05-11-2011, 03:22 PM
Dakota wrote:
The university can simply refuse their money. Endowed positions always come with strings and the donor certainly has the right to decide how his money is going to be spent.
While true, you must consider the current funding environment we are in. Universities simply are not going to turn down money.
Federal and state grants are hard to come by and shrinking in total amount. Professors are spending 70+% of their time writing more and more grants for smaller and smaller amounts, leaving only about 30% of their time for actual research or teaching duties.
Most universities have somewhat of a double standard regarding funding. They will gladly accept industry or an individual's funds to build a new building (which gets left empty because the funds usually cannot be used to hire anyone), but somehow industry grants don't usually count towards tenure for professors. They are considered tainted money. Not as good as federal or state dollars.
I do understand it is a slippery slope. Industry doesn't typically offload core research to universities, only testing type work, which isn't going to lead to any real innovation for the university lab doing the work. But for professors, the choice is to either keep their labs operational with "tainted" industry money or scale back and hope to win the federal grant lottery, which is highly political in nature.
I guess my point is that both at the university level and at the individual professor level, no one is turning down industry dollars because that's largely all that is available.