[thelittlenag]

My wife was hired last year as a full time professor and leads her own lab. By far the largest pressure on new faculty is the ability to get money into her lab, and by extension the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets). Getting approved for the money via the grant process means having published "interesting" research along avenues of inquiry that other folks find worth pursuing. Often times this means building on existing lines of research over pursuing new paths.

The hiring process is setup basically to filter for folks who they think are the most likely to publish lots of papers, collaborate to push existing lines of inquiry, write lots of hopefully approved grants, and grow a lab into what is effectively a "successful small business". Quality is an after thought taken care of by what passes for peer review.

The incentives for everyone involved is just a complete and total mess. I'm reading tea leaves here, but my guess as to why she was never hired is that she was deemed "unable to get grants". Had she been, then she would have found herself hired immediately somewhere because universities are incentivized to play a numbers game and get as many folks in writing grants as possible.

[exmadscientist]

> the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets)

Don't forget that this is actually money laundering. Our NIH grants had major strings attached, like "you may not buy non-instrumentation computers" (at least, that's what I was told, I did not actually get to read the grants). So the University helpfully launders the money for you through a kickback from its overhead cut, at the tiny tiny price of keeping most of it. You may then spend the kickbacks without restriction.

The whole system is insane. Even having lived it for years I barely believe some of my own stories.

[CamperBob2]

Our NIH grants had major strings attached, like "you may not buy non-instrumentation computers" (at least, that's what I was told, I did not actually get to read the grants)

Sadly, that bit of goofiness goes back a long way. It's why the early HP desktops were sold as "calculators." Many important customers told them that buying a computer required approval from the board of directors, but anybody could buy a "calculator" out of petty cash.

[dctoedt]

Aboard the USS Enterprise (the aircraft carrier) in the late 1970s, I automated some of my division's reports by writing BASIC programs on a "programmable calculator" — a desktop in all but name — that was owned by the air wing (IIRC) and used for setting up missions.

(It was a day of celebration when the 8K of RAM was upgraded to 16K.)

[mattkrause]

It's also not actually true.

The NIH themselves is fine with you buying computers that directly support the "aims" of the grant (e.g., data analysis). They don't want you buying "general" office equipment off a grant.

However, most universities are touchy about this and default-deny all computer purchases unless you yell the chapter and verse of the regs at them (which I have now done several times).

[CamperBob2]

Yep, I'm referring to a historical anecdote, not current practice.

It'll be tough to dig up a solid citation for the HP "calculator" story but I've heard it from more than one reasonably-credible source, e.g.: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/9499/when... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard_9100A#cite_not... .

[kps]

I've heard the same about the DEC PDP branding — a “Programmable Data Processor” could slip through where a “computer” couldn't.

[mananaysiempre]

“Inside the AS/400” by Soltis quotes a story of IBM’s Rochester group developing the System/3 minicomputer (followed by the incompatible System/38, later rebranded the AS/400 and later still the i) under the guise of an “accounting machine”.

[mattkrause]

Oh, I totally believe it!

I just wanted to explain that although "No computers on NIH grants" is still current practice at most universities, it shouldn't be.

[robwwilliams]

That statement is flat out false. You can buy as many computers as you can justify on an NIH research project. I have bought several dozens over 35 years without a peep.

[tnecniv]

Universities are the best at creative accounting. PhD students get charged “tuition” but that is normally (hopefully) out of the pocket of their advisor or another fellowship. So your pay is valued at 120k despite you seeing a quarter of that.

I know some grad students that used that fact to their advantage when applying for credit cards but it’s still gross.

[atrettel]

When I got my PhD (at a public university), I almost got charged for the out-of-state part of this fictitious tuition because I did not switch my residency to the state where I got my PhD. The requirements for residency were pretty onerous from what I remember and I would have been unlikely to qualify. Instead, I took my "preliminary exam". Upon passing the exam, my title changed from "PhD student" to "PhD candidate" and it waived the out-of-state tuition for the rest of my PhD. So universities take this stuff seriously but have arcane procedures for edge cases like this that kinda make a mockery of the whole thing. That said, I'm grateful I did not have pay in the end!

[pfannkuchen]

How does treating the tuition as a charge and payment (instead of the tuition being zero) benefit the university?

[moregrist]

It transfers money from grant funds into the University general fund, where it can be used for other purposes, like paying for less lucrative departments and administrative salaries. More or less, this plus the ph.d. student’s stipend is the cost of the student, and both can be charged to a grant that the student is working on.

This is baked into grant funding and has been for at least 40-50 years. No one is doing anything underhanded here; NIH is fully aware of the situation. Some grant organizations, including NSF, are much stingier with their grant overhead (ie: don’t allow it).

Whether or not the overhead is fair is a matter of opinion, I guess. I don’t think it’s even close to the most broken aspect of grant funding, though.

[ftyers]

NSF definitely does, and it's often (at least at R1) of >50%

[kelipso]

Overhead for government contractors are typically 100% or their salary or more for research work, so percentages like that (whether fair or not) are pretty standard.

[j7ake]

It’s more expensive for the prof to hire the student.

At MIT it is easily 100k per year to fund a PhD student. But phd student gets much less than half of that.

[zhdc1]

> Don't forget that this is actually money laundering. Our NIH grants had major strings attached, like "you may not buy non-instrumentation computers" (at least, that's what I was told, I did not actually get to read the grants).

The EU does it better. At least with the old Horizon 2020 scheme, up to 20% of the grant amount could be set aside for overhead costs. Anything more would get flagged if the grant was ever audited.

This limited how much participating universities could repurpose. I don’t know how Horizon EU is set up, but my guess is that it follows the same approach.

[analog31]

In a lot of departments, employees are unofficially expected to buy computers out of their own pockets. Workers are often quite incensed about this.

In turn the employees have a "fuck you" attitude about it. They often buy the cheapest laptop, and won't let their department's IT person touch it. As a result, most work is done with things like out-of-date OS's and software versions, and ad-hoc security and backups.

[robwwilliams]

Wow—you and I live in different university universes. The overheads are essential to running research universities. They are definitely not kickbacks. This is obvious when comparing research costs at national laboratories versus research costs for comparable work at most universities.

[queuebert]

Overhead rates at pure research non-profits are much lower than at universities. The difference is the amount of bureaucracy.

[Fomite]

This is not universally true. The last grant I had with a pure research non-profit, my state university had a markedly lower overhead rate, as well as far more flexibility in lowering it (if a sponsor pre-specifies a lower rate, we almost always accept that).

[kelipso]

No, overheads for research organisations, non-profit or otherwise, are typically higher than universities. Researchers cost way more than grad students and researchers have similar percentages of overhead too.

[queuebert]

Five researchers and one admin is cheaper than two researchers, two postdocs, a grad student, two admins, a compliance officer, an HR office, a grants office, a budget office, a legal office, some Deans, Vice Deans, Vice Chairs, Vice Chancellors, etc. You get my point.

I'm sure there are particular examples of places with high overheads, even higher than the 70% at top universities, especially in the biosciences, but historically pure soft money places have been relatively cheap to operate.

[kelipso]

A small independent group might have low overhead but from what I see in the ML research space those types of groups are very limited in what they can do. These small groups also tend to work as subcontractors for large groups anyway, so the overhead advantage becomes somewhat moot. Just submitting research proposals to funding organizations regularly in order to get consistent funding requires a large group, especially these days with lower funding per project. Basically, five researchers and an admin won't survive very long without latching onto bigger groups. Also it's pretty well known that universities are cheaper than contractors by a wide margin.

[robwwilliams]

Not true at all in USA. Check out overheads at Salk Institute or other high profile non-profits.

