Academia's Crooked Money Trail

[salvorhardin]

“Follow the money!” According to the film All the President's Men, this advice from the shadowy informant known as Deep Throat guided Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in cracking the Watergate conspiracy.

The strategy also serves Georgia State University economist Paula Stephan extremely well in her illuminating and accessible new book, How Economics Shapes Science. A leading expert on the scientific labor market, Stephan isn’t looking to sniff out high-level government corruption. Rather, using the “tool bag” economics provides for “analyzing the relationships between incentives and costs,” she penetrates the financial structure of university-based science, explaining the motivation and behavior of everyone from august university presidents and professors to powerless and impecunious graduate students and postdocs.

It's a remarkably revealing approach. Most of what the public hears about the arrangements that govern research comes from reports by blue-ribbon commissions, prestigious panels, and university-oriented advocacy organizations. Such reports rarely use hard-headed economic analysis; rather, the groups writing them tend to consist of top administrators at leading universities, eminent faculty members in major science and engineering departments, and high executives of large corporations -- “not,” Stephan pointedly notes, “students and postdocs who could not find jobs.”

The documents that result from those high-end studies lean toward self-congratulatory invocations of science’s role in advancing human welfare. Their suggestions generally favor solving what ails universities by giving them more of what they already have: funding, grants, graduate students, and postdocs. But, warns Stephan with an astringency that she infuses throughout the book, when “assessing recommendations, one should be leery of those coming from groups who have a vested interest in keeping the system the way it is.”

...

The problems arise, Stephan argues, from how that money is allocated: who gets to spend it, where, and on what. Unlike a number of other countries, the United States structures university-based research around short-term competitive grants to faculty members. The incentives built into this system lead universities to behave “as though they are high-end shopping centers,” she writes. “They turn around and lease the facilities to faculty in [exchange for] indirect costs on grants and buyout of salary. In many instances, faculty ‘pay’ for the opportunity of working at the university, receiving no guarantee of income if they fail to bring in a grant.” Those who land funding staff their labs with students enrolled in their department’s graduate program, or with postdocs. Paid out of the faculty member’s grant, both types of workers depend on the primary investigator’s (PI’s) continued success in the tournament.

Full review: http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2012_01_06/caredit.a1200001

[AdHocSolver]

1. K and R. Academia is a highly competitive jungle. n/t

[greymattermom]

2. welcome to my world

where tenure and a full professorship doesn't even guarantee a salary. I write grant proposals non stop, just to keep 2 people employed and my own salary paid. There is little time left for teaching or writing scientific papers. I take very few students, mostly MD/PhD students, who get a free ride through medical school and always match in top residencies and won't need to write grants in the future.