This was true when I was a grad student, decades ago. It was true when I worked in a lab as an undergraduate before that.
Specifics of the current environment aside, welcome to academic life. Unless you are one of the exceptionally fortunate few to have a permanent fellowship of some sort (e.g. Howard Hughes), your primary job as a research professor is to raise funding.
It really depends on what you mean by "decades", but I've been in the system for a generation and what you're saying doesn't match what I see on the ground.
During the doubling of the NIH budget under Clinton and Bush the younger times were great. After, budgets stagnated and things were harder but there was still funding out there. The disruption we're seeing now is a completely different animal: program officers are gone, fewer and less detailed summary statements go out, some programs are on hiatus (SBIR/STTR) and if you have something in the till it was wasted time, &c. NSF is a complete train wreck.
My startup had an STTR in for the last cycle and we can't talk to the program officer about our summary statement, nor can we resubmit, nor are we likely to be funded. That's a lot of lost time and money for a startup that, since we're atoms and not bits, is funded on a shoestring budget. The only time something like this happened in my memory was the shutdown in 2013 and that wasn't even close to the disruption we're seeing now.
I was also in science during Clinton, and what I’m saying was true then. The increase in funding went hand in hand with a massive increase in people seeking funding. So maybe there was some golden era of happy times when nobody had to chase grants, but it hasn’t been in my lifetime.
But again, I explicitly said that my point was independent of recent changes in funding. I am no longer in science, but it seems to be true that funding has declined. That doesn’t mean that chasing grants is something unprecedented for scientists to be doing.
The Clinton era was the golden age for life sciences (can’t speak to others) and it’s been a decline since then, either stagnant or a sharper downturn. Now? Complete operational collapse, a completely different animal altogether, and it’s not one agency it’s all agencies. You seem to be saying that chasing grants is not unprecedented, which has been true since Galileo and the patron system, but that isn’t a profound observation it’s the status quo. What I and others on the ground are saying is that now is a sudden and profound shift, having committed funding pulled or applications in process effectively frozen and simultaneously new awardees decimated, in a way that is impossible to sustain the basic and translational research enterprise. And outside of the feds, there isn’t a viable source of patient capital to turn to on the scale we’ve been operating.
Yes, I understand your claim that things are tighter now; I've repeatedly acknowledged that fact, and in any case, I have no personal basis to dispute the argument. But again, that's not related to the point I'm making.
One last time: OP was complaining that the group has to spend all of it's time raising funding, but that's always been true in my lifetime. There's never been a magical age where being a PI (or even a senior lab member) wasn't a perpetual process of raising funds, and anyone going into science should know this. Hence my comment: welcome to academia.
For whatever it's worth, this is basically reason #1 that most PhD grads I know voluntarily jumped off the hamster wheel. Anyone who gets a PhD and expects to be doing labwork as a PI is deeply deluded, and it needs to be shouted for the folks in the back: you are signing up for a lifetime of writing grants, teaching classes, and otherwise doing bureaucratic schleps. The current administration did not suddenly make this true.
I read SubiculumCode's post in the same context as bane's, speaking to the current environment.
You're saying that a group having to spend all of its time fundraising has always been true in your lifetime and you link it to your time as a grad student decades ago and earlier when you were an undergrad. Do I have that right? The dominance of fundraising might have been true for your specific experience and viewpoint, but I don't understand your basis for claiming it was universal: it certainly wasn't my experience (R1 engineering, not software) nor my colleagues around that time.
Complaints about fundraising and administrivia have always been plentiful but actual time spent on teaching and service and research were dominant, with the expected proportions of the three legged stool varying based on role and institution. What SubiculumCode and bane and myself are reacting to now is the dramatic shift in how dominant (because funding has been pulled, funding allocation methods have suddenly shifted) and unproductive (fewer summary statements, less or no feedback from SROs and POs, eliminated opportunities for resubmissions) that work has become. The closest I can remember to the current was around the aftermath of the 2008 recession and 2013 government shutdown and that pales in comparison to the disruption of now.
> You're saying that a group having to spend all of its time fundraising has always been true in your lifetime and you link it to your time as a grad student decades ago and earlier when you were an undergrad. Do I have that right?
I mean, yes...but everyone on this thread admits that it's still true (in fact, worse today), so I'm not sure what point you're making with this. Y'all are arguing that it's worse now, which is not a claim I am disputing [1]. The entire point of citing my "old" experience is that, in fact, we were all doing the same stuff back in the stone ages. I also haven't forgotten or misremembered due to my advancing age [2].
> The dominance of fundraising might have been true for your specific experience and viewpoint, but I don't understand your basis for claiming it was universal: it certainly wasn't my experience (R1 engineering, not software) nor my colleagues around that time.
OK. I never said my experience was universal. I was in the biological sciences, not engineering. To be clear, I'm not claiming experience in economics or english literature, either.
Again, I don't dispute that things might be worse today, but the situation is absolutely not new, and any grad student in the sciences [3] who expects otherwise has been seriously misled. That is my point.
[1] To be clear, I'm not saying it is or isn't worse today. I am making no claim with regard to the severity of the fundraising market. The market can be a bajillion times worse than when I came up, and my point is still valid -- back then, professors spent nearly all of their time chasing money! Today, professors spend nearly all of their time chasing money!
[2] This is a joke. I'm not old, and my experiences not as ancient as you're alluding. I understand that every generation clings to the belief that their struggles are unique in time, but it's probably a bad idea to take that notion seriously.
[3] Yes, I made the general claim "in the sciences". Because insults about age aside, and even though the specifics will vary from year to year and topic to topic, it's very important to realize that if you become a professor in the sciences, this is what you will be doing. You will not be in the lab making gadgets or potions or whatever -- you will be filling out grants, making slide decks, reviewing papers, and giving talks. If you cannot handle this life, quit now. It will not get better.
There are certainly ways to go work in a lab and do "fun stuff" forever, but a) you often don't need a graduate degree for these, and b) you shouldn't be deluded about which path you're on.
But clearly there was some science going on. Any time spent writing grants rather than doing research feels wasteful, but it's the way to get funding. The percentage of time spent doing that is changing, and the percentage of grants applications that get funding is going way down, demonstrating a big change in the amount of effort that goes directly to waste. Unfunded grants are not evidence of bad research that does not get funded, but merely of the funding level.
Science gets done by the people you hire with the money you raise. And yes, everyone in a group is always thinking about the next grant.
I’m not joking. I’m not exaggerating. This is the job, and it’s always been this way (at least in my lifetime). Maybe it’s worse because of the current administration, but complaining that academic life is mostly about grant writing is like a fish complaining about water.
I really wish people would stop trying to gaslight all of us into believing the current crisis is just business as usual.
Yes, previous US presidents told some lies.
Yes, previous US presidents and politicians had some unsavory associations or potential conflicts of interest.
Yes, previously some labs spent too much time writing grants and not enough actually doing research.
The problem is, these things are becoming the norm now, and your anecdotal memory of "aw, man, we spent all our time doing that back in the day!" is not a reliable indicator that really, nothing has changed, we should just stop complaining. Especially since we know that human memory is not only fallible, it is prone to specifically being better at remembering the exceptional, and the unpleasant.
Specifics of the current environment aside, welcome to academic life. Unless you are one of the exceptionally fortunate few to have a permanent fellowship of some sort (e.g. Howard Hughes), your primary job as a research professor is to raise funding.