The Soft Money Trap Faculty are Stuck In

This is a follow up post to "The Unspoken Contract: How Academic Departments Run on Invisible Labor" I want to acknowledge the very real risk that critiquing departmental dysfunction could sound like I'm blaming faculty writ large. I'm not. Faculty didn't design the soft money model, the incentive structures, or the operational gaps that research administrators spend their days compensating for. Scientific investigators are working within the same broken, extractive systems that are harmful to the work we all care about. This piece is about revealing the other side of the coin and highlighting the current reality that we are all experiencing, and the fact that it is not serving most of us well.

To understand how we got here, it helps to look at the incentive structures that created this mess in the first place. I recently listened to an interview by Santi Ruiz of Statecraft with Dr. Mike Lauer, former Deputy Director of Extramural Research at NIH. It's an interesting insider's view that I highly recommend.

At one point, Dr. Lauer describes how the research enterprise has expanded in response to institutional incentives, leading universities to hire faculty under "soft money" arrangements - meaning faculty are responsible for generating their own salaries through grants. This is considered normal in higher education, but when you stop and think about it, it's sort of nuts that people with advanced training and expertise are expected to cover their salaries like they're car salesmen working on commission.

Despite my many documented critiques of institutional structures and practices, I have a lot of empathy for the faculty trapped in these systems. Because here's what that soft money model actually looks like in practice: Most faculty investigators I've worked with are juggling somewhere between five and eight grant projects that collectively pay their salary, plus teaching and service obligations. Some manage upwards of sixteen projects (that's an entirely different thing I will not get into here).

In the words of Taylor Swift, "You don't know the life of a showgirl [faculty member], and you're never gonna wanna." It's not easy. I've had faculty in my office literally crying about their salary distributions, trying to make the percentages balance, figuring out how to cover shortfalls.

Let's cut to the chase: is this a good way to treat anyone? Does it create the space and freedom that translates into quality, meaningful work? I don't think so.

This strain isn't just emotional - it has material consequences for how faculty relate to the very infrastructure meant to support their work. In February of last year, when NIH dropped the Friday policy notice heard around the world, which mandated a reduction in allowable indirect costs to 15% for all awards, I was immediately incensed. I got into debates, sometimes arguments, with - plot twist - faculty about indirect cost recovery in which they felt like F&A was some sort of racket. There was plenty of misunderstanding and some genuine lack of knowledge, but I'll say this: my thinking on how indirects are used has changed quite a bit since then.

I've become comfortable holding two competing views at once: that while federal indirect costs are critical for funding research infrastructure, they are often not reinvested in ways that are mutually beneficial to the departments and investigators that generate them. Instead, they create perverse incentives. University CFO equivalents and presidents pick winners with favored projects and footprint expansion rather than ensuring adequate staffing, salary coverage, or sustainable operational capacity in the units doing the work. Indirects flow up and rarely flow back down in proportion to the strain they're meant to offset. So faculty see millions in overhead leaving their grants while their own salary coverage remains precarious and their departmental support staff remain overextended and underpaid. Of course they think it's a racket. But to be clear, that's not the Federal Government's doing.

I came to this work of writing about these issues because I believe in upstream solutions - in preventing harm rather than merely responding to it. That belief isn't going to change. What has changed is my understanding of where the harm is accumulating. It's in faculty offices where people are piecing together salaries across eight grants. It's in research administration offices where people are working nights and weekends to keep compliance failures from surfacing. It's in the gap between the research mission we claim to value and the systems we've actually built to support it.

The path forward is not more resilience, more flexibility, or more heroic effort from either faculty or research administrators. It's structural change that aligns resources with responsibility, that treats operational expertise as leadership, and that stops depending on people, whether they're piecing together eight salary streams or working weekends to prevent compliance failures, silently suffering and trying their best. We know what thriving looks like. The question is whether we're collectively willing to demand it and do something about it.