[TeMPOraL]

Would they still be if they cut down on building sports facilities?

[ModernMech]

They often bring in a lot of money and attract students. Sports facilities are one of the main questions on tours. It's an arms race really, because you can't entice many students to join the school with your course syllabuses and the number of books in the library. So schools invest in other shiny things to catch students' attensions.

[Fomite]

"you may not buy non-instrumentation computers"

This will come as a shock to the three laptops, one desktop, one server and five cluster nodes I have purchased on various grants.

Also the "kickback" as you put it (aka indirect cost returns) vary wildly both between and within universities. For example, we get zero indirect cost returns, but do get money back for unallocated spending if we bring in a higher percentage of our salary than we are obligated to.

[mjburgess]

What amuses, and irritates, me is that academics frequently project this insanity onto Business or The Profit Motive.

Having close connections in academia, that world is the worst of what can be imagined. A highly competitive start-up, or scale-up, environment has a level of Reason and Merit imposed by the market which rationalises most everything (even the insane VC fantasyland headline-driven stuff is intelligible).

Academia is the worst combination of every imaginable macro force.

[quacked]

I don't know if I'd agree that Reason and Merit are always applied by the market, unless the market is referring to "whatever VCs can be convinced to give money to". However, the crux of what you're saying, which is that in academia Reason and Merit are thrown directly out of the window is completely true.

My favorite discrepancy is in hiring. In startups, you can win a $150k/year job in a ten minute conversation with the right person and be at work the following Monday, even that afternoon in some cases. This is especially true if your previous work is already known to the person doing the hiring.

In academia (and to a lesser extent government work) they're conducting 6-month searches and stringing along candidates for months at a time for $65k jobs with a fraction of the responsibility of the equivalent in the private industry.

[mjburgess]

In the medium term, on average, the market tends to kill-off sheer stupidity. It is kinda traumatic in the short-term to see how much stupidity is rewarded, of course. (And here, are VCs anything more than serial idiots?)

But if you really want to persue a basically competent merit-based path, there's usually one available. You can make 2x in a crypto conjob, or 1x on a gamble that someone needs a plausible value-adding service.

I just don't see this logic at work in academia. The only reason I care here is how often academics have a kind of superstition of 'business' which is nothing other than a description of their own situation. When, in reality, freedoom from these chronic stupidities lies in everything they claim to hate.

[StressedDev]

A VC which is a serial idiot will eventually run out of money. One thing to remember is that not all VCs are the same and there probably are some which are very good at what they do.

Another way of saying this is just because some VCs are not good at their job does not mean all VCs are not good at their job.

[tobyjsullivan]

> A VC which is a serial idiot will eventually run out of money.

This is not really true as VCs are not the sources of the money they invest. VCs raise money from their backers and there really is a (virtually) infinite amount of money available to raise, even for a repeatedly unsuccessful VC firm.

As with the startups themselves, the key skill is raising, not earning the actual ROI.

[BurningFrog]

I assume this is in part because the $150k startup hire can get fired just as fast if they don't impress, while the corresponding academia process takes months or years.

[IG_Semmelweiss]

There's also inmediate feedback

150k salary ships, sells, or is out of a job or the company goes bankrupt, whichever is 1st

The equvalent researcher, with almost all kinds of research, will always keep the same job for years, and the University is always going to be around regardless of the research being done

[Fomite]

Given very few tenure-track faculty are making $150K, it's more like "A 85K salary has a ticking clock - and considers themselves lucky to have it - wherein if they don't meet some fairly steep performance goals, they are automatically fired."

[ModernMech]

Startups work under the "fire fast" mentality, where if someone isn't working out, you axe them asap. For a professor, ramp-up period can be a couple semesters to over a year for them to experience all the seasons of faculty life. You want someone who will stick around for 3+ years. Firing fast is something you want to do under only as a last resort.

[Fomite]

It's also expensive, because lab start up costs money. The cost of a faculty recruitment in the sciences can be well into the hundreds of thousands.

[ModernMech]

Yeah, this is definitely another thing. It takes a couple years of ramping up a lab to recoup that. I've seen startup packages in the millions. It's getting crazy stupid lol. I guess they figured that particular researcher had such promising research it was a good investment.

[jltsiren]

Academic hiring processes are ridiculous. Not because anyone wants it that way but because citizens like to complain. They complain when they think tax/tuition money is being used for inapproriate or frivolous purposes. They complain when they see nepotism and corruption. They complain about perceived political biases and discrimination. And so on.

Every time something goes wrong badly enough to cause a scandal, new processes are put in place to prevent that specific harm in the future. On the other hand, nobody really cares about effective and efficient use of tax money. People surely complain about waste, but the complaints are rarely specific enough to have consequences. Given a choice between preventing a specific harm and using tax money better, people almost always choose preventing the specific harm.

The salaries are what they are, because universities can't afford to pay more. There is only so much tax/tuition money available to them. People like to complain about administrative bloat, but it's their fault really. Every time people complain about something specific in the academia, they are advocating for giving more money to the administration to fix that, and for giving less money to the people who teach and do research. That's just the way public management works.

Additionally, academic hiring processes are more involved than in the industry, because there is less responsibility. Not despite it. People are effectively given money to do things they would do anyway, and the employer often can't tell the difference between a good hire and a bad hire, except maybe much later. If you can't fix you mistakes in a timely manner, you'll probably want to think things through before making the decision.

[rmah]

Universities could afford to pay more if they redirect funds from paying for "administrator" to paying for instructors and researchers. Or diverting funds from beautification projects. Or from the mass of consulting firms they hire for various things. There is now an average of only 2.5 faculty per administrator at universities and many of the better research universities have ratios closer to 1:1. Really, it's a question of incentives and priorities.

[ModernMech]

> Universities could afford to pay more if they redirect funds from paying for "administrator" to paying for instructors and researchers.

Which administrators tho? There are about a dozen I rely on every day, and if you eliminate them, you'll be causing a lot more work for me, the researcher. Many admin positions are created after faculty complain their workload is getting too large. A lot of people seem to think they are just bloat, but they can actually be very helpful. To be constructive, you need to be more specific than parroting the "just get rid of admin" trope.

[bluGill]

They can't do that though. All those administrators are preventing the faculty from abusing their position. Most of the abuse are the type of thing that someone has done in the past. What you really seem to be claiming is that the loss from faculty abuse is in general less than the costs of those administrators. I'm not sure if this is true or not - this is the real debate that we are not having. (I'm sure in some cases it is true, but in others it is not)

As for beautification projects: that projects often bring in big donars. It is hard to say if they are worth the costs or not, but we need to start by being clear. A ugly brutalist building would be a lot cheaper but probably is too far the other way.

[Fomite]

What amuses, and irritates, me is that industry frequently projects their own system onto academia.

They get incensed at the idea of overhead - but don't recognize that we're not legally allowed to have a profit margin.

[pxmpxm]

Is this a recent thing? Many many years ago I did work for a NIH funded study and we had no issues buying machines, with the stipulation that the servers have to be Sun Ultras for some reason.

[KennyBlanken]

So, if you're complaining about this in an HN comment, that means you reported it to the NIH, right? Because "kickbacks" are not a common thing, friend.

[justin66]

> Because "kickbacks" are not a common thing, friend.

cue the audience laughter

[exmadscientist]

This behavior is known to all parties. It's openly advertised and discussed by the admin office people.

[lostlogin]

You don’t think so?

It sounds like something that would happen. Where I was there were complex arrangements to avoid breaking grant rules while also spending every last cent.

[godelski]

> Don't forget that this is actually money laundering.

