| | Many interesting comments about what went wrong with academia funding here: Comment of the week
Like this one:
anna v says:
I have posted about this before here. I started my academic career back in 1962 as a graduate student in Greece and watched the deterioration of funding decisions through the years.
Of course government funded the academic institutions. But the funding was given directly to the institutions. They requested every year a budget, and usually most of it was approved, and the judges were elected representatives sitting on committees, not peers or other scientists. Then the institutions had internal reviews of research necessities and distributed the funds within.
Second step came when funds became available from the “development budget”. There, if one had the right political connections and push/respect one could get a lot of money for a project to kick start an activity outside the institutional budgeting. It happened in my field in 1966 when prof Ypsilantis, one of those involved in the discovery of the antiproton , wanted to work in Greece and he was given enough of a budget to set up a high energy group in Greece working with CERN. It was pure political influence, no peer review or bureaucrats, I think even the queen at the time was involved. Note here that the power distribution was haphazard, no centralized bureaucrats deciding on projects.
Then came the EU and the format of centralized bureaucracy. It completely took away the power of decisions on research from the institutes and turned it into a power structure in the ministry with committees etc funding individuals and projects . The bureaucrats controlling the flow of decisions and committees were usually not so successful PhD holders in various disciplines who got a job in the administration.
This had three effects.
a) Hierarchy within the academe was destroyed, because young brash researchers/professors could get a lot more funding than the ones with high academic standing.
b) The institutes were taking cuts and became hooked to the extra money ( Mann et al) these young brash academics brought.
c) the most important, research could be centrally controlled and guided, as we see that it happened with the AGW wagon of fools.
When research decisions were being taken independently by different institutions in the country, the randomization of the process assured good academic competition.
It is not an efficient way to use the money for a business, but in research where serendipity plays a huge role the variety of decision processes is very important.
This was lost more and more during the years , when EU funding became dominant and the whole of Europe is being orchestrated from a central menagerie of decision takers on what research is funded.
I believe the situation in the US is similar.
The feminist movement support is just an example of the centralized decision making dominance , because of the money , which of course is the root of all evil :) .
Also the power. The more centralized are decisions, the more the power, and that attracts not the best of researchers to the centralized decision making process, because researchers search for truth, not power.
I think a first step out of this one way street is to start funding institutions and let them decide how and what research to support. It will break the chorus.
(Edited by Maria Feht on 7/19, 6:49am)
|
|
