timorl

18+ manisha , 4 months ago to academicchatter

I thought of writing this "blog" post after reading @elduvelle's question: Are there any US universities that actually pay you to do research

Here's my understanding of the operations of most US universities that hire scientists as faculty (some of this may be applicable to universities in other parts of the world too):

• Universities operate like companies where teaching profs are employees, educational degrees are the products being sold, and students are the customers (they pay for tuition and we all know how big of a problem is student debt thanks to these companies, err I mean universities).
• Research Faculty are expected to teach and that's the main source of their income. Probably also why usually they aren't given the title of "Scientist" but of "Research Faculty".
• Research Faculty pay for their research through grants. If they don't wish to take on teaching duties, they must be able to secure grants to pay for their salaries.
• Research Faculty pay for the lab space, shared equipment, benefits, and other admin costs to the university via what are called "overheads" - this is the % cut that the university takes from each grant that a research faculty gets while being affiliated to the university.
• This is why the bigger your grants, the happier the university will be to promote you to a "tenured" position. Also why scientists are often forced to follow grant "trends" to get the big bucks.
• Some universities are so rich that they can afford to pay for-profit data cartels to strategically decide which sector their next hire should come from, e.g Clarivate's Research funding and analytics services
• side note Clarivate's data is also used to decide university rankings and journal impact factors. Clarivate's scam is for out of scope for this blog but hope you see the circularity here and how the rich get richer in academia ...
• Universities also rely on endowments, gifts, and donations from wealthy individuals and philanthropic organizations to pay for things like construction/renovation of buildings/libraries, or for paying certain research faculty who take on extra duties like the Chairs/Heads of departments. That's why you see titles like "The XYZ Chair of Neuroscience" where XYZ is usually the name of the entity that made the donation.
• Sometimes (but not often enough), endowments/donations/gifts are made to waive tuition fees like this recent one made by a billionaire.
• Postdocs and lab managers/techs are temporary contractors and are paid from the Research Faculty's grants. I won't be surprised if the benefits that they are offered are also derived from the grant's "overheads".
• Universities have done a great job of marketing themselves as an ivory tower distinct from "industry" but when you look at how they operate, are they not just a part of it?
• I'm not sure of how much of the public funding that public universities receive is allocated for research 🤔​
• I'm sure there are more layers to this that I am missing (like how libraries operate and how Clarivate and journal subscription fees are involved there, sigh).

If you know of something that's crucial to understanding university operations or something that's mentioned here that isn't true, please share! It would be nice to collectively understand the systems we are/were/want to be a part of 🙂​

@academicchatter #Academia #Research #AcademicChatter