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Article Excerpt
1. Introduction
A growing crisis in academia during the past decade is affecting the creative output of its faculty, particularly in science. One of the underlying structural defects which is causing this crisis to assume major proportions can be stated simply as follows: The failure rate for proposals submitted by academic scientists has reached such high levels that the increasing numbers of faculty are required to spend virtually all their time writing proposals, while leaving the creative thinking to graduate students and post-doctorate associates--science by proxy. Further exacerbating the problem is the increased importance placed by academic administrators in considering salary, tenure and promotion, on the amounts of money brought in by grants. As universities become more like businesses, a debilitating stress, both mentally and physically, is being placed most severely on young faculty, who, under pressure, must neglect their teaching (and most everything else) in their frantic search for funding. Biggest losers, however, are both the quality of scientific output and the students. Many people I have spoken to are already very much aware of the serious abuses of and strains placed on the academic community which I discuss in the paper. Some faculty are afraid to rock the boat; no one knows what to do about the situation.
Let me begin with a very brief historical background relevant to the issues at hand, then quickly summarize the points raised in earlier discourses (Carlson, 2006a; Roulston, 2006; Carlson, 2006b), provide some additional anecdotal material derived from communication with colleagues on the issues discussed here, touch on future dangers resulting from the present state of affairs, and finally suggest a possible approach to remedy the deteriorating situation regarding funded research in the university. My emphasis in so doing will be on the detrimental effects on the morale and well being of young faculty members in science, brought on by a decline in the changes in resource allocation by federal government and by the concomitant change in attitudes (in the words of Clark Kerr, the 'the great change in spirit') that occurred during the 1990s.
According to William Clark in his book Charisma and the Origins of the Research University, the research university began in Protestant Germany after the reformation and reached it epitome in Europe at the end of the 19th century. Clark Kerr (2001, 2004), the former chancellor of the University of California, describes four phases for the research university in the United States: (1) its origins: 1810-1870; slow growth: 1870-1940; rapid expansion: 1940-1990, and an era of constrained resources: 1990-2015. The present ills in atmospheric funding which I will discuss arise from a disjoint between phase 3, which Stuart Rojstaczer in his book Gone for Good (1999) calls the 'Golden Age', and phase 4, the present. The decline in research funding is real. Clark Kerr states that, overall in the United States, expenditures for higher education decreased about 10% from 1989 to 1993, though a few states have experienced increases. This decline in educational funding mirrors a decline in national productivity during that same period, according to Kerr. The level of funding per student or faculty member has decreased even more because of increased numbers. The problem, however, is not so much declining support for scientific research, but the strains and abuses within the academic community brought on by a mindset frozen in the Golden Age.
2. Illustrative Examples
Over thirty years ago, when I entered academia, it was possible then for a faculty member with a good idea to elect to write a proposal and submit it to an agency of choice. If the agency liked the proposal, then it was funded. Success rates were typically not tar below 50%, at least in our department.
There is no doubt that the success rate in proposal submissions among university faculty has decreased considerably over the past 30 years. This unhappy situation is the result of several factors: 1) for well over a decade national funding has decreased relative to both inflation and research costs; 2) more PhDs are on the market who are writing grants; 3) universities continue to grow as they did during the Cold War period when generous federal funding encouraged their expansion; and 4) there is an increased competition between university scientists and members of funding agencies to whom the proposals were being addressed. Indeed, the process now has become almost surreal, if not bizarre, in that colleagues in funding institutions such as at NASA are now submitting proposals to their own agencies in competition with scientists in academia.
Faced with declining success in grant writing, many faculty members have begun to resort to various devices to bolster the declining odds against them. Roulston (2006) puts these efforts into the context of elementary game theory, citing Nash equilibrium as the ultimate stalemate in proposal writing; (Nash, of course, refers to John Nash of the movie and book Beautiful Mind; Nash, one may recall, won the Nobel Prize for economics some years ago.) Roulston shows that if everyone writes the same number of proposals no one can improve their chances of success. Indeed, the chances of success would be identical if everyone submitted one or a large number of proposals, except that, in the case of a large number of submitted proposals, everyone loses. Roulston shows that each proposal engenders a cost function, which is to say that each proposal has a cost attached to it. The cost is in time, energy and resources and in intangibles such as the quality of life and the drain on emotional and physical resources of the academic scientist ... in other words, the loss of inspiration and insight needed to do good work.
Roulston's arguments imply that if the Nash equilibrium level becomes sufficiently high--a large number of proposals submitted--the net cost to individuals and to the system can exceed the benefit of the research. Of course, the system has not yet evolved to a full Nash equilibrium, and some individuals play the system successfully by submitting a large number of proposals. A colleague of mine at another university Cited an instance in which a faculty member once submitted 33 proposals in a single...
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