For anyone questioning this line, let's remember a few things

- Graduate students (in this setting) are typically funded, so the cost of their credits (often higher than undergrads) are determined by the university and such costs are a major factor of what is taken out of the grant the professor gets their portion (sometimes after the uni's cut!). The rest then goes to the student's salary and hopefully some left over for new lab equipment.

- Grant money must all be used and cannot be put aside for future investments. It is better to buy shitty lab equipment because you don't have enough for good equipment and can't invest any excess (even if by being spartan elsewhere). If you don't use the money in the allotted timeframe you're considered to have improperly managed the funding.

- A funded graduate student is considered 49% employee and 51% student.

- Graduate students in year 3+ (median 5 years for PhD) are not taking courses and doing full time research and likely being a TA at the same time. (Tuition costs do not change)

- A successful graduate student sees their advisor less and less as they dive into their niche area of research where the advisor no longer has any level of expertise. (This is what's supposed to happen)

- When a graduate student stops taking classes they still pay for credits and at the same rate (albeit through funding, which they are often writing for at this point. But prof gets the award).

- Universities pay students and professors to publish papers and judge success by publication in venues

- Students and professors "judge" works submitted to venues by other students and professors for no pay (i.e. on university time)

- Venues take copyright ownership over works they deem valuable and put it behind a paywall

- Universities pay for access to venues where their researchers published in and where their researchers performed volunteer service for.

- Promotions are given to those who's name is on the most works, regardless of position or contribution to that work.

Think about it this way, what if we framed this as a job? Your job considers you a junior part time employee for the first 5 years and if you don't complete all 5 years every other job will treat you as a junior part timer. Your first two years 50% of your time is spent doing training, 50% of your time is spent teaching the interns (who pay, but who spend 100% of their day training), and whatever time you have left is spent performing research. You're told you're a part time employee because 51% of your time is training. After two years you finish training but get no change in pay (maybe +$100/mo), nor graduate to a full time employee. By year 4 your manager never shows up except few months your manager comes around telling you that you need to make sure to make a deadline and they need to read your report first. They demand it is in their hands a week early so they can review it. 3am the night before the deadline they ask for major rewrites, this is the first you've heard of any problems. 10 minutes past the deadline you're still getting requests to "modify the graphic" with instructions like "a little to the left" or "I don't like the colors" and the iterative process can only be performed by back and forth submissions with random delays as your manager won't touch the source code. Every few months your manager stops by to check on progress and ask you to write a report that needs to be written by tomorrow. They'll slap their name at the top and if successful they advance their career. Your reward is via proxy. After 5 years, you write a large report about what you did the last 5 years filled with stuff you've mostly done over the last 18 months and pretend that you had a plan all along. If they approve, they usually do (but will ask for changes), you can go be a manager if you're lucky or get a full time position. Or if you go the post-doc route, 75% employee.

Idk, this sum it up pretty well? Anyone want to add anything?

[jacquesm]

This is really painful to read.

That whole system seems to be so ripe for disruption.

[godelski]

Well just know you're not alone. I hope you got out without killing your passions.

Fwiw, I intend to lead by example. I love researching. I have a long term internship where I even do research (unfortunately not closely tied to my PhD work lol). But since I read math books and research as a hobby, I intend to simply do what I call for (in other comments) and just post to GitHub + Openreview + Arxiv and call it a fucking day. I hope to get others to join me in this paradigm shift. We all fucking rely on arxiv anyways and I'm pretty sure more of us find works via twitter/google scholar/semantic scholar/word of mouth more than we find works via journal/conference listings (twitter post of "just got accepted" counts as former, not latter).

I'm not so sure we need "disruption" as much as we need to just cut off the fucking leeches. The problem was turning school into a business. Thinking that profits align with education of students. But we have no strong evidence that higher ranked schools produce higher quality students, but rather only better connected ones.

Idk, maybe the private sector can disrupt it. But they'd have to perform a pretty similar feat, though there is a monetary benefit. Because the world is disillusioned that Stanford students are substantially better than Boston College students, you can pay the BC student less. In fact, many places do, but the issue is Stanford has a huge fucking media arm so we don't hear about that. They can also stop using number of papers as criteria but rather quality of papers (i.e. use domain experts to hire domain experts. Novel idea, I know...)

I'm just shooting in the dark here. I'd actually like to hear other peoples suggestions. Even if we're just spitballing at this point (I don't think anyone has strong solutions yet, that's okay), we just need to get the ball rolling at this point instead of talking about what a ball's relationship to an apple or the sour more rounder apples that are orange.

[jacquesm]

I got lucky: I never went in. My family more or less imploded in the middle of my highschool track and I went to work instead and that put me on a faster road to a lot of interaction with the computers of the day than school would have given me and that led to an interesting career. If that hadn't happened I may well have ended up in academia and I somehow feel I dodged a bullet there because my ideas of what university was like at the time seem to have very much been informed by pink glasses and meeting the occasional very interesting person who was part of the academic world.

[godelski]

Don't get me wrong, there is a lot I like about academia. Honestly, there hasn't been any other point of time in my life that I've been able to dedicate so much of my time to learning and researching. Even as I'm in a long term internship, that freedom is slipping away. Academia is supposed to be about protecting that freedom to explore and learn, but simply too much bullshit took over. Bureaucrats love metrics regardless of the value of those metrics. Maybe I wouldn't feel as disenfranchised if I wasn't in the fast moving world of ML with where peer review is like playing a slot machine except bigger schools and big labs get access to slot machines with higher payout rates (I see no quality difference between works from different institutions, rather the arxiv wave primes reviewers or language/proprietary {models,datasets} also prime reviewers).

I actually want people to feel disenfranchised at this point though. Because if there's anything I've learned, it's that we don't fix things before they break or even when they are noticeably broken. Rather we fix things when they're so broken that they're unusable, and typically only fix to minimal usability. Which is such a waste of resources. Maintenance is far cheaper.

[ModernMech]

>- Graduate students in year 3+ (median 5 years for PhD) are not taking courses and doing full time research and likely being a TA at the same time. (Tuition costs do not change)

Typically they will only take 1 credit after entering candidacy though, down from 9, so overall tuition drops significantly.

> It is better to buy shitty lab equipment because you don't have enough for good equipment and can't invest any excess

Sounds like you should have asked for a more appropriate amount of money in the grant.

> If you don't use the money in the allotted timeframe you're considered to have improperly managed the funding.

Grants can often be extended and funding can be supplemented.

> Students and professors "judge" works submitted to venues by other students and professors for no pay

Sure, but we are compensated by other academics reviewing our papers for no financial compensation.

> Venues take copyright ownership over works they deem valuable and put it behind a paywall

They take copyright over the submitted manuscript. I maintain copyright over preprints. Anyway, the point of writing the research is to distribute it, not to own copyright over it, so I don't see the problem. You can choose the venue, and not all venues take copyright over the submitted manuscript. If copyright is important, then choose one of those venues.

[Fomite]

A bunch of this is just...wrong.

"- Graduate students (in this setting) are typically funded, so the cost of their credits (often higher than undergrads) are determined by the university and such costs are a major factor of what is taken out of the grant the professor gets their portion (sometimes after the uni's cut!). The rest then goes to the student's salary and hopefully some left over for new lab equipment."

There are a number of ways to cover students - TAships, university level scholarships, and grant funding. For grant funding, the cost of the credits is something we can budget for, is in my university markedly lower than an undergraduates, and is budgeted for. This is portraying "We had to budget for someone working" in a weirdly salacious light.

"- Grant money must all be used and cannot be put aside for future investments. It is better to buy shitty lab equipment because you don't have enough for good equipment and can't invest any excess (even if by being spartan elsewhere). If you don't use the money in the allotted timeframe you're considered to have improperly managed the funding."

