[spamizbad]

> Colleges need to get back to their mission and ditch the sports, drinking, non-academic facilities. Get back to teaching, standards and research and stop ripping off students to backbreaking loan debt.

Can you explain how cutting research funding achieve these goal? Especially since many of the schools most impacted by these cuts are very much not party or college sports schools.

Those most impacted are R1 schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_research_universities_...

[AnimalMuppet]

Cutting administration achieves these goals. (It's not the skyrocketing number of tenured professors that is driving college costs.)

Now, do you have to cut research in order to cut administration? Research takes a lot of administration, but that should be paid for by the research, not by the students.

[fluidcruft]

It seems like capping indirect rates achieves the goal of defunding administrative bloat while preserving funding to the actual research?

[jhbadger]

No. Indirect costs on grants aren't some slush fund used to fund whatever but are real costs involved in doing science. It costs money to build lab facilities, maintain and repair lab equipment, pay salaries of support staff like IT folks and lab techs. If indirect costs get capped, more of the actual grant will have be used for these things and less science will get done.

[fluidcruft]

Included in this overhead is administrative staff salaries and administration's facilities that researchers themselves have no control over. That's all spending controlled by research administrators and the institutions administrative layers that control research including decisions about who they hire for administrative roles and various aspects of strategic planning.

[newsclues]

It’s the rotten bureaucracy (bloated administration) in academia that results in the symptoms of non academic spending. The root cause is the management that is not allocating resources to the core mission and instead focusing on administrative costs (salaries), and expensive facilities that aren’t academically necessary.

You don’t get the professional managerial class investing in world class research labs, they spend more on sports!

[palmotea]

>> Does the book describe how there's a professional managerial class that took over higher education inflating its costs, degrading its services, undermining its ideals, watering down it's standards?

>> Colleges need to get back to their mission and ditch the sports, drinking, non-academic facilities. Get back to teaching, standards and research and stop ripping off students to backbreaking loan debt.

> Can you explain how cutting research funding achieve these goal?

It doesn't, but I think there's a real connection there. The cutting funding is a backlash, and the correct response to that is to change to achieve a more secure societal position that doesn't invite a backlash. The current cuts to research funding are the direct result of universities allowing themselves to become identified as elements of a particular political faction. But the universities have been weakened and have few allies to call on, because they're now widely perceived to be expensive rip-offs, etc.