The Soft Money Trap Faculty are Stuck In

This is a follow-up to "The Unspoken Contract." Critiquing departmental dysfunction can sound like blaming faculty, and I want to be direct: 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. They're working within the same broken systems. This piece is about what those systems actually cost them.

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 - an interesting insider's view that's worth your time.

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 a strange way to treat people with advanced training and expertise, essentially asking them to cover their own salaries on commission.

The soft money model, in practice, looks like this: 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 - a situation that deserves its own essay.

It's not easy. I've had faculty in my office crying about their salary distributions, trying to make the percentages balance, figuring out how to cover shortfalls. That image stays with you.

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 infrastructure meant to support their work. When NIH released the policy notice mandating 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, who felt like F&A was some sort of racket. There was genuine misunderstanding on all sides, but that experience changed my thinking considerably.

I've become comfortable holding two competing views at once: federal indirect costs are critical for funding research infrastructure, and they are often not reinvested in ways that are mutually beneficial to the departments and investigators who generate them. University CFOs and presidents pick winners - favored projects, 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 watch millions in overhead leave their grants while their own salary coverage remains precarious and their departmental support staff stay overextended and underpaid. Of course they think it's a racket. That's not the federal government's doing - it's a choice institutions are making.

I came to writing about these issues because I believe in upstream solutions - in preventing harm rather than merely responding to it. 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 and stops depending on people silently absorbing what the system refuses to fix.

Further Reading What's Wrong With NIH Grants, Santi Ruiz interviews Mike Lauer, Statecraft, 2025 The Unspoken Contract: How Academic Departments Run on Invisible Labor, The Optimum Department