There is an interesting article in the New York Times about the current science funding structures that depicts how hard it is to be truly creative and independent given the current model of science funding, especially if you are young and not established yet.
I thought it would be instructive to have a dialogue about this in this space. So please comment.
Just a quick comment: this article is about science funding in the US specifically. The Canadian structure is very different (and I think superior), and I imagine the European, Japanese, etc. are also different.
Hi Moshe:
The article is indeed about the US funding structure, but the conversation should not be so restricted. Also comparisons to other models are very useful. The we can debate pros/cons of various models, while trying to be realistic about how to make the models efficient given other constraints.
Let me address two of the issues in the article: overhead and summer salary. Both don’t exist in Canada, or at least handled differently, and I think that’s a good thing.
Overhead: in Canada there is a specific agency allocating money to universities, which is renegotiated every year and is roughly proportional to the amount of grants flowing to researchers in that university (but there are other considerations as well). Individual grants are not taxed.
I think this is much better: Your status in the university is not determined by your current success in bringing money in, which relieves a lot of the pressure on young faculty. It also addresses the fundamental discrepancy between applied and fundamental science. By the nature of it, the former has much more money available, so in periods of financial strain it is really easy to shift towards the more applied fields.
Summer salary: I agree with the article that it is a bad idea to put financial pressures on the researcher to work in popular areas. It is one thing to decide to invest time and energy in difficult subjects, taking into account the resulting loss of productivity and status etc. I imagine things are very different when your mortgage payments come into play.
Einstein was right: Imagination is more important thank knowledge. Most people forget the corollary to that, that imagination doesn’t mean much without knowledge to back it up.
I think it’s *always* been difficult to be truly creative and independent in science – but it was easier when the barrier of entry on scientific instruments was “make your own because they haven’t been invented yet” instead of “get a few million dollars worth of funding and maybe you can afford that AFM you need to study the RNA your lab is producing.”
When you’re engaging in pure thought like Newton, Einstein or Hawking it’s probably a little easier, then you just need to beggar yourself for the top-flight education and run the risk of public humiliation if your creativity is dumped upon (like Einstein’s cosmological constant… during his lifetime).
The main problem is, as always, that money is controlled by people who understand not giving it away to be a good thing and have generally very shallow depth of knowledge when it comes to scientific endeavors – and they don’t understand what Churchill said “Success is going from failure to failure without losing hope” (paraphrased because I’m late for analytical SEM class)
From a layman perspective.
My interest as well, has always been to speak too the recognition of the creative ability that resides in scientists. In all of us.
These are situations that in worrying about the fundamentals of living require a responsibility to self and family. This can detour the creative incentive of such work, while economy is being sought to stabilize that cost of living. While one is working “toward the trade” one has establish through the years. Indentured by cost.
Knowing this, one has to scour the landscape for opportunities and sometimes this draws minds away form the areas of work they have established. That are important theoretically.
So whether the article speaks to the US or Canada this root causation rests as to the detraction of, and affects the work that can be creatively inspire further and under the right considerations, to receive information from the mind in position of “the arche above”( have to refer to Bee’s posting of Science and democracy). Further too, having this “insecurity of the distant future” can also be a hindrance, if focused on, in short term contracts.
Professorships seem to display a more sincere, restful and playful excursion as a display of confidence?
Best,
Finished the article in question – I agree with the last statement, we should be funding science broadly.
In fact, I would really like to see most of our useless military research funding decommissioned and diverted to science that will help us live, not help us kill. The only significant military threat we’ve faced since the fall of the Soviet Union (assuming their missiles actually launched and reached targets, as their economy had been crumbling almost the entire time they were our ‘enemies’ after saving our asses on the eastern front of Dub-Dub-Deuce when they were our friends.) erm, sorry, the only significant threats have come from a bunch of cave-dwelling religious hypocrites in ways our military might can do pretty much nothing to defend against. The next best thing we can say is “maybe some tiny countries have or are trying to get WMDs, so we need LASERS AND ROBOTS AND HUGE MISSILES RIGHT NOW to stop them. If they maybe ever get a weapon and then maybe one day decide to maybe threaten us.
10$ billion a month is going to Iraq right now. Imagine what 10$ billion a month going to our scientific research could do. Imagine what half of our Pentagon’s 700$ billion + budget (if you count the ‘emergency funding’ that doesn’t get officially counted as Pentagon budget by the .Gov) could do if given to the scientific community – 350$ billion a year to science funding instead of “how to kill people funding.”
As a nation, our priorities are crazily whacked out. Statistically we have more to fear from our bathtubs than we ever will from terrorism – more people drown in bathtubs per year than have been killed by terrorism… ever.
I’ve written many times on the problems with the present academic system on a general basis. Overall I would say it is a great obstacle to progress that researchers have to pay too much attention to things other than their research interests, with the result that their interests are influenced due to various forms of pressure (financial pressure, time pressure, peer pressure, public pressure). Thus, there is the risk that what is expressed in the topics scientists eventually chose to work on is not what they actually regard most promising. I have no idea why this has become commonly accepted, I can only guess that there prevails the believe that competition on a ‘market’ of whatever form does necessarily lead to a desirable outcome. Just that there is no reason to believe this unless shown to be the case. Instead, there are good reasons to think the outcome is not generally desirable but leads to an inefficient use of time, human, and financial resouces.
