| | | Hi koan; Re: "Yes, but scientist's don't do science for the grants. They do it for the love of science.";
This is the attitude of a lot of beginning grad students. But to stay in academia (in science) nowadays means that you *must* get grants. They do not give tenure for good instructors. The colleges want *money* and that means grants.
So to maintain the life of a scientist means winning grants.
So I agree that they "don't do science for the grants". Instead, they "do the grants to stay in science."
This amounts to pretty much the same thing.
All this changes when people win tenure. But tenure is more and more difficult to get these days.
Let's say a department grants tenure to a couple of scientists. One turns out to be a real hero, a guy who keeps developing better and better stuff. Attracts lots of grants. The other only wanted tenure. After he gets tenure he never does another stick of research. Just teaches his required (light) load.
After a few years the tenure bargain doesn't look so good to the university. In the second professor they end up with a leech attached to the department until they can ease him out through age limits. And in the first case? Well the guy who became famous left the department in order to take up a position at a more prestigious university, one that was closer to his wife's folks (or whatever).
So overall, tenure is a bad deal for universities. They get nothing from it. If scientists truly "do it for the love of science" there's no need to use tenure to attract them. And if they do offer tenure, people, being people, will abuse it.
And universities aren't stupid. They grant tenure a lot less often now.
Go ask your son in law which parts of the above are an untrue description of academic reality.
-- Carl
P.S. Since you're a moron, here's some references from the academic literature on the subject:
As an example, this study shows that junior scientists, in order to obtain tenure, adjust what they study. That is, there's more to motivating scientists than "love of science" per se:
Reward Systems and NSF University Research Centers: The Impact of Tenure on University Scientists' Valuation of Applied and Commercially Relevant Research
Boardman, P. Craig; Ponomariov, Branco L.
Journal of Higher Education, v78 n1 p51-70 Jan-Feb 2007
Over the past three decades, U.S. science policy has shifted from decentralized support of small, investigator-initiated research projects to more centralized, block grant-based, multidisciplinary research centers. No matter one's take on the "revolutionary" nature of this shift, a major consequence is that university scientists, now more than ever, are subject to multiple and often conflicting demands. The purpose of this article is to examine the impact of having tenure on university scientists' consideration of these demands, particularly the demand for applied and commercially relevant research. For this study, the authors examine scientists who work in a particular type of university research center, one previously referred to as the "multidiscipline multipurpose university research center" (MMURC). MMURCs are interesting because they are required to be tenured or they are required to occupy a tenure-track position in an academic department. In this study the authors tested the general hypothesis that junior-level scientists will, relative to their tenured counterparts, devalue applied and commercially relevant research in favor of basic research, which the authors feel is justified by (a) some basic microeconomic reasoning and (b) implications of the above-discussed literature. (Contains 2 tables and 11 endnotes.)
eric.ed.gov
Use of Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Members Is a Long-Term Trend, Study Finds
aas.org
Proponents argued more than 60 years ago that tenure is needed to provide faculty the freedom to pursue long-term risky research agendas and to challenge conventional wisdom (1). Those arguments are still being made today (2) and are still valid. However, a 30-year trend toward privatization is creating a pseudo–market environment within public universities that marginalizes the tenure system. A pseudo–market environment is one in which no actual market is possible, but market-like mechanisms (such as benchmarking and rankings based on research dollars, student evaluations, or similar attributes) are used to approximate a market.
sciencemag.org |
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