It's not better to buy shitty lab equipment - while grants don't like funding large capital purchases that will cross projects (except for the grants for this), the equipment doesn't vaporize. The cluster nodes and servers I bought for my first project are still running, and indeed go in applications for new grants as equipments I have, in a section often titled "Facilities and Equipment".

As for not spending it out in time, there's what's called a "No Cost Extension", which is "Hey, we didn't spend the money in time, can we have a bit more time?". The NSF grants the first one of these automatically, and one grant I'm on is on it's third (a program office has been very understanding about the difficulties of conducting research in hospitals during a pandemic).

I've never had pushback from a program for getting an NCE unless it was genuinely something where we messed up spending somehow.

"- A funded graduate student is considered 49% employee and 51% student."

Nope, they're 100% students. This is both good and bad for them, but it's true. They're just expected to spend half - or less - of their time in classes, and the rest on research.

"- Graduate students in year 3+ (median 5 years for PhD) are not taking courses and doing full time research and likely being a TA at the same time. (Tuition costs do not change)"

Every university I have been at has had a mechanism for a massive cut in tuition once a graduate student has passed their preliminary exams and become a candidate. It's a big enough one that literally my first instruction to my students is "File your ADB waiver please."

"- A successful graduate student sees their advisor less and less as they dive into their niche area of research where the advisor no longer has any level of expertise. (This is what's supposed to happen)"

When my students are "on approach" they see me and their committee more and more. They're just expected to drive those meetings more as well.

"- When a graduate student stops taking classes they still pay for credits and at the same rate (albeit through funding, which they are often writing for at this point. But prof gets the award)."

Again, this is simply incorrect.

"- Universities pay students and professors to publish papers and judge success by publication in venues"

Perhaps in the most abstract sense, in that scholarship is a metric by which I was judged for tenure and promotion, and without that, I don't have a job and thus am not paid. But there has never been a "paper bounty" or something like that for any position I've been in.

Venues do matter, and some places are cutthroat about it, but other places aren't. In my department for example, publications that are in respectable journals appropriate for your discipline will carry you all the way to full professor.

"- Students and professors "judge" works submitted to venues by other students and professors for no pay (i.e. on university time)"

I consider this part of my service obligation, and indeed when filling out annual reports and the like, list reviewerships and editorial positions.

The rest of your stuff on publication is actually refreshingly correct.

"- Promotions are given to those who's name is on the most works, regardless of position or contribution to that work."

I sit on my college's tenure and promotion committee. This just actively isn't true. We look at the difference between solo and co-authored papers, where a particular individual is on a paper and the balance between first, last and middle authorships (I'm in a field that doesn't alphabetize). We also consider whether someone is expected to be there, or is anticipated to contribute a lot to work that others will end up being the lead for (as a modeler, this is occasionally the position I'm in).

Then there's positions that give considerably more weight to teaching or service.

[stavros]

I don't understand this comment. So basically, I have a bunch of dirty money, I give it to a university, who then use all of it to buy a bunch of stuff that my own company sells, thus cleaning the money? So basically what I've done is I've given away $X million of stuff, and my company gets its 5% margin out of it?

This makes zero sense to me.

[exmadscientist]

They are removing conditions ("strings") from federal grant money and simultaneously taking a large cut to fund the university's general operations.

They are not laundering general money, they are doing a very specific thing here.

[stavros]

Hm, I guess I just don't know enough about how grants work to understand what's going on.

[vineyardmike]

It’s not laundering money in the criminal sense, it’s just removing restrictions and contractual limitations.

If I’m a grant giver, I want my money to go towards the consumables of research, not fund CapEx that can be used for someone else’s research. If I’m a lab, I want/need fancy and reusable equipment, which is excluded in the grant terms.

Some of the grant money goes to “university administration” (pick your term) because the university gets a cut. The university administration pays salaries, endowments, whatever with that money. They also buy that durable equipment that was excluded in the contract from their “general fund”, washing the connection to the original grant.

[jancsika]

To provide a helpful analogy:

Suppose you want to get karma for a low-effort take on an engineering forum. If you say, for example, "academia is just like the mafia," the low-effort will be immediately recognized and down-voted.

Alternatively, you can make an assertion that is outside of the scope of engineering. Like "this is actually money laundering." Engineers don't have the expertise to assess that, but they will happily carry on a discussion of whatever process you describe for that misnomer.

Voila! Your karma has been granted.

Now you just have to devote a tiny tiny amount of time and energy downstream to clarify that you weren't talking about "actually money laundering" in the sense of, you know, "general money", but rather something else entirely.

In my analogy, that tiny tiny amount of time and energy is like the lab equipment that the university provides to the poor little grant recipient.

[GabeIsko]

It's a weird chicken and egg scenario, isn't it? Grants should really be going to universities that have the equipment to do proper research. Universities rely on grants to fund their operations and lab maintenance. The whole thing just kind of gets grinned down. Additionally, there is public pressure to reduce government spending to lower taxes for private companies - who themselves are also slashing RnD budgets unless they can get a grant.

[stavros]

Ahh I see what you mean, thanks for explaining.

[burnished]

I'm not an expert so a pinch of salt is warranted but:

When you give some one money with legally recognized conditions then the organization has to honor those conditions. e.g donate money to a charity and tell them that it is to be used purchasing pens then that is all that money can be used for.

So if I understand correctly the 'scheme' here is that Lab A applies for and receives a grant that has stipulation X. As part of this process a portion of that grant goes to the hosting university without that stipulation. The university is free to spend that money however they wish, including providing some funds to Lab A for things that they really need but were not provided for under the grant.

[HansHamster]

The grant has restrictions on how the money can be used and the university takes a sizeable chunk of this (because they can). Then out of generosity and the pure kindness of their heart they might give you back a small chunk of that sum without the same restrictions.

[johnvaluk]

This isn't fair. Researchers put an extraordinary burden on administration in an academic institution. Research by its very nature is cutting edge and is always testing limits. "I want it now!" ignores existing streamlined processes and administration often provides value by enforcing compliance. This kind of oversight also minimizes a lot of abuse.

[tombert]

My dad used to be a full time professor of aerospace engineering. He liked the research, and he didn't mind teaching, but he quit after a few years because he absolutely hated having to play "salesman" all the time. He found himself seeing everyone as "potential funding", and he personally found it kind of hard to turn that mentality off.

He went back to industry after that, which has its share of legitimate problems, but at least they don't typically expect their engineers to also be sales people.

Also universities pay shit.

[fritzo]

Is that true that aerospace engineers are not expected to act as sales people? I've certainly found that in software, engineers who don't sell their work get reassigned or laid off.

[tnecniv]

It’s really all a professor does. You’re the boss of 5-10 people that are researching your half baked ideas Turing them into quarter baked ideas. Managing them + other obligations take up all their time. Very little is spent getting their hands dirty.

[robwwilliams]

Why all of this cynicism? Science research at many universities is awesome and efficient. And in biomedical research and CS it is kicking ass. We are a gloomy bunch here in HN.

[exmadscientist]

That does not match my experience with multiple universities and national labs, as a grad student and a member of research staff. Not at all. Where the heck are you at where it's actually working out for once?

[infamouscow]

Define many.

[GabeIsko]

I do get the sense that it wasn't as bad in the past. My grandfather, as an aerospace engineer would talk about how the entire culture changed around the 80s, and it came at the expense of diligent engineering. I looked at some of the management reports from his heyday. The management structure has it's own problems - it's pretty inscrutable waterfall management. But, I definitely know they weren't working on sales.

