Research Faculty
Eli has been explaining why tenure track faculty go searching for grant support but, as ferocious as that search is, if grants are pork chops, wolves are research faculty. Universities give research faculty hunting licenses for grants and contracts without providing any guarantee of support. Why you ask, well, among other things, universities get indirect (aka Facilities and Administrative) costs, about 50% of the direct costs less instrumentation and tuition. Departments like research faculty because they get a share of the F&A, as well as having a larger number of skilled folk around and more people to build a larger graduate program. It is not uncommon to have about the same number of Research and Tenure Track faculty in larger departments, and that is one reason they are larger.
So, the bunnies ask, what happens when those grants run out. Well, Eli has seen it all, ranging from goodbye, to suggestions that the unfunded research faculty take a leave of absence to structured bridge funding programs, with the length of support depending on rank and years of service (read bringing in grants)
Research faculty are driven to submitting multiple grant applications each year and for the most part need to get funding from several grants. Since most grants are funded for three years, research faculty want to have one grant per year coming up for refunding. Increasingly they are chopping up proposals so that multiple people are supported for small percentages, spreading the risk. What this has lead to is a sharp decline in the quality of proposals and an increase in the number of submissions, simply because so many must be submitted each year.
Next body shops.
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But do you believe the increase in research faculty has lead to an acceleration in the advancement of science because there are more hands on board? Especially important with the downfall of industry and government funded laboratories (Bell Labs)?
If the public purse(General fund), received a 12.5% royalty from any science that proves to be profitable, for just a moment or in perpetuity... The patents becoming the 'intellectual property' of the 'people'(TPOA), who paid the tab... Those funds could now bail out the US. Instead we let the world have it---one way or the other, some folks say... Now what? The people own the empty bag. What a ratchet... If walled street would have kept all the bonus money from ten years and then just paid out the first year profit, in the eleventh year,... they would have had their own money to bail themselves out. I guess they were not forced to hire a historian? Damn. Oh, & if, the scientist think they have found a way to turn plastic into lead... fund it you own self.)
Now-now...
chow-chow
Eli, I think I would even extend your analogy with one from Rodney Dangerfield. Grants are the porkchops that folks with research money hang around their necks so that scientists will play with them.
If I can believe what I see on the TV... GM is going to have a stock offering & name change from:) Government Motors to, General Mao. Whoo woulda thunk it?:o)
As Andy said, having a mechanism to support more people has increased absolute productivity, but the nature of the funding has made progress sub-linear, and as this tail grows, the amount of time that devoted to raising the rent has increased, taking even more time away from doing science. This is also reflected in the F&A costs as the universities need more people to check and track the proposals and for financial reporting.
The question of patents and access to the results of sponsored research is a curious one. In the US a decision was made about 25 years ago to encourage universities and non profits to patent discoveries made as a result of government sponsored work (Bayh-Dole act). The idea was that the universities would get some skin in the game and this would be a more effective way of commercializing discoveries. The initial result was that everything got patented, but recently it has been realized that only a small percentage of these ever pay off, and all of them cost $$ so the number of patents is falling.
Such a wonderful morsel, I had to take a bigger bite...
What Dyson proposed was a 240-million-ton ark with a pusher plate 90 miles in diameter and powered by hydrogen bombs. It was a modest vessel, really, the smallest possible practical version of a class of 6,000-miles-per-second starships he had dreamed up, dreadnoughts capable of crossing our solar system in a month. His starship would be slow off the starting blocks, with a zero-to-6,000-mps time of 30 years, but then it would really get rolling. Dyson addressed small details, like questions of plumbing. Nuclear-pulse propulsion, even in the small, pokey, atom-bomb-powered version of the Orion ship designed to tool around this solar system, required that each nuclear bomb be packaged in propellant—some material that, when vaporized into a plasma stream by the explosion, would strike the pusher plate and provide the necessary kick. For his starship, Dyson proposed recycling the feces of the astronauts as propellant. Riding a thermonuclear shit storm, his ark would carry several thousand colonists to Alpha Centauri on a 150-year voyage.
Dyson himself, when I put the same question to him, was dismissive. “The starship was like an existence theorem in math,” he said. “It was to prove if you could do it. I never really believed in it.”
Bet you a buck, it cost more than two bits...
Educated Fool is Fly--- with Orion though...
buy-buy
Bird brain, do you understand how anything works?
After re-re-re-reading Dr. Dyson's, Orion Starship & 'Riding a thermonuclear shit storm, his ark would carry several thousand colonists to Alpha Centauri on a 150-year voyage.' These colonists were going to a star...? At least they were not scientists, we know that for sure.) Maybe that is why no one pointed this out while the scientists were still in the Bull-Session stage.
Gotta-say
bye-bye...
Interesting stuff-- so far (to the best of my knowledge) our research faculty are still hired under real TT contracts with the university. There are supposed to be commitments for necessary support/ ongoing research funding from the gov't(s) (provincial and federal)-- but, at least at the provincial level, that's not worth all that much. The panic level got pretty high last year as the provincials blew-up and redesigned their research support system (as usual adding more focus on commercialization and consulting more with business than academics) while reneging on previous commitments to high-flying researchers. But at least most (almost all in ongoing positions) of us still have some sort of job security.
BB
a__ray..., From personal experience, it pretty much comes down to $ these days. For those that pay with their labor, it is usually blood, sweat and tears. You know, the three fingered guy who helped build your house---that kinda thing. Straight commission... need I say more. DC don't care, don't see it, don't wanna, nada. Where's the beef you say. Open your eyes. It is all around us.
Say hey,
by-by
About patents:
Most patents lose money. About 1% or so of patents actually make money. It is nearly impossible, even for experts, to predict which will pay off. (Anecdotes abound: one former APS President told me that every time the board of scientific advisors of a major corporation thought that something was really neat, it lost money. And every time they thought it was stupid or obvious or wouldn't work, it made money.)
Universities hoping to strike it rich in the patent game are playing a game in which the odds against winning are long. Not all university administrators realize this.
I'm not complaining: my father was a patent attorney, so the high costs of litigating patents helped to pay for my college education.
Nevada Ned
But now its become worse and institutionalized so. A so-called figure of merit is expenditures per year charged to grants. So simply spending more $$ gives brownie points towards 'merit' increases in pay and so on.
Birdbrain,
Ever hear the saying, "When they say, 'It's not about the money," it's about the money." Do you know how old that saying is? Science is the only place where it ain't about the money, and once it becomes about the money, you ain't doin' science.
So, again, Uncle Sam, thanks to you and your aides. Often you are wasteful, and sometimes you are bullying. On occasion, you are downright maddening. But in this extraordinary emergency, you came through — and the world would look far different now if you had not.
Your grateful nephew,
Warren Duck
Warren E. Buffett is the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, a diversified holding company.
This is unrelated but something I think people should see:
http://www.ceres.org/Document.Doc?id=648
1/4 of global capital is represented by the signatories of this document.
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