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Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

I was under the impression that those universities took good care of their researchers.

I'm under the impression that most university researchers's reputation, labs, and tenure cases rely heavily on grants, and that most university "scientists" today are really grant writers and grant managers.

That might be a little too cynical a take, but I've heard variations of it enough times to take the view pretty seriously.

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Unfortunately it's not cynical but the reality. Most people would be shocked how much time academics have to spend on grant writing and other administrative things. The whole system is completely broken, essentially we are applying for money to spend time on writing grants to apply for more money. The unfortunate reality is that in the experimental sciences there is no way around this. You need the funds to be able to run experiments (grad students are part of this as well) and if you ever stop you will never be able to start back up again. Essentially you need to be able to show a track record & preliminary results to be successful at getting a grant, if you stopped applying for grants you have neither. Moreover often universities will give you more teaching duties because you are not bringing in research funding. It is a vicious circle.

Not cynical at all. Speaking from experience, it is just reality. They are still scientists, but in practice it is more like the technical lead who also does the fundraising. At least in the US, universities do not take "good care" of their researchers. Researchers take care of the university. Direct funding and overhead income from grants is super important to university budgets.

Not cynical. Also, academic institutions take "overhead" from grants, sometimes up to 100%, ostensibly to provide infrastructure, keep the lights on, etc. (this means the $5m grant from NIH for the researcher really costs the NIH $10m).

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