Stephen Quake (not a geologist, as I'm sure he's sick of saying) has an eye-opening column/blog post in the NYT about his life as a researcher at a university. I had no idea it was this bad [emph. added]:
When a university hires a professor, they typically agree to provide a start-up package to support that professor’s research over the first few years, after which the professor must seek external funding. This funding is needed to buy research supplies, pay stipends and tuition for graduate students, and even to support the salary of the faculty member. In fact, the university rarely pays the full salary of the professor — depending on the department, the professor must find between 25 percent and 75 percent of his or her salary from outside grants.
As he notes, one of the big problems with this system is it tends to encourage safer avenues of pursuit. Obviously, we don't want to be tossing money away on every hare-brained scheme that gets dreamed up, but we do need some crazy ideas from time to time, especially at the more fundamental levels. Remember what Niels Bohr said:
Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.
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