[BeetleB]

Professors - particularly newly hired ones, need to spend almost all their time selling. Between that and teaching courses, they have little time for research. That's off loaded to their grad students.

When I was in grad school, the refrain of "I'm not going to become a professor because I actually want to do research" is common. They usually try to go to national labs, etc instead.

[tombert]

I can't speak for most engineers (and I really can't speak for my dad either), but I think my dad is in a more researchey position at a BigCo. I think he does do proposals but I think a majority of his time is research now.

[bachmeier]

> they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets

This leads to some very interesting conversations at universities.

"Your department doesn't bring in many grants, so we can't grant your budget request."

"But grants aren't revenue. They're money used to cover the expense of doing research."

"Yes, but they bring in overhead."

Then when the granting agencies try to cut overhead:

"We can't afford a cut in overhead. That money is used to cover the cost of doing research. We'd be losing money."

[cvwright]

Even more baffling, there are studies showing that most US universities actually manage to lose money on federally funded research.

Yes, the overhead rates are obscene, but somehow the compliance costs are even greater.

[araes]

Having tried to write a large grant recently, can slightly comment. I attempted to work with a university, because like most grants, never available without an academic tie-in. In a pithy way, the only individual grants are mostly NEA/NEH grants about writing books about writing books (also applied for those).

The university I worked with had a 40+% overhead rate auto-included. This could not be negotiated. If you want to work with us, we add this amount to our Govt. request.

The university added a lot of extra work because of this. I basically brought them a proposal, I literally walked over to their partnership office and said "I've written a proposal I'd like to work with you on." It was mostly written, and said I think "some number" would be reasonable. They said, we don't apply without 40+% overhead, rewrite the whole grant so it works with our overhead and faculty tie-in requirements. I said that seems very large, and then none of the other numbers work. They said, write with 40+%.

The eventual result was that the university wanted me to work as a sub-contractor being paid less than a different contractor they were going to hire as a specialist, so I could have the pleasure of partnering with them.

Also, it needs to be completed a month before the deadline, because then all our internals need to churn over the money numbers (and predictably came back a check mark). I was glad it lost.

[adolph]

See also How Hollywood Studios Manage To Officially Lose Money On Movies That Make A Billion Dollars

For example, consider the case of Winston Groom who was promised 3% of the net profits of a film based on a little book he wrote called Forrest Gump. As noted, Paramount would later argue that the film, which cleared almost 13 times its production budget, a total of $700 million at the box office or about $1.2 billion today, had actually lost $62 million, all in an attempt to weasel out of paying Groom, among others.

https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2020/06/how-hollywo...

[mistrial9]

wikipedia EN does not make that so clear, but they do also mention that the book itself by Winston Groom sold a million+ more copies after the movie came out..

there are remarkable stories of swindling of all kinds out of Hollywood, of course! great movie too

[robwwilliams]

Why obscene? Is rent obscene. Building, supporting, and growing research space does have expenses. And federal grants require much administrative support. Overheads are typically 50% on top of the direct research support-$1 support for every $2 of research effort. Completely reasonable.

[cvwright]

50% was on the low end, 10 years ago when I submitted my first proposal. I’ve been out of the game for a while now, but I don’t think the rates have gone down.

[Fomite]

My kingdom for someone, someday sitting down and figuring out what the average corporation's overhead rate would be if they had to account for it like universities. Because as much as it seems high, there's no real comparison, because no sane company would accept an accounting scheme where their internet connections, phone lines, lights and heat, administrative assistants, copy paper, building maintenance, etc. couldn't be included as part of the cost of doing business, but had to be shuffled to some other category.

In my experience, when universities are allowed to submit straightforward total cost bids for things like contracts, we're often fairly competitive with private industry.

[robwwilliams]

They actually have gone down. Feds have tightened up. I would guess the national average is about 52% and at that overhead rate university do lose money!

Here is old news that the HN community needs to catch up on.

https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-plan-reduce-over...

[renewiltord]

American universities are a fantastic scheme. I'm working on a project right now to see if I can bring this to high schools. They're a massive machine to move money from taxpayers into certain organizations very effectively. That's why you'll see that the loudest voices for student loan forgiveness go to these universities. Come on, you have a Divinities degree from Harvard? That's a fictional thing. Of course you're advocating for student loan debt discharge by the taxpayers. Ideally, if you're running the university, everyone gets $1 m to spend on university, and you charge $1 m.

Once we get school vouchers going we can do that for high school too. It's going to be a revolution, man. Pure money printing.

And what's anyone going to try to say? You can't touch US universities or schools. Education is important! I think I could probably give one or two poor kids a scholarship and trot them out every now and then.

[tnecniv]

Harvard’s Divinity School is basically why the university exists in the first place and is very real.

The cost of tuition for undergrads at schools is certainly ridiculous and a way to siphon money from the government though. That said, I take umbrage with the people that complain about liberal arts degrees. The education is as valuable as any other kind of education in that it hones critical thinking skills in a specific discipline. Those skills are applicable to many, many jobs. The engineers I knew and liberal arts students I knew that struggled to get jobs after college struggled because they had nothing else on their resume when they graduated because they put zero thought into getting a job until school was over.

[paul80808]

I've worked in postsecondary policy for a dozen years and while this perspective is cynical,it's painfully close to reality in many cases. "Paying the Price" by Sarah Goldrick-Rab chronicles some horrifying case studies , if you're interested.

[chefandy]

... Harvard Divinity is considered one of the best divinity schools in the world.

[ilya_m]

> I'm reading tea leaves here, but my guess as to why she was never hired is that she was deemed "unable to get grants".

Rest assured, this is exactly what happened. University administrators have no expertise, interest, or motivation to identify and invest in promising research direction - they outsource this task to funding agencies. The only signal universities are extremely skillful in reading is dollar amounts.

I do not necessarily criticize this setup. Think of a research university as a start-up accelerator of sorts. Its main task is to give resources to secure sources of funding, not provide funds themselves.

[GabeIsko]

It's a big picture issue though, right? Where else is scientific research supposed to be conducted? It can't all be profitable.

Not that I know how to manage a research department or anything. But it is a bad sign if even prestigious universities have a poor grip on what important scientific research is beyond "what makes us money".

In this instance we are talking about UPenn. Wharton is a pretty productive wallstreet pipeline. If they can't use their endowment to fund important scientific research, it is a massive problem.

[godelski]

> Quality is an after thought taken care of __by what passes for peer review__.

I can feel the strong disdain in these words that can only be expressed by someone close to the academic world. I've honestly decided to just stop using the phrase all together because it's just a misnomer and not meaningful at this point other than a metrics for the bureaucrats.

[kurthr]

I'm sure you'll find lots of people at her school who know the game, but for everyone else who hasn't heard.

In order to get good grants you need to run "successful" experiments, which means you need to propose to find something interesting, but that means you want to already know there's something interesting there. That means you really need to bootstrap to have already run enough of the experiment that you know where it's going to go, before you write the grant for the money to run the experiment (and analyze the results, write papers, pay grad students, etc). You also need the money to run enough of the experiments for the new proposals you're going to write next so that they are "successful". Running experiments and not getting interesting results will lead to not getting future grants, because those handing out money have memories.

Second thing. The best way to get tenure is to have such a huge group working for you (e.g. 30 grad students), because the provost will be terrified there isn't room for other grant writers in the department to get the money to support them and the lab you've built. Of course managing this is such a full time job before even teaching, that you'll be totally overwhelmed and delegating almost all of the research, papers, and grant writing to senior students. Once you get tenure you can slim back down to about 5 students.

