Baldwin: ‘Grant culture’ and financial pressures harmful to the mission of universities

This is Pitt’s 225th anniversary. I’ve been at Pitt for the past three of these 225 years. I…This is Pitt’s 225th anniversary. I’ve been at Pitt for the past three of these 225 years. I love this University and its history, and I am a proponent of education as a means to a better life. After being here for three years, my conceptions of academia have shifted dramatically. This week’s column is part of my series on issues in higher education. This week, I discuss research grants.

I am by no means against research funding, nor do I disvalue the role of journals that serve the academic community. Research funding is imperative for the future of scholarship and for producing new information in unresearched areas that will lead to improvements in society. The groundbreaking work of Nobel Prize in Economics laureate Daniel Kahneman in behavioral economics and the recent development of an HPV vaccine are the products of substantial funding from government and private research agencies. However, the focus on obtaining grants has overcome their original purpose, which was to facilitate research, thus creating original knowledge and pragmatic innovations. Now, the objective is to get more grant funding for the sake of bringing in more revenue for the university.

As a consequence of this grant-obsessed academic culture, especially in the life and health sciences, there are tenured professors at Pitt and at other research institutions who have contracts that have no teaching clause, or guarantee to the professor that he or she will never have to teach. To put it simply: professors who don’t profess. These people are usually contracted because of their demonstrated ability to get grant money and publish prolifically and are categorized as research professors.

To be a professor is to conduct research and then disseminate that work through undergraduate and graduate courses to students in addition to publishing the work. By not teaching, research professors are neglecting an important duty of any career academic. I’m not implying that professors should spend more time teaching and less time doing research. I am advocating that all professors teach at least occasionally, in order to disseminate their work to the next generation of scholars.

When a university allows someone to carry the coveted title of professor, yet permits him or her to not teach, it is doing a disservice to students. We are providing funding and a salary to a person who will conduct research without any desire or obligation to disseminate that scholarship to undergraduates or graduates or promote their work in the public discourse. Research institutions such as  Pitt are allowing these professors to lock themselves in the ivory tower and never come out. While it is critical that we not only maintain but also augment the current rigor of research programs at Pitt and at other institutions, we cannot forget what we are here to do in principle: learn and teach.

In order to better understand why institutions push professors so much to continue getting grant funding and hold those professors who do in such high regard, it is critical to look at what the institutions are receiving. For every funded research project, the university receives a certain percentage of the total grant to cover “facility and administration costs.” According to a directive from the office of Pitt’s chief financial officer on May 4 of this year, Pitt’s academic year 2012-2013 will have an effective facility and administrative rate — colloquially known as overhead cost — of 52.5 percent and is set to increase for year 2013-2014 to 54 percent. Federal money granted to professors to conduct serious scholarly work is more than cut in half by the University under the auspices of overhead costs.

To illustrate this: A grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities given to a professor in the history department in the amount of $50,000 will be cut down to $23,750. I am left perplexed as to what facility and administrative costs a professor of history could incur that could validate the extortion of more than half of their research funds. If the model for how grant money is distributed is shifted to a model where overhead is proportional to the project, perhaps universities will reduce the push for obtaining grant money and allow professors to focus more on their research interests and teaching, and less on bringing in revenue for the University.

Traditionally, the university was the bastion of a noncapitalist, non-market-oriented realm that was free of the pressures of finance and were places that could solely focus on the fleshing out of ideas, on scholarship and research, and the pursuit of intellectual cultivation. Today’s university is a market-driven and technocratic enterprise in which the value of rigorous scholarship is subordinated to getting grant money and publishing journal articles.

When we allow the pursuit of researching unexplored areas and extending education to more people to morph into the narrow pursuit of getting grants, publishing and winning academic awards, then academia has forgotten its original mission and commitment to democracy: to connect the academy with society at large, to encourage the dissemination of scholarship in the public discourse and, most importantly and fundamentally, to foster and nurture young minds.

Write Eric at eab73@pitt.edu.