Trump has destroyed US science
My chairman predicts that the proposed NIH cuts will be a “nothingburger.’ Even if the budget cuts don’t come to pass (and I’m pretty sure the indirect costs cuts will stick), the damage will already have been done. Creative, energetic American scientists who seek academic positions will move to other countries.
Back in 1986, I only applied to US faculty positions. If I were a postdoc looking for a faculty position today, I’d be looking in Canada, the UK and Australia at least. Probably also France and Switzerland.
Trump is actively destroying American scientific research and leadership in science. Why? Because authoritarians can’t allow an independent nexus of authority and respect.
Back in 1986, I only applied to US faculty positions. If I were a postdoc looking for a faculty position today, I’d be looking in Canada, the UK and Australia at least. Probably also France and Switzerland.
Trump is actively destroying American scientific research and leadership in science. Why? Because authoritarians can’t allow an independent nexus of authority and respect.
It would be interesting to hear your chairman’s thinking in greater detail. I recall an article about 3 months ago that a professor in a Humanities department at a university that got a lot of federal research grants believes that the research departments will be pretty okay, while other parts of the university effectively eat the reductions in indirect cost ratio. Essentially he thought ( I guess) that the historic ratios were above the “direct” indirect of the research organizations and the excess was backstopping departments that rarely or never get grant money of their own. I didn’t bookmark it, but think it might have been the Atlantic and the author was Ian something.
@Eric,
His “thinking” is that the threatened cuts won’t happen. That’s what he meant by “nothingburger.” To be clear, he’s fine with cutting DEI-related research, since neither he nor anyone in our department does that.
Humanities grants are tiny compared to NIH R01s, which are the meat and potatoes of biomedical research. And the overhead costs of humanities research are tiny compared to, e.g., cryoEM, FACS machines, genomics cores, X-ray crystallography, BSL3 labs and NMR machines. Research is always and everywhere a cost center at universities–they already subsidize it with tuition, philanthropy and licensing, and for some universities with medical schools, the margin on the practice.
Joel, I don’t think the professor that wrote this was thinking about Humanities overhead cost of their research so much as their direct costs getting indirectly funded with excess indirect costs funds from research grants. The impression I got from his article was that a haircut to indirect cost ratio in NIH research grants would flow down to non-grant taking departments primarily. So NIH more or less says ‘we provide 70% of your institute’s funding, so we will cover 70% of the costs of maintaining your specific parking lots but nothing for all the other parking lots at the university. And 70% of your specific HR, but nothing for other HR.’ And so on. And when it is all added up, the original 47% ratio maybe gets down to 25% going forward. Implicit in his view seemed to be that the establishment of the original higher indirect ratio supported non-grant recipient departments with important funding. So the sociology department parking lot got maintained with NIH dollars. NIH says ‘nothing against sociology, but we aren’t paying to maintain their parking lot’. But the lot needs maintaining. ‘Well, one less aide and no raises for a year’ gets the funds.’ And so on. That I think was his concern. Sorry I can’t link to it.
@Eric,
Sounds like this person doesn’t actually understand the process that funds university research.
Read this: Rouse WB, Lombardi JV, Craig DD. Modeling research universities: Predicting probable futures of public vs private and large vs small research universities. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2018;115:12582-9.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.1807174115
For a deeper dive, I recommend: Rouse WB. Universities as Complex Enterprises: How Academia Works, Why It Works These Ways, and Where the University Enterprise Is Headed. Wiley; New York: 2016.