Killing Sacred Cows, Part 3: Research Matters, & We Could Be Doing It Better
Killing Sacred Cows, Part 3 of a series which explores myths and outdated practices in academic research that need to be critically examined, debated, and put on the chopping block. Check out Parts 1 and 2 here.
Over the past two decades, research at institutions of higher education has changed—and not for the better. It’s become more hurried, less respectful of the humans who conduct and administer it, and, despite our best efforts, is often less compliant. Funding, namely that of the Federal variety now shapes priorities, determines what gets celebrated, and signals where faculty investigators focus their energy. How often do Deans or Associate Deans of Research frame goals in terms of Federal grant growth metrics?
Annual reports highlight grant project counts, dollars received, and papers published—not the broader societal impact produced. Curiosity-driven research often takes a back seat to projects attractive to sponsors, creating a subtle but pervasive shift: investigator curiosity shifts to what seems most fundable. Departments expend immense effort chasing money, while the infrastructure needed to coordinate complex projects, ensure compliance, and preserve institutional knowledge remains negligently under-resourced.
These criticisms aren’t naïveté—research costs money—but it also reflects values. What universities choose to fund and reward with recovered indirects and other revenue generating activities shows what they truly prioritize. The U.S. has built an unparalleled research enterprise that has benefited humanity, and that is something to be proud of, yet we now face a system where public trust is eroding in both higher education and scientific expertise. This is a crisis.
The current Trump administration didn’t create this fragility; it revealed it. When funding ebbs and political pressure rises, the system exposes itself: a house of cards built on dependency rather than intentional, values-driven design.
Quiet truth #3: The system didn’t break—it evolved exactly as it was incentivized to.
WTF Happened in 2003: More Money, More Problems Edition
A few months ago, I stumbled on a website called WTF Happened in 1971. It’s fascinating: through a series of charts and graphs, it tells the story of a turning point in U.S. history under President Richard Nixon. As someone who’s been observing and working in research since 2008, I find looking backward useful for explaining how we got here—and it all starts at the turn of the century, during the Bush Administration.
2003 marked an important shift in federal funding. In the 1990s, NIH’s budget hovered around $12 billion annually; by the early 2000s, it had jumped to $28 billion. Adjusted for inflation, this was a high-water mark for the agency. Federal R&D spending has risen slightly in real terms since 2003, but once research costs and population growth are accounted for, the effective purchasing power for university research has not kept up.
That initial influx encouraged universities to prioritize capturing these dollars, likely expecting steady growth—or at least inflation-adjusted stability that never came. Meanwhile, the indirect costs they recovered were put into societal role expansion and more physical space, which is not explicitly capped in indirect cost rate methodology like administrative costs have been at 26% since 1991.
Meanwhile, faculty employment trends tell a complementary story. Data from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) show that the number and proportion of full-time tenured or tenure-track positions have not kept pace with demand, while contingent and adjunct positions have grown. In fall 2023, tenure-track faculty comprised roughly 32% of the total—down from 53% in 1987.
So, where do we shake out: research dollars are mostly flat, tenure-track positions have decreased by nearly a third, and NIH R-series grant budgets have not increased direct cost caps in several decades. It might look like a balancing act that kind of works—but it’s far from stable.
More Grants, Less Staff, Organizational Dysfunction
Higher education also suffers from the same stigma that plagues the non-profit sector: The Overhead Obsession. Efficiency and effectiveness are important when stewarding funding responsibly, but universities have opted for a starvation diet when it comes to allocating adequate indirect costs to generating departments to hire the appropriate number of staff to manage the workload. The result? Units, labs, and centers have been chronically understaffed and overextended—essentially, a disaster.
Any research administrator managing faculty effort or reviewing audit summaries can intuit what’s happening—especially with tenure-track professors, who receive an estimated 60–70% of NIH R01s. They are overcommitted on the federal side to make up for reduced state and tuition support. They chronically bump up against prior-approval requirements for effort reductions, may work at institutions that rely heavily on “soft money” imperatives even when faculty teach or perform other service activities, and juggle multiple funding streams that demand constant “spend-down” gymnastics. Some create secondary appointments or stipends above their Institutional Base Salary (IBS), effectively using federal grants to subsidize non-grant activities.
Where has this left us? Non-compliant effort reporting. Fierce competition to cobble together a portfolio that pays for science that can’t be completely recovered on other awards. Faculty and staff stretched far too thin.
From a research administrator’s perspective, it looks like a constant, hair-on-fire procession of proposal submissions; being caught off guard by purchases, contracts, and agreements; faculty and research staff not following policy because they are trapped in a perpetual “get it done” headlock; and having to undo and clean up with cost transfers after untrained staff who don’t understand university processes or compliance imperatives that are continuously changing. Add to that: inadequate staff development, undocumented standards, and structures that do not promote accountability, these are all common pain points for departments that don’t have the support and resources they need.
Digging Out and Building a Different Future
So how might we move forward? Start by taking stock of your current position: how much of your portfolio is federally funded, and what contingency reserves do you have? Here is the key some leaders are not factoring in: for units heavily reliant on federal dollars, with low reserves and practices that encourage over-commitment to grant funds, the situation is precarious. In this situation faculty and staff may be lost, and difficult decisions will likely be unavoidable. It’s worth imagining the worst-case outcomes—not as alarmism, but as preparation.
If you do have reserves, now is the time to build them strategically. Waiting it out is a mistake. The current administration has fundamentally changed elements of the system—indirects (still TBD), foreign subawards and components, data requirements, disfavored research areas, and more—that won’t simply snap back with a new administration.
Diversification, too, is not a simple fix. Chasing non-federal funding without focus is rarely worthwhile: these sources are often more restrictive, provide fewer dollars, and bring an entirely new set of administrative requirements. Where diversification is necessary, it must be deliberate. Relationships take time, and the funding pursued should advance mission-critical work—not just add a few endowed chairs. Communicating impact convincingly is imperative: real, measurable impact, not case studies, LinkedIn publication posts, or newsletter blurbs. External benefactors want to support initiatives that produce tangible value, and your strategy must reflect that.
Underlying all of this is the human and operational side. Units need to understand and measure appropriate staffing levels for what they are actually trying to accomplish. Workload should be mapped across the portfolio, so effort aligns with the true demands of each project. Take this time to commit to systems redesign, supported at the top, to embed process improvements, normalize reasonable workloads, and reduce reactive firefighting. The art lies in down-regulating and eliminating unnecessary work while moving forward in a controlled and sustainable way—scaling back where possible, prioritizing what truly matters, and creating a rhythm of proposal submission, staffing, and execution that can be maintained over time.
The current environment is tough, and it feels like so many things are out of our control. I would argue that now is the perfect time to be brave and there is plenty within our control.
Additional Reading:
The Janus Face of Research Administration
Academic Values and the Lure of Profit
Implementing Limits on Grant Support to Strengthen the Biomedical Research Workforce
Revisiting the Dependence of Scientific Productivity and Impact on Funding Level
