Science/Technology blog

I have talked about funding a couple of times (here and here), and I get the impression from the comments about those posts that my views are at the minimum somewhat iconoclastic. Basically, while I would prefer the government to give more to research, at the moment I don’t think that the primary issue is that the government isn’t giving enough.

In this area, The Health Care Renewal Blog has a great post on the funding problems facing researchers in medical schools. Here’s a clue — they don’t have to do with the government’s but rather the medical school’s priorities:

[Dr Goldman was asked to talk about academic careers....] I’d add something about the cold, hard facts of Academic Economics 101. There are four categories of faculty: 1) ‘Taxpayers’ who generate more than they cost and help fuel the academic mission; 2) ‘Hired workers’ who get paid to do a job that many people might like to do; 3) ‘Loss leaders’ who get short-term investments in the expectation that they will become successful ‘taxpayers;’ and 4) ‘Welfare recipients’ - faculty with more tenuous status.

Bottom line, you should strive to be a ‘taxpayer.’ If you’re a ‘hired worker,’ you should strive to be better than the others who would like your job.

Dr Goldman reveals that in the typical medical school, the most important criterion for faculty success if generation of external funding, that is, generation of fees for clinical work, or of grants from external sponsors. Whether a faculty member is good at patient care, teaching, or research, or whether he or she upholds the highest professional standards, is secondary. (Emphasis in the original.)

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