told plainly what’s expected of them. Pretty much everyone finds out pretty quickly anyway, but still, there’s no reason to be mealy-mouthed about this.
Universities invest a great deal of money in junior faculty in the sciences. Starting salaries these days are almost decent, and start-up packages are still growing rapidly. It costs a lot to get someone started in independent research: the university simply can’t afford to continue carrying faculty whose research is not self-sustaining after 5 or 6 years. That is why a record of continued grant funding is overwhelmingly the most important consideration at tenure time. Teaching is important, but you can hire teaching faculty for under $ 50 K a year. Publications are important, but you can’t publish without money, and you need publications to get more money, so the two are inseparable.
Of course, it’s an odd system; scientific academia is one of the few professions where one is expected to find for oneself the resources needed to do the job one is hired to do. But it’s the way our system works, and that system has dominated the Nobel Prizes for the last 50 years. So we must be doing something right.
...and it's red. Congresswoman Marxine Waters yesterday threatened to
Tonight! 7:30 p.m., Nebraska City Campus Union Ballroom. Come and hear one of the great independent-minded political thinkers of our time!
...dribbles anemically into Nebraska. But here are our first spring snowdrops, taken Monday Feb 18.
Wednesday pic
1/21/2008 on a roadway in Viera wetlands, Brevard Co., Florida. Not a great picture (he was a long way off) but quite definitive, I'd say.
Cape Canaveral beach, Saturday, January 19, 2008.