Also, if you come from a national lab or somewhere that gives you experience writing proposals (and preferably reviewing them) that is a huge advantage since you know exactly what the other reviewers are looking for. Once you write successful proposals and papers, you'll be invited to the committees and review other papers for important journals in your field. Of course a lot of this is again a bootstrap and treadmill problem.

[godelski]

> Second thing. The best way to get tenure is to have such a huge group working for you (e.g. 30 grad students), because the provost will be terrified there isn't room for other grant writers in the department to get the money to support them and the lab you've built.

There's another factor too. More students means more papers and your h-index goes up. Were we to suppose that all students were equal and that there is a noise associated with the likelihood of publication and another noise with the number of citations then if either of those noise variables are large, you should maximize quantity over quality. Because you're simply increasing the odds that you'll hit a jackpot.

In fact, if you pull the data from csrankings.org you'll find that the first 30 (all I pulled because I'm lazy and not a web person) school's rank is practically a function of the number of publishing professors at that university. So the "more workers = more better" tactic actually scales from lab to department. If we look a little harder, I think we can all see the limitation of the metrics being used here and why they're so easy to hack. More importantly, why these metrics result in a dominating momentum force (aka. rich get richer). Maybe we should start reevaluating how we are evaluating systems. After all, it is neither fair nor an efficient usage of resources. If we're going to continue the trend though, the only solution is to allocate more resources... (which to be fair the pool of available resources is increasing year over year, but the allocation isn't)

[Fomite]

Sitting on our tenure and promotion committee, I'd be extremely skeptical about someone having 30 graduate students doing a good job supervising them, and we consider having a lab of 3-5 students to be fairly productive for a pre-tenure faculty member.

I think the causation is reversed - if you're successful enough at writing grants, which involves convincing your peers that your research is that good, to support 30 graduate students, you've already met the qualifications for tenure which involves convincing your peers that your research is good enough to want you in their department for as long as possible.

Personally, my work load is worse post-tenure.

[IshKebab]

Definitely the case. A Nobel prize comes from one great discovery. An academic career comes from ongoing successful grant applications.

[WalterBright]

This is hilarious. I've been lectured by several PhD's that insist the NSF is an unbiased organization, doling out grants based purely on scientific merit.

Of course, it is nothing of the sort.

[justinclift]

> The hiring process is setup basically to filter for folks who they think are the most likely to publish lots of papers ...

In Australia, it did seem to be that way up until maybe a year or so ago.

These days however there seems to be far greater emphasis on hiring people from er... "diverse" backgrounds, over everything else. Strongly preferred to be non-male too.

Don't even bother applying if your a Caucasian male, regardless of your qualifications, academic history / publishing record, etc.

Note - that's not just a random impression, that's what I've been told by friends working at major Aust Uni's when they want to vent.

And yeah, it's as bad as that sounds. :(

[contrarian1234]

I'm not in the same field, nor in the USA, but I've found the incentives usually work but there is a misunderstanding of the role of the professor.

All the professors I know have their teams pursuing multiple lines of work. Some are "safe" and some are more out there. A typical "safe" area is usually running some very expensive piece of equipment (like a mass spectrometer or something) b/c that automatically generates collaborations and gets your name on lots of papers. You need to mix and match and use the safer work to fund your more experimental ideas. They also basically never do too much research themselves. They will dip in and give suggestions and guidance and help out, but their primary role is to teach and act as a lab manager - directing students and postdocs to different areas of research. So in a way, if you're being a professor and personally deeply involved in the research, then you're "doing it wrong".

On a high level, at least from these popsci descriptions of her work, it kinda feels like Katalin Karikó was just not doing the professor role correctly? The fact she was working on this one problem (and seemingly nothing else?) is very surprising for a professor. Professors aren't just tenured post-docs. If you don't want to be a lab manager then I don't think being a professor is the job for you

[kevinventullo]

I guess the question I have is whether this is really the optimal setup. Shouldn’t we be encouraging more tenure-aged faculty to be getting their hands dirty with research?

[Fomite]

There are professors that choose to go this route. It is very risky, but if it pays off, it pays off big.

[robwwilliams]

> Quality is an after thought taken care of by what passes for peer review.

Cynical and generally wrong. Peer review of papers and grant applications is obviously far from perfect—-just like humanity and our messy cultures—-but it often works well nonetheless.

We read the horror stories but read less about shining successes.

[Kye]

Was it always like this or headed here? I'm curious if flat government funding for research against rising costs creates or amplifies counterproductive incentives.

[godelski]

A little of both. The problem is that evaluation of research work is insanely difficult. A lot of people think it's easy because "the world is objective, it either works or doesn't" but research is cutting edge and you're only chipping away at a much larger picture. It can take decades for a work to reveal itself as truly profound or utter shit. The problem, which I rant about in a longer comment, is that instead of acknowledging the noise we've embraced poor metrics and encouraged the hacking of those metrics. I call this Goodhart's Hell. People forget, metrics are models and all models are wrong. You have to constantly be questioning your metrics and determine how well aligned they are with your goals or else you'll drift (the environment moves, so your metric must move too).

I think actually the better way to solve this, which may seem paradoxical, is to actually increase funding. Not in size of single prizes for grants (well... we need that too, but that's another discussion), but in the availability. The reason being that the hacking is partially encouraged by the competition for a very scarce resource. A resource that compounds. Due to this (and some nuances, see other post) we're not actually rewarding those who perform the best work (we may actually be discouraging that) but those who become lucky. A "good work" is simply one with high citation counts, which is heavily weighted on the publicity around that work. Which is why top universities have big media departments, pay news publishers to advertise their works, and why survey papers generate huge counts.

The problem is that the system is rather complex and there are no simple or "obvious" solutions. "Good enough" is also not clear because too low order of an approximation can actually take you away from your intended goals, not a small step towards as one might think.

[blululu]

We have been increasing funding for 50 years and the problem has not been fixed. America currently sets the record in science funding (in raw amount and percentage of gdp) for any society in History and it seems to have these issues. Even if increasing funding would solve the problem, it is, at best, a short term fix. So long as there is growth in the system you can hide a lot of blight and rot. There is enough to go around so the zero sum bad actors don’t take the full pie. But the long problem with such a solution is that you cannot increase funding indefinitely. At somepoint there is a limit to how much money society can allocate to these projects. We need to make our spending work properly.

[caddemon]

Yeah any increase in funding needs to go to meaningfully different grant processes. Giving more money to the existing funding structures will not fix a damn thing. Because the present system is just woefully unscaleable. More money to current NIH -> more PhD students -> tenure track competition remains fucking ridiculous.

[Fomite]

We have been increasing funding in some ways. But, for example, the amount for a non-modular NIH R01 hasn't changed since the Clinton administration. A lot of individual grants are just as much work as they have been, more competitive, but pays for less science.

[WalterBright]

Any source of funding will spawn an industry designed around extracting every dollar from it.

[godelski]

Exactly. Or equally: money can only exchange hands by means of a leaky bucket. But I'd say that it's not a big problem that the bucket is leaky. Goodhart's Hell is when that extraction industry dominates or that bucket isn't so much leaky as it is missing the bottom which differentiates it from a tube. Some people call this peak capitalism and it's right to complain, but I think this happens in whatever system you use, just exhibits itself in whatever metric dominates (in our case capital/dollars. Also typically capital/dollars in communism too because both systems are explicitly about capital ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).

[lbeltrame]

50% for overheads? Is that university serious? Where I live grants that have more than 30% raise many, many eyebrows...

[ChuckMcM]

And this is also why I think the single biggest innovation starter billionaires could do would be to apply grant funds to new Professors for interesting research.

[golem14]

Not a billionaire, but of course this would be great. Are there good suggestions on how to do that without paying the university overhead AND being tax advantaged ?

