Researchers need to afford to live, and that money comes from research grants. If this was even a problem, which it isn’t, the root cause is capitalism.
Researchers need to afford to live, and that money comes from research grants.
Not really and certainly not directly. Almost all research grants (at least in Canada and the EU) are for the costs of running research, not for the PI’s salary, which their institution pays. I know those two can’t be separated, but the point is still true that most of the grant money that individual researchers apply for can only be spent on conducting research. It is not for them to live, it is for them to do their job.
If this was even a problem, which it isn’t,
What do you mean by this part?
The neoliberal logic consuming academia is bad for academia as a whole, and anyone who can stand to benefit from higher education and/or quality research (i.e., practically everyone everywhere). Almost anyone working on research in academia is severely underpaid and they’re expected to work countless hours for free. Academia is a house of cards help together by the grindset of graduate students and early- or mid-career researchers.
The ways that grunts and funding are allocated are deeply flawed, and fields that aren’t tied to profitable industries (e.g., “life sciences” like biology and chemistry) are severely underfunded. See:
The only winners in the current system are the profit-driven capitalists who fund research for good PR and ‘passive’ income, and the few others in academia who game funding systems to cash out on shitty dead-end or naively idealist research
When they ran out of money doing it that way
For the same reason the person tweeted rather than googled this thought.
Alternative idea: perform and publish misleading research to push a corporate driven narrative for money.
When your future began to depend on what you were published in, and those publishers had to compete with corporate interests. Capitalism poisons nearly everything it touches, but especially academia.
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Isn’t that the same thing? Why work as a scientist when you don’t have interesting research to do? And if you do, then getting funding should be possible. I know that it can get quite tricky and exhausting but what exactly do those people expect? The whole job of scientists is to come up with worthwhile questions and to find answers.
No, the number of grants you get determines whether you get tenure / raises. So the government tells everyone what research ideas they will fund and everyone has to do as many of those as possible.
Usually professors come up with grants and students are solving the questions. Professors just don’t have time to do both.
The problem the tweet is pointing out is that research scientists are mostly concerned about getting and keeping funding since their jobs and the jobs of those working for them depend on it. Thus they’ll target research questions that are deemed sexy by those in control of the funds. This can lead to a few areas being over-researched and other worthy areas of inquiry being underfunded. Plus that over-researched work can be of questionable quality and importance since a lot of less-good scientists get funded due to the overabundance of funds.
This system is one of the primary reasons I decided not to go into academia
Me too. Also my lack of intellect.
If that’s what you were worried about you would have been fine, trust me
Image: Gus Fring
Text: You didn’t go into academia as a protest against the corruption of academia by capitalism.
I didn’t go into academia because brain hurty.
We are not the same.
That’s the same thing lol
“what happened to you, academia? You used to be about the science. Now you’re just about the money.”
I’m gonna go with “immediately after the fall of the soviet union” when the feds pulled the plug on all funding for higher education in lieu of doing donuts in the parking lot and invading Iraq over and over again
Money, money , money …
It’s a rich man’s world.
Ain’t it funny?
People will always optimize their methods to maximize resource gain. It’s a fact of life since the dawn of life. Even animals do this.
I’ve seen cancer researchers lie to people with dead loved ones to get funding. I’ve seen physicists do bogus experiments that yield nothing with a nice dark matter story just to get funding… it’s become marketing at this stage.
This is my problem with climate change research. Those who attempt to oppose the “narrative” never get funding. How are we supposed to claim science is unbiased when bias is what’s making the results come out?
It’s inherent to grants. If you want scientists to choose their topics you have to fund them unconditionally.
What a weird take. Alternative version:
“When did authors lose sight of the fact that books should be written about story ideas they already have, instead of trying to think up stories to write about.”
Why would we want people to stop coming up with ideas that would be beneficial enough to be funded?
I take it you don’t work in academia
