So I learned something yesterday, from someone who is in the world of research.
The trope about researchers spending most of their time applying for grants is no joke. Universities don’t pay researchers; the researchers get paid from the grant money they receive. If they also have a teaching position, they might get a tiny tiny bit from the university, but that’s it.
So when federal grants get halted, there’s a whole bunch of people who do important research basically put out of work immediately. The kicker is that a fair amount of the research being funded is ongoing research, where if you just “stop doing it,” all the previous work is ruined. Because there’s a lot of things you can’t just stop, put on a shelf, and restart later.
Little t’s war on universities is more serious than you might think.
After her latest research project got defunded by the government, my wife got 4 job offers. 3 short term projects that were perfect for her, 1 permanent contract that she didn’t really want to do. She took the latter because fuck this shit.
If they also have a teaching position, they might get a tiny tiny bit from the university, but that’s it.
Granted this is a best-case scenario, but the salaries for profs at my alma-mater (a public tier 1 research university) are public and I looked one of them up once. He was getting well into six-figures for teaching classes.
If at all, this applies only to profs, which is a tiny subset of researchers and insanely hard to get into. Everyone else is paid shit and 80+% depend on grants. Source: am researcher
Yeah, from what I see, professors get their salary i.e. the money for living expenses from their teaching job. But most of the research money comes from grants. Those are usually earmarked so that they can only spend it for very specific purposes.
Edit: This is only true for people who need to run labs. For subjects like math or philosophy, professors depend less on grants since most of their work is done without significant expenses. But they still do need grants for travel and organizing conferences.
As far as I can work out about this USA, this is not true. It is certainly not true where I am from. It may be true in the case of postdoctoral researchers (but not always), i.e. relatively junior researchers who don’t yet have a permanent position. But a permanent position is just that - it’s like a permanent job, and you’re paid a salary by the university that gave you that position. You will typically also need to apply for grants in order to pay for things like:
travel to conferences
travel to collaborate in person with colleagues at other institutions
make papers open access
hire postdoctoral researchers and PhD students.
I did two postdocs during my time in academia and both were grant funded (one awarded to me, one awarded to a more senior researcher who then took me on as a postdoc). I also applied to one postdoc position I remember which although fixed term, not permanent, was paid for by the university. I worked with many permanent staff who had salaries from the university as well as grants for other things.
As far as I can tell in the USA the only real difference is that your salary may only be for the 9 teaching months, not the full academic year, and you’re expected to top up those 3 months if you want to be paid a proper wage.
Still, the people on permanent positions are rare and act as the masterminds behind the research rather than doing research themselves. Professors are guiding their PhDs and postdocs through experiments and writing. If all these people that are more or less early in their careers that are working on Grant money get defunded, than even Professors cannot really do science anymore cause they lack the staff… And of course this future Generation of Professors is looking for other Jobs or leaving the US if they can.
In my (old) field, this was not really true, but maybe it’s true in some other fields.
But it is true that if all these grants are cut, it will have a big effect on research output due to killing off early career researchers. It’s clear that the US Government doesn’t give a shit that it’s going to ruin the country’s research credentials.
Which is why this is hilarious imagine the country threatening everyone inhibiting their own future which means they will be more dependent on the people they’re threatening in the future.
So I learned something yesterday, from someone who is in the world of research.
The trope about researchers spending most of their time applying for grants is no joke. Universities don’t pay researchers; the researchers get paid from the grant money they receive. If they also have a teaching position, they might get a tiny tiny bit from the university, but that’s it.
So when federal grants get halted, there’s a whole bunch of people who do important research basically put out of work immediately. The kicker is that a fair amount of the research being funded is ongoing research, where if you just “stop doing it,” all the previous work is ruined. Because there’s a lot of things you can’t just stop, put on a shelf, and restart later.
Little t’s war on universities is more serious than you might think.
After her latest research project got defunded by the government, my wife got 4 job offers. 3 short term projects that were perfect for her, 1 permanent contract that she didn’t really want to do. She took the latter because fuck this shit.
Granted this is a best-case scenario, but the salaries for profs at my alma-mater (a public tier 1 research university) are public and I looked one of them up once. He was getting well into six-figures for teaching classes.
If at all, this applies only to profs, which is a tiny subset of researchers and insanely hard to get into. Everyone else is paid shit and 80+% depend on grants. Source: am researcher
Yeah, from what I see, professors get their salary i.e. the money for living expenses from their teaching job. But most of the research money comes from grants. Those are usually earmarked so that they can only spend it for very specific purposes.
Edit: This is only true for people who need to run labs. For subjects like math or philosophy, professors depend less on grants since most of their work is done without significant expenses. But they still do need grants for travel and organizing conferences.
They prominently need grants for phd students
As far as I can work out about this USA, this is not true. It is certainly not true where I am from. It may be true in the case of postdoctoral researchers (but not always), i.e. relatively junior researchers who don’t yet have a permanent position. But a permanent position is just that - it’s like a permanent job, and you’re paid a salary by the university that gave you that position. You will typically also need to apply for grants in order to pay for things like:
I did two postdocs during my time in academia and both were grant funded (one awarded to me, one awarded to a more senior researcher who then took me on as a postdoc). I also applied to one postdoc position I remember which although fixed term, not permanent, was paid for by the university. I worked with many permanent staff who had salaries from the university as well as grants for other things.
As far as I can tell in the USA the only real difference is that your salary may only be for the 9 teaching months, not the full academic year, and you’re expected to top up those 3 months if you want to be paid a proper wage.
Still, the people on permanent positions are rare and act as the masterminds behind the research rather than doing research themselves. Professors are guiding their PhDs and postdocs through experiments and writing. If all these people that are more or less early in their careers that are working on Grant money get defunded, than even Professors cannot really do science anymore cause they lack the staff… And of course this future Generation of Professors is looking for other Jobs or leaving the US if they can.
In my (old) field, this was not really true, but maybe it’s true in some other fields.
But it is true that if all these grants are cut, it will have a big effect on research output due to killing off early career researchers. It’s clear that the US Government doesn’t give a shit that it’s going to ruin the country’s research credentials.
Which is why this is hilarious imagine the country threatening everyone inhibiting their own future which means they will be more dependent on the people they’re threatening in the future.
The people who are making these things happen are wholly unfamiliar with consequences.
The people doing this understand the consequences and see the as goals.
But they are speedrunning for the rapture, no consequences when they are off to heaven eh…