Our lab is scrambling, spending all our time writing grants, not conducting science. It is so frustrating and wasteful.

ModernMech 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is why I became a teaching professor. My employment and promotion are not conditioned on how much money I bring in and what I publish. But I still get to spend 4 months of the year doing research that's important to me. I don't publish as often but when I do, it's substantive work.

I've seen too many promising academic careers torched at 6-years because they had unfundable ideas. With this new administration, we see how "fundability" and "good important research" are often at odds and can change as quickly as the political winds.

When I was in gradschool it was over drones and the politics was within the FAA and their shifting definitions of what an "unmanned aerial vehicle" technically was. Recently you wouldn't get funding if you didn't have the word "equity" in your proposal. Now you don't get funding if you do have the word "equity" in your proposal. New boss, same as old boss.

Heaven forbid you were researching suddenly now <VORBOTEN> topic, your entire career is torched. I just didn't want to tie my career to that kind of capriciousness.

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2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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timr 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This was true when I was a grad student, decades ago. It was true when I worked in a lab as an undergraduate before that.

Specifics of the current environment aside, welcome to academic life. Unless you are one of the exceptionally fortunate few to have a permanent fellowship of some sort (e.g. Howard Hughes), your primary job as a research professor is to raise funding.

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epistasis 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

But clearly there was some science going on. Any time spent writing grants rather than doing research feels wasteful, but it's the way to get funding. The percentage of time spent doing that is changing, and the percentage of grants applications that get funding is going way down, demonstrating a big change in the amount of effort that goes directly to waste. Unfunded grants are not evidence of bad research that does not get funded, but merely of the funding level.

	▲	timr an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Science gets done by the people you hire with the money you raise. And yes, everyone in a group is always thinking about the next grant. I’m not joking. I’m not exaggerating. This is the job, and it’s always been this way (at least in my lifetime). Maybe it’s worse because of the current administration, but complaining that academic life is mostly about grant writing is like a fish complaining about water.

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danaris an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I really wish people would stop trying to gaslight all of us into believing the current crisis is just business as usual.

Yes, previous US presidents told some lies.

Yes, previous US presidents and politicians had some unsavory associations or potential conflicts of interest.

Yes, previously some labs spent too much time writing grants and not enough actually doing research.

The problem is, these things are becoming the norm now, and your anecdotal memory of "aw, man, we spent all our time doing that back in the day!" is not a reliable indicator that really, nothing has changed, we should just stop complaining. Especially since we know that human memory is not only fallible, it is prone to specifically being better at remembering the exceptional, and the unpleasant.