The whole field of academic science research is dominated by the need to get grant money, which means submitting lots of grant proposals, hoping some will get approved.
The whole edifice of much of science and useless educational endeavour may collapse due to underfunding. Colleges may shrink to 1/2 of their current size. Lots of gender and woke “perfessors” will become gardeners.
Not just science but any research coming out of academia. Especially sociology research. In fact most social perversions (transgenderism, nonbinarism, genderfluidism….) have their roots in academic ‘research’
Absolutely nailed it! The only real work many in the ‘sciences’ actually do is filling out the many, many gubmint forms that request grant money. There are even outside services that are available to do the grunt work of grant requests.
It is a racket.
“The whole field of academic science research is dominated by the need to get grant money. “
It’s a good article, except that she, for some reason, fails to mention that elephant in the room.
The problem in all of academia is how do you evaluate performance. And this is true for all disciplines. For example
1. To get a PhD, you need to do ‘publishable’ research even if all it is, is grinding out a couple of more decimal places in a measurement and it’s published by the school.
2. What separates the academic performance of associate, assistant, & full professor so the get P&T (promotion and tenure)?
a. Time in the seat? School gets no benefit!
b. Papers published? (It can be gamed! See the early AGW papers and who did the evaluations.) Benefits the school’s reputation so an indirect benefit.
c. Grant money? Still can be gamed but the school’s infrastructure directly benefits from the R\D overhead!
d. Teaching? Definitely can be gamed and is! School gets no benefit!
So, 2b. & 2c. are the metrics used. It’s hard to come up with anything else that could be used.
For item 1 a PhD is supposed to say you know how to do the craft of ‘research’. How are you supposed to learn to do it if you are not required to do it? Even if in reality the R\D mentoring is poor to nonexistent, and it’s done badly as long as 5-7 PhD’s bless it, it’s fine. (It’s kind of like the old saying what’s the guy\gal who graduates last in medical school called? — Doctor!)
The system is still very much a medieval craft guild system.