I cannot just go and give Professor X $10K to do this research and claim a tax writeoff.

Are there existing nonprofits who do this ?

Are there Howtos on setting up such nonprofits ?

Genuinely interested. Not just for academia, even for open source. I can donate to the FSF, but if I want more people improving/maintaining emacs or vim and those people get paid for it, that's probably not the way, as the FSF does not do this sort of thing, I believe.

[Fomite]

A couple things:

1) You can actively just donate money to a professor's lab. You cannot usual direct what they do with it, because that's a grant (or contract), but if you just think Professor X does amazing work, you can give them money.

2) There are tons of existing non-profits that do this. My department, for example, was founded thanks to the generous donations of two non-profits.

3) A key that HN always forgets (or doesn't know about) with overhead is that if a funder pre-specifies that they'll only pay X for overhead, the university will almost always accept that. Now it hurts a lot when it's 0%, and I actually object when people do that because overhead pays for things needed in research, and at my university that's essentially saying "I'm donating this, but the taxpayers of $State will pick up the rest", but we regularly accept grants for very low levels of indirects.

You just have to state it in advance.

4) You could also endow a chair if you wanted to make sure that University X always has someone working on Y supported with your money, if you've got enough.

[golem14]

Thanks, this is very helpful (and hopeful).

[zamfi]

> I cannot just go and give Professor X $10K to do this research and claim a tax writeoff.

You absolutely can. These are called “gifts”. Typically, the overhead rate is very low (~10%?) and they are tax deductible as a charitable contribution.

That said, you don’t then get to say “do this research” directly. (That’s called a “directed research” grant and comes with a higher overhead.) But you would basically only give money to a lab that’s already doing research you find interesting — and of course you can talk to them about the research you’d want them to do, this distinction just refers to whether there’s a contract for specific research activities or not.

[ChuckMcM]

Setting up a non-profit is not that difficult[1], especially if you're doing educational work vs say politics or NGO type work. You start with a "regular" LLC company, and then ask the IRS to certify it as a non-profit. An attorney that has done this before can probably set it up for $10 - $15K, less if they give you the friends and family rate. You could make it an S-corp which is a bit more complicated and might cost more, and for this purpose would be overkill.

Generating a grant is harder. I went through that process when I was working with IBM to fund some research at CU Boulder on machine learning work that was aligned with IBM's Watson research at the time. As the comment lower down in this thread indicates the University sets its own rules and takes its own share of any monies "donated" for research. The person you want to talk to is the University President and then probably the Provost. The President can point you to the right person and see that they are willing to take a meeting with you about your proposed grant. My experience is that professors will be very enthusiastic the University somewhat more reserved. My experience with CU Boulder was that the politics were pretty intense/petty[2]

My take was that the net amounts end up needing like 3x that is base grant to get what you want to give the professor something. Numbers that are still in the noise for very high net worth individuals but a barrier for less endowed individuals. The good news is that your non-profit can run fundraisers and bring in donations that you then funnel to research. This was something suggested to me as a way some people want to fund something but want to put a bit of space publicly between them and the funding. The non-profit has to report who donated (over say $5000) and how they spent their money, but it doesn't have to "connect the dots" directly so to speak.

[1] I happen to be the Treasurer of one which gave me an opportunity to see how they work in California and what's involved in doing the taxes :-)

[2] Silly example, the Department Chair was blocking any grant for an Associate Professor in the department unless it included a separate grant for a different professor in the department.

[golem14]

Yeah, isn't that crazy? 3x overhead? For what? I want to support the research, not the university.

[ChuckMcM]

I agree. The university will argue that if they didn’t exist there would not be a place to do research.

[KennyBlanken]

I'm sick of lies and misrepresentations from people who clearly don't know what they're talking about, talking like schools are greedily taking away poor Petey PhD's hard-earned grant money.

First off: grants from most places factor in the administrative overhead. That is negotiated between the school and the grant org. For the NIH, it averages fifty percent. The school/university is very restricted in what they can bill a lab for; for example, I worked somewhere that we couldn't charge for storage because that would have violated NIH's rules on double-billing, because the storage cluster was paid for via administrative overhead.

Chances are when someone says "I got a $1M grant to study bubblegum's effects on the gall bladder", they actually got $1M plus another $500,000.

Second, that money isn't being greedily stolen. That overhead help pays for, directly or indirectly, things like (notice I said "like", because I am not an expert in the exact rules around what can and cannot be paid for via overhead):

* the building

* the real estate the building sits on

* the utilities to keep the building lit and comfortable (which in the case of life/bio/chemistry sciences can be an enormous challenge given how much airflow lab space needs, which is far greater than office airflow...and then there's biosafety / chemical hoods)

* security, both equipment and staff (which can be substantial if the university or school does biomedical research in any sensitive areas such as stem cells, animal research, infectious disease, etc). This includes monitoring for equipment failure (for example, sample storage systems often have dry contact alarm hookups so that if they fail, security or facilities finds out ASAP and can alert people)

* the utilities to power equipment, such as -80 freezers (just one of which can use more energy than a US household)...most of us would also go pale if we saw the power bill for some physics labs) and other "utilities" like vacuum, purified water, etc.

* construction, maintenance, cleaning...both staff and supplies

* grounds maintenance, everything from mowing the lawn to leaf and snow removal

* technology costs - telephone and networking infrastructure and staff, server admins for everything from websites to email to storage to computational clusters, desktop support staff

* business administration, which includes, but is a lot more than just, payroll/benefits/HR. Grant writing/administration is often its own entire department, because you need people who not only know how to submit the paperwork, but frankly, also follow faculty around badgering them to fix or submit paperwork on time - faculty are incredibly lazy about this.

* all the services the lab's grad students, staff, postdocs, and faculty use and don't think anything about, like shuttle busses, the library, and so on.

[PheonixPharts]

Regarding your first point, was the parent comment edited or did you miss this part as they clearly address this issue:

> (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets).

Parent comment isn't making the claim that "schools are greedily taking away poor Petey PhD's hard-earned grant money."

Rather bemoaning the fact that academic success (and even entry into the field at all) is very, very closely tied to the ability to generate revenue and more so the corollary that quality of research performed always at best takes a back seat, or at worst becomes a liability if it gets in the way of bringing in more money.

[bachmeier]

I think they were probably replying to exmadscientist, not thelittlenag.

[WoodenChair]

> First off: grants from most places factor in the administrative overhead. That is negotiated between the school and the grant org. For the NIH, it averages fifty percent.

You write as if a 50% administrative overhead is healthy. In non-regulatory captured industries it's almost unheard of. Even most non-profits that are considered the best by Charity Navigator have administrative overheads of <20%.

[jltsiren]

First, charities are closer to research funders than grant recipients. They are more likely to hire contractors to do the actual work or just send the money instead of doing the work themselves.

Second, academic overhead rates are usually stated relative to direct costs. A 50% overhead rate means 1/3 of total costs.

Third, it's not just administrative overhead, but it's also used for paying for facilities and the services required for using and maintaining them. The actual administrative overhead, for administrative services and facilities used by the administration, is usually below 20% of the total.

[cycomanic]

It's funny how you accuse others of misrepresentation but are yourself misrepresenting.

Regarding overheads yes they pay for some of these things, but they also are clearly being used to prop up ever increasing administrative bodies (whose salaries have often grown disproportionately compared to academic staff).

Just some examples (and they are in physics/engineering and not the US so specifics are not directly comparable).

Professors had to pay the their salary + overheads on the percentage they worked on the project (those percentages often add up to to more than 100%, while not reducing teaching load).

