Re: Maternity Leave Stipends?



On Sun, 8 Jan 2006, Threeducks wrote:

Straydog wrote:





Are you living in fantasy land? Where do you think the money comes from to support students?


In all the non-science, non-engineering subjects the student support is some mixture of "tuition supports the student" or "scholarship/fellowship/assistantship supports the student" and not the faculty's grant because there is almost no grant money for the non-science-non-engineering fields. Before govt-based grant money became available (~1940s), academic science and engineeering got most of its money from endowments and a few gifts that were not at all on the scale of NIH/NSF, today.

  Do you think faculty just go to the money tree and pick

it?


For a decade now, I've been on the line of thinking that faculty should be lobbying for a job where their duties include teaching and research, only, and not fundraising, first priority, and research second priority, and teaching third (or lower) priority. The whole competitive grants system, where, on average, 90% or more of all proposals are rejected, is really wasting faculty time on activities unrelated and unproductive compared to the traditional duties of faculty: scholarly study and teaching.

 Who would be happy about spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to

train someone only to have them quit and leave you with nothing.


Its interesting to hear that "whining and moaning" from someone who has a job and was so happy to brag (recently) about making 90K+ and having a nice home, nice toys for the kids (i.e. all the "nice" elements of that
station in life, and now it comes out that there are some "not so nice"
elements in that station, eh?)


I didn't see it as whining and moaning, but maybe you do. I think any normal person would be annoyed if they spent a lot of money for a product or a service and got nothing in return.

Having been on the ng since '92, having been in exactly the situation you described in your last sentence, and having complained about it here on the ng, I've gotten responses ranging from a little bit of very mild sympathy to derisive judgements that all I'm doing is "whining and moaning" or "no matter what happens to you, its your own fault no matter how hard you worked" and "you really didn't work that hard, after all" and "you're just blaming other people for your problems" and if you search the archives of the last 100,000 posts, you'll find just what I summarized.

No pun intended, but faculty doing research on grants is like ducks in a shooting gallery and the shooters are: grants comittees, chairs, deans, etc. And, when you get to the end of the conveyer belt, still alive, the conveyor belt accelerates you instantly without rest to the beginning of the run, again, and then slows down. And, the shooters don't run out of ammo.

That said, I would always advise a
student to do what is best for them, not me. I don't want unhappy students in my lab. Besides being no fun, they aren't very productive. Furthermore, just because something annoys me doesn't mean I'm not enjoying my work.

Of all of the faculty I talked with over the years, as colleagues, most of them readily and happily talked about their work. When I started to talk about funding phillosophy, funding experience, and funding reform, most but not all either could not bring themselves to talk about it, or they were scared shitless. Many would not be honest, but would prefer to talk about their work. Thus, reforms in funding will always be impossible since all the grantees refuse to discuss the need to eliminate the crazyness in the system.

No
research, thesis or publications? Keep in mind that this is a different situation than the student that makes choices to slow their research progress. That is not a big deal because they eventually produce something useful. A student that has a child while in school is not a big deal as long as they eventually come back and do some work. If they quit, it's a big deal, but since they quit, the faculty advisor has no power over the student. In that case I don't see how any student would find my statements unsettling. So what if their advisor doesn't like it, they are going and the advisor might as well pound sand. For students that come back and want to work, life is life and you give them your full support. Anything less and you are shooting yourself in the foot.


So, you see, besides being a "fundraiser"--first priority-- you also have to be a "labor recruiter" (or you don't get that 'productivity' [i.e. journal papers, book chapters, books]), too--second priority-- and the teaching and actual research (including adequate time in the library which no one today can do because the information overload began decades ago) gets pushed even farther down.

Sure, this is what being a professor at a research university is all about. Grants #1, labor recruiter => publications #2. Most people don't realize this and think your primary job function is teaching. Wrong!

And, unless faculty get together on this, this is the way it will stay and good, competant, productive people will get denied tenure, grants rejected, etc.


A bunch of us, here on SRC, have known about all this since way before you came around. I've been here since '92.


I've been around a lot longer than you think (about 10 years), but perhaps under a different name. I know you know about all this stuff, Art, so why are you busting my chops? I thought you would appreciate hearing something negative.

I've advocated for people to not go into the meat grinder to begin with, and I've advocated for existing faculty to think about organizing or lobbying for reforms that would limit funding to one PI but also grant something like 90% of proposals and instead of rejecting 90% of proposals (which is the minimum rejection rate overall because in the private foundations its more like 95%+ rejections) and faculty just have to re-write and re-submit and its a big waste of time. Faculty should be spending more time in the library, more time thinking, more time research, more time teaching, less time scribing, less time losing sleep.
Right now, the funding game is limited to guys who write "beautiful" BS proposals and have high award rates (and the guys get recognized as being good scientists not because they are doing good science but because they bring in a lot of money) and this just cuts money to the guys who are good scientists but can't write "beautiful" BS proposals. And, I've seen this on NIH grant review committees.

Busting your chops? Nah, trying to advocate for a funding reform movement. It would also cut down on budgets for grant review staff and eliminate some bureaucracy. Cut out 90% of committees re-reading the same proposals, and you can cut out maybe 60% of administrative staff.

I think if you reject only one out of ten proposals and limit funding, then that will be plenty of fear to keep faculty motivated. I'd also have more accountability on the part of grant review comittees: they have to prove they read the proposal! I have had pink sheets come back where I could prove that they _didn't_ read the proposal.

.

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