What Ben Horowitz's survival manual teaches us about the moment universities are actually in

There's a genre of advice circulating right now aimed at university leaders scrambling to respond to federal funding cuts and administrative award delays. It goes something like this: diversify your revenue...

Guest Contributor: Anna Campana, Sr. Pre-Award Research Administrator, R1 Cancer Center

Plaintiffs suing the U.S. Government over grant terminations early in 2025 had initial success in getting federal courts to stay agency actions. However, after the last few U.S. Supreme Court decisions, these st...

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 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 compensati...