Regarding rent, one of my colleagues compared the rates to rent in the prime location in the city centre and they were significantly higher. This is despite the fact that the buildings were often paid through large grants (who were often written by academics) and land was owned by the university.

In another case, I know of some universities were the biggest business unit was the real estate management unit (they were lucky as a university with significant land in the CBD of one of the most expensive cities in the world. In that country the university could not charge the academics for rent (funding rules), so instead the academics were put in the smallest space possible because renting out was more profitable. The money from renting also never was used for running the university.

Regarding paperwork, you call academics lazy. What I have seen is that almost all systems around reporting are designed to make life for the administrators easy, while academic time is treated as free (as academics don't get paid overtime). As examples, as an academic if you spend money e.g. when travelling for a conference you have to keep the receipts to justify spending (no issue with that). After you had to fill out the accounting categorisation fields for every $ you spend, scan the receipts and send the originals and the scanned receipts plus some form that had to be filled in online but also printed (finance couldn't print apparently) to finance. The spending had the to be approved by at least one other academic (head of lab, school or faculty). A friend was made to write a statuary declaration I front of a justice of the peace, because a $6 receipt from subway didn't say it was a sandwich.

For a similar example from teaching. I was responsible for the final year projects in an engineering degree. The university required all grades to be in the system two weeks after end of term. Because the grade in this program depended on a report which was handed at the end of term and all academics were extremely busy with grading their own courses, it was essentially impossible to collect the grades before the deadline. What that meant is that for every student we had to fill out a grade amendment that had several pages. While I had admin help to fill the form, I still had to check every page, initial the page and sign the document for >300 students.

Admin at university is absolutely insane and not designed with the academics in mind.

I'll stop this rant here, because it's already way too long, but I just had to reply because the post above just reeks of how many "centralised admin" seem to think of academics as a cost centre that is lazy and doesn't do any work. At my university I know that when there were redundancies admin were complaining that they didn't fire the professors, because they don't do anything anyway.

[FireBeyond]

A corollary to your story, from my partner who started as Payroll at a university and now is the Accounting Manager, reporting to the Financial Controller.

> prop up ever increasing administrative bodies (whose salaries have often grown disproportionately compared to academic staff).

Over the four years she has been there, faculty have received 3 3-5% annual raises. Staff have received ... 1 1% raise.

Faculty and staff were allowed to start working remotely where appropriate during COVID, or "expand the use of a home office".

Faculty got a $7,000 stipend to "set up a home office". Staff got ... nothing.

Faculty also lobbied for "increasing flexibility for students" by "offering all classes all terms", regardless of enrollment. In practice, this has lead to numerous professors and adjuncts getting paid for teaching a class that often has 2 or even 1 student enrolled.

> As examples, as an academic if you spend money e.g. when travelling for a conference you have to keep the receipts to justify spending (no issue with that). After you had to fill out the accounting categorisation fields for every $ you spend, scan the receipts and send the originals and the scanned receipts plus some form that had to be filled in online but also printed (finance couldn't print apparently) to finance. The spending had the to be approved by at least one other academic (head of lab, school or faculty). A friend was made to write a statuary declaration I front of a justice of the peace, because a $6 receipt from subway didn't say it was a sandwich.

And the counter to this is how for many departments getting hold of their company card statements is like pulling teeth. They just try to tell Finance "just pay the bill, thanks". And then audits find faculty paying for flights for their partners on the university card... or first class upgrades... or very liquid lunches.

In fact, the university recently found themselves in a near 8 digit budget deficit, with every department overrunning. And then faculty tried to throw Finance under the bus - "How could this happen?"

Finance's answer - "Because your departments generally refuse to do purchase orders and an approval process. The first time we hear of most of your expenses is when you hand us an invoice and say 'we bought something, please pay for it'". It also ignores the reality that for the most part, Finance is a facilitator, not an arbitrator. Faculty are adults - if they're given a budget (which they largely come up with themselves), then stick to it.

Things easily go both ways.

[bachmeier]

> Faculty got a $7,000 stipend to "set up a home office". Staff got ... nothing.

That's a very unusual university. I have never heard of such a thing. During covid, it was common for faculty to take large pay cuts, but not staff. The $7000 you mention is less than my pay was cut. Staff were unaffected.

> They just try to tell Finance "just pay the bill, thanks".

I don't believe this if you are talking about a US university. That's just not how it works.

> And then audits find faculty paying for flights for their partners on the university card... or first class upgrades... or very liquid lunches.

That's why there's no such thing as "just pay the bill, thanks". They don't pay without knowing what it's for. First and foremost, they have to confirm it's legal. After that, they have to confirm they're in compliance with tax laws. I'm not even getting into state laws if it's a public university and all the other potential problems. Paying a bill without knowing what it's for would simply never, ever happen at a US university.

[FireBeyond]

Without outing her university, I will add the (possible) caveat of "private Catholic university".

> During covid, it was common for faculty to take large pay cuts, but not staff.

The only real benefit to staff during COVID's early days was in the (where else) athletics department (and this is very much not a sports school), where all the coaching and related staff were kept on at full pay, and only "required" on their own recognizance to "spend time keeping up with relevant information in your field".

> That's why there's no such thing as "just pay the bill, thanks". They don't pay without knowing what it's for.

The various schools thought process is "We (the school) knows the bill details, supervisor signed off, so, Finance just needs the sum total and to send payment".

[cycomanic]

The university your partner works at sounds like non of the universities I have worked at or heard of.

Regarding home office, when covid hit we went to all online teaching with a lead time of a few weeks (changing an in person course to online teaching is not straight forward). There was no funding for setting up the home office and rules around covid meant that you couldn't even deduce your office at home from taxes.

Even when we went to hybrid teaching there was no central support for kitting out lecture halls with cameras/microphones etc. Academics often used some research (or personal) funds for purchasing cameras etc.

About flights and misuse of funds. I find it hard to believe that people could purchase flights with their cards at all universities I have been at you had to use the approved travel agent for flights. Also the only people allowed to fly business were high level management/admin, no matter where funding was from. Also I don't have an issue with submitting receipts, however I don't see why I have to spend the time on scanning receipts which I also have to send in as original. Moreover why do I need to know freaking tax codes for a train ticket or some lab consumables? Isn't that exactly what finance's job is?

[Fomite]

"And the counter to this is how for many departments getting hold of their company card statements is like pulling teeth. They just try to tell Finance "just pay the bill, thanks". And then audits find faculty paying for flights for their partners on the university card... or first class upgrades... or very liquid lunches."

I've never been at a university where I've been able to tell the finance office "Just pay it" without pushback.

[Fomite]

"Professors had to pay the their salary + overheads on the percentage they worked on the project (those percentages often add up to to more than 100%, while not reducing teaching load)."

They better not have. This is actively illegal. One of the major activities of our grants office is making sure you don't go over ~ 95% effort (you also can't write grants while supported on a grant).

[glitchc]

Total bs, all of this. Thank you for conveniently ignoring the major sources of revenue for a university, namely tuition, in particular international tuition, govt. funding and endowments. Overhead from grants is a tiny line item in comparison on the balance sheet.

The overhead is basically a tax on research and robs professors of valuable resources. It only goes to pay an ever-growing, over-bloated admin staff. This is coming from someone who has first-hand knowledge from both sides of the equation.

[OfSanguineFire]

There are countries where students are not charged tuition (or, if tuition is charged, it is meagre) and there overhead from grants is most definitely seen as important revenue.

[raincom]

Your wife is on tenure-track and Kariko was on a lower track designed for postdocs, researchers, leading to research assistant/associate professor, etc. Kariko was treated badly on the track she was on——a track that doesn’t require stringent filtering. So your comment is not that relevant.