One of the most damaging factors to progress is that researchers are too frequently tied to topics, supervisors, or time constraints.
For more details see eg we have only ourselves to judge each other, the marketplace of ideas and change you can believe in.
Just to guide the conversation, you have to assume that the amount of resources spent in science is not going to grow substantially in the US, and that reforming the current system means using those resources that we do have in a more clever way.
My half-serious philosophy is that basic cybernetics (Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety) puts the kibosh on hope, because the variety of any regulatory system established by a set of budget specifications and tenure qualifications will be far smaller than the variety of scientists’ lives. Scientific knowledge is complicated, and the ways we discover new things are also complicated, and so the real world will always be able to twist into a situation which your formal setup for resource allocation won’t be able to handle. Fix a problem here, and it’ll spring loose there. . . .
What else do you expect when finding market equilibria is NP-hard?
From the article: “So not only do they have to worry about publish or perish, it’s also funding or famine, in the very real sense that without a grant there might not be food on the family dinner table! ”
I am trying to think of a system that might be more stupid than this. Nope, nothing so far.
Surely “summer salary” is the greatest of all these evils. Do away with that, and the rest will follow; or at least there will be some hope.
“Summer salary” is bad not just for the obvious reasons, but also because it provides a crucial point of leverage for those who want to play the academic politics game. Where I teach and research, my line of work [fundamental physics] is strongly deplored, and all kinds of pressures are applied by the retards who have given up research in order to be administrators. But we don’t have summer salary, so while they can make my life unpleasant in other ways, for a long time there was a limit to how much financial pressure they can put on me without making it *too* scandalous. Recently they threw caution to the winds and started refusing to give me any pay increments [despite the fact that I publish far more papers in top journals than their lackeys], but still the absence of summer salary has slowed them down very considerably. Naturally some of them are agitating to bring it in, on the grounds that whatever the Americans do must be good.
Summary: summer salary is a device for making tenure meaningless. It must go.
First a general question; Is the extremely competitive nature of the grant writing system contributing to the gender gap in certain areas of science?
Now a comment; No matter what system you choose, you will inevitably end up in a situation where most people spend most of their time working on projects they are not interested in, that’s just reality…not everyone can be rock stars.
Finally a suggestion; I think that some method of allocating resources based on cost-benefit analysis and risk assessment would provide additional funding to more ambitious and risky proposals. A more quantitative system for assessing proposals based on cost-benefit and risk ratings would allow managers more flexibility in identifying portions of their funding that they could consistently allocate to risky ventures, and provide more opportunity for ambitious researchers to pursue their pet projects.
p.s. why not hire an undergrad to write the bulk of your proposal anyway, a lot of these things are cut and paste and I assure you, in successful companies managers typically aren’t writing proposals, also, why not create a database of successful and unsuccessful proposals?
I think it is hard to eliminate bias completely, so I’m not sure to what extent the competitive nature of grants is contributing to the gender gap. What I have found from reading various articles and survey results is that the extremely competitive process of establishing yourself as a scientist leaves little time for building families etc, and therefore the gender gap is kept by some amount of self-selection.
I’m not sold on the ‘evilness’ of having summer salary. I think the major problem with it is that Universities count on the grant system to cut costs by lowering the salaries of faculty and expecting the faculty to compensate by having summer salary from outside. At the moment it is unrealistic to imagine that this will change considering how short-funded the university systems are.
There should be rewards for doing good work and in some sense the summer salary can serve as that kind of vehicle for rewarding work. Prizes also help, but they can only reward a very small portion of the population.
Also, the fact that we bring grants to the university reduces the expected number of teaching hours we have to do per semester.
I think that if one tries to find a short-term solution to improve the situation, having more funds available for prize grants for junior scientists without too many strings attached would make a difference.
I think the discussion, like so many others, conflates two issues. One is how research is evaluated, and the other is how it is funded. I think the first one is the difficult issue, and the second one just follows. In other words, the problem is not how to maximize a given utility function, but to agree on one.
For example, one can discuss how wide a distribution of research should be supported, and how to evaluate high-risk/high-reward research (avoiding carefully the artificially similar high-risk/low-reward research). Depending on your personal preferences on that issue, coming up with a funding structure is relatively easy.
So, to give an example, I personally like one of the ideas of FQXI, supporting part-time work of established scientists on more risky subjects (on the other hand, I am skeptical about their idea of finding diamonds in the rough). Here in Canada we have “accelerator” grants, provided to scientists (young or old) that are judged to work on important issues, and are held back by lack of funds (which could be translated to shortage of time, e.g. heavy teaching load). The latter criterion, which is an important one, is what makes it different from prizes, which are typically awarded to established scientists in recognition of their success.
Incidentally, the issue of money and academia is one I am too chicken to write about, fearing the resulting firestorm. But, somehow the statement that Planck scale physics is Lorentz invariant seems to generate much more heat. I have to admit I kind of like what that says about our readership…