Since NIH released NOT-OD-25-068 in February of last year, I’ve been obsessed with indirect cost recovery. I’m not an economist, and I don’t have visibility into university balance sheets - they’re not transparently shared. But it’s hard not to notice that universities often talk about indirect cost...

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 s...

I have been thinking for a long time about whether, and how to say this out loud. Not because the problems are subtle, but because naming them plainly is uncomfortable in systems that depend on people silently absorbing strain. What follows is an attempt to explain why I am choosing to name them any...

Killing Sacred Cows — Part 4 of a series examining the unspoken norms, taboos, and protected assumptions in academic research that are rarely questioned, even when they undermine effectiveness and resilience. This series names those assumptions, puts them up for debate, and asks whether they still d...