Unpopular Opinions in Academic Research: Why We Need to Say the Quiet Parts Out Loud

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The bottom line: Federal grant funding in the US is broken. Senior leaders and faculty have no hope of making the case for rebuilding it by rehashing the same tired arguments. We need a new plan.

Today we are bringing back “Unpopular opinions in academic research”. If you missed the first one, you could check it out here. This week’s free riders whirling around in my brain are distinct but also related.

1. The current federal grant funding situation here in the US is broken.

1) Awarded funds aren’t moving. Now, this is absolutely NOT an indictment of the program staff at the various institutes. They are doing the best they can with the situation. I would certainly not want their jobs. But the reality is the money isn’t moving.

2) Everyone is now competing for smaller pools of money. Consequently, existing biases will only be exacerbated going forward.

What we are witnessing here is the reality of turning off a huge bureaucratic system with no plan to restart it. This will almost certainly take a much longer time to repair than we think.

2. Academics (leaders and faculty) are telling the wrong story if they want to regain the public’s trust. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve seen several posts of senior leaders from major research institutions speaking out about cuts to research funding. While I am glad to see we are finally getting out in front of the negative stories, I disagree with the message often shared. As you will see in this video, MIT’s President advocates for the value of “curiosity-driven” research and uses CRISPR as an example, noting that it emerged from research on bacteria.

I value curiosity.

However, I also know that it is incredibly difficult to watch tax money be “wasted” on research into freezing worms (see here for the reference) if your local public school or community hospital just closed, or you can’t find a job, or your kids don’t have enough food to eat, or you just like to see tangible returns for your investment.

Our case for restarting research funding can’t be perceived as advancing our pet projects, which may or may not lead to anything useful. Our case must be grounded in solving problems people have TODAY. The public understands that it takes time to build knowledge, but I think they would be willing to wait if they could see that we were taking their problems seriously.

Do you agree or disagree with these unpopular opinions? What would you add this week? Let me help you free up some mental space so we can focus on our to-do lists this week.

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