Scientists as Business Owners

Much of our discussion of Creatives tends to deal with what we think of as creative fields, like different kinds of design, graphic art, hairstyling, fashion, and so on. But let's not forget those who create new knowledge: professors. Those who take the work done before as a starting point and add their own grains of sand to the mountain of human knowledge are operating in a environment that demands a brand of leadership that recognizes the unique requirements and motivations of this particular group of Creatives.

In a recent New York Times column, Professor Steve Quake of Stanford talks about the "small business" part of life faced by university scientists who need to fund their research. Many people don't realize how much effort a professor has to put into finding the resources to conduct their research. Dr Quake writes

When a university hires a professor, they typically agree to provide a start-up package to support that professor’s research over the first few years, after which the professor must seek external funding. This funding is needed to buy research supplies, pay stipends and tuition for graduate students, and even to support the salary of the faculty member. In fact, the university rarely pays the full salary of the professor — depending on the department, the professor must find between 25 percent and 75 percent of his or her salary from outside grants.

Now, if you're a department head or an administrator at a university you certainly know all this, but for everyone else, it's useful to know just how this research gets paid for...and what the impact is of this method.

It’s almost like a small business — each faculty member is essentially running an enterprise for which he or she must find revenue (grants), manage finances, balance the books and pay expenses like salaries, tuition, rent and even taxes to the university for the space used.

Such a system does not come without its own perils. It is not so easy to ask our young scientists to think out of the box when a significant portion of their salary (and mortgage payments) depends on guaranteeing a steady source of funding. Consequently, professors become highly attuned to the institutional priorities of various funding agencies — often at a cost to their own creativity and desired research directions.

Though this article is unique to academics, the lessons can be applied to many Creatives. The big lesson is: be careful about loading up your Creatives with support tasks or you'll take their attention away from their creative work, which of course is what you hired them for.

I've argued before against creating a support system that doesn't really support your Creatives. I stand by that argument. At the same time, there are tasks that must be done but don't require your Creatives' best efforts, so why have them spend time on, say, administrative tasks when they should be doing creative work? In the case of academics, they are the ones who are going to have to write the grant proposals -- because the researcher is the one who best understands what they're asking for and why -- but once they've got it, do they need to do all the administration of that grant? If your academics are spending 40% of their time on grant-writing and 40% on administration, with only 20% on the actual research (numbers suggested by a commenter on Dr Quake's article), then something is definitely wrong.

There's little that individual universities and their departments can do about the overall academic research funding process, though they can address issues within their own schools, and the larger universities could try working with the funding organizations to bring about change. Dr Quake highlighted a number of efforts among agencies such as the national Institutes for Health, and within the comments on his blog are other examples plus some pretty good suggestions.

American academia is forcing its professors to be "small business owners" in a way, but if they wanted to do that, they probably wouldn't have gone into academia...instead, they'd be small business owners. One result of this is fewer people going into academic research. I have a number of friends who stopped their education at the master's degree level, or who got their PhD and headed into private industry, where someone else handled the administrative details. The ultimate result is a reduction in academic research in the US, which means either that the answers will be found elsewhere, or they won't be found at all. One result is bad business, the other is just bad.

(A word of disclaimer here: I spent 7 years teaching at a small college in the western US. But because it wasn't primarily a research university, I didn't have to spend all the time on grants and other research funding that's discussed above. Similarly, as I write this, I'm teaching as a Fulbright Scholar in Singapore, and because all my funding is secured through that program, I don't need to deal with finding additional resources. Lucky me.)