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Originally posted by: Invictus
" Ding! Ding! Welcome to 21st Century America, foot soldier. As the prophet Pogo once said, "We have met the enemy & he is us." Everyone among us who frets about the short-term return on a stock portfolio reinforces the "cultural, social, spiritual" devaluation of America. It's about the money & has been for over 20 years. Shelby Thames & his minions merely reflect the avarice of our society in general. Think about it. That said, I think it's entirely appropriate for Dvorak to have teams of students from mixed disciplines writing grants on topics none of them know anything about. "Professional" grant writers do this all the time. The #1 qualification to write grants is that one has never been a Boy Scout: "Trustworthy" is not a valuable character trait for a grant writer. The only thing that's important for a grant writer is getting funded, because a "pro" is usually paid for funded projects & it's expected that they will write themselves in for a chunk of the money. And in that sense, it is about "power," power over the principal investigators & power over large sums of money. I could challenge the FS readership to look at almost any faculty member's grants in search of bogus or frivolous expenses. But the fact of the matter is that USM is strictly bush league with respect to external funding. The major research universities are expert at grant-scamming. The best time to look at a grant for "irregularities" is right before it expires. At that time, there's usually a terrific draw-down of money & also a tendency to hedge on reporting results so there's some possibility of an extension. A great question to ask when looking at a grant proposal is, "What is the contingency plan for accomplishing these activities if they are not funded?" The usual answer is, "There is no contingency plan. If it's not funded, we won't do it.""

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I think your take on this is often unfortunately true but I also think it is discipline sensitive. Most liberal arts and arts grants don't pay the researcher, let alone an assistant or a lab. There really isn't a lot of money to be made in them -- only a reputation.

USM began as a teaching institution. It is experiencing a kind of schizoid existence since it wants to be a research intensive institution but continues to sell itself as a teaching/learning institution. In the academic and business world it advertises itself in the first category. To the parents of undergrads its advertises it as the second.

Both faculty and students are caught in the middle.

Present Professor commented:

USM began as a teaching institution. It is experiencing a kind of schizoid existence since it wants to be a research intensive institution but continues to sell itself as a teaching/learning institution. In the academic and business world it advertises itself in the first category. To the parents of undergrads its advertises it as the second.

Both faculty and students are caught in the middle.

These contradictory statements of priorities are pretty common.  The upper administration at Clemson (which has moved a little farther up the grant-funding ladder than USM, but suffers from most of the same internal conflicts) seems genuinely surprised that increasing graduate enrollment might get in the way of maximizing revenue from undergraduate tuition, on which the university is becoming much more dependent.

Fortunately, we don't have anyone like Shelby Thames or Angie Dvorak in our administration.

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Originally posted by: Robert Campbell
" These contradictory statements of priorities are pretty common.  The upper administration at Clemson (which has moved a little farther up the grant-funding ladder than USM, but suffers from most of the same internal conflicts) seems genuinely surprised that increasing graduate enrollment might get in the way of maximizing revenue from undergraduate tuition, on which the university is becoming much more dependent. Fortunately, we don't have anyone like Shelby Thames or Angie Dvorak in our administration."

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Robert:

I agree. This is my fifth institution (3rd research university) and I have certainly seen the change over the years. This isn't to say that this conflict of priorities is itself bad or unusual -- but your comment about leadership's role in establishing priorities and methods is.

Unfortunately we do have Shalby Thames and his cabal -- none of them particularly thoughtful or reflective about the epistemology of academic life.

I've enjoyed your comments and critiques both in this forum and in your other one.

I think that at the moment we consider ourselves to be one of the "ground zero" sites in which the there is a significant discourse of power in the academic setting in which the broader academic community must engage. You are quite right -- we are hardly unique.

By the way, do you know Mark Charney? He is a good aquaintance  . . .

FYI, the students I referred to weren't taking the class to become professional grant writers. They were trying to advance their own research. (Perhaps Dvorak did not make clear the purpose of the class.) I once heard Gary Stringer say something like, "it's not the money, it's that the money enables you to do the work."

Go ahead and call me naive and idealistic, Invictus, because I believe that education is not about the money. (Okay sure, so the world works this way--I don't have to agree with it.) If most professors were in it for the money, they would not be professors. In many areas, one can make more money in the private sector; and in many disciplines, there is no place else to go but the academy. (How many professional philosophers entirely subsidized by grant money do you know?) That is why I object to the increasing commercialization of the academy--ultimately it will be damaging to academic freedom.

And for those of you in disciplines that bring in gigantic grants, you must realize that ALL DISCIPLINES ARE NOT ALIKE. Sorry to scream, but if economic development is the driving force behind USM, we might as well shut down the LAB and rename the school Thames Tech. Every time Thames stands up and says something about research funding, it is clear that he is only talking about part of the campus, and has no clue what the rest of us do, nor does he care. When he talks about profs becoming millionaires, he might as well say to many of us, "you are and will always be a complete failure." There are no millionaires in my discipline. Not even the big name scholars, like MacArthur "genius grant" winners, fit his profile. And just because polymers make money doesn't mean my discipline is any less important than Thames's. Nor does it mean that scholars in my discipline should readjust their priorities to be more like polymer scientists.

As for USM being a "research institution," perhaps it is in some disciplines, but not in mine. I just came back from a job interview at a "research institution," where they make research possible: lower teaching loads, travel money, funding that you don't have to compete with the entire campus to get, and yes, professional grant writers on staff. I said something about USM being a research institution and was told, "Well they think they are, but they're not." This is just to inform the readers of FS how the rest of the world perceives us--even before the firings and whatever stature USM had achieved was lost.

In response to Present Professor's query, I know Mark Charney in the English department--just a little.  I don't know how he finds the time to do everything he does!

In response to some of the other comments:

It is a huge mistake to make an engineering dean (or some other kind of administrator with an engineering background) either President or Provost at any university, unless it is narrowly focused on engineering.  Engineering deans evaluate professors in terms of grant bucks per square foot of lab space per year and devalue non-engineering programs, regardless of their contributions to revenue or to the university's reputation. (At Clemson the Engineering departments are trying to figure out how to change the curriculum so there is no General Education and Engineering majors never have to take a course outside of the Engineering departments.)

From 1992 to 1996, Clemson had a Provost who came out of an engineering discipline.  He went out of his way to let Humanities and Social Sciences professors know that he despised them and their fields.  He actually announced that if he had been in charge when the request went forward to the state Commission on Higher Education, he would have blocked it and made sure the Psychology department did not get a Ph D program (...in Applied Psychology!).  We used to say that this Provost's ambition was to make Clemson into "Tiger Tech."

A few years ago, one of my mentors told me about a meeting with the new president of his university (a former engineering dean).  The dialogue went something like this.  President: "What kind of research do you do?"  Professor: "Theoretical psychology."  President: "Do you get grant money for doing theoretical psychology?"  Professor: "No.  Theoretical psychology doesn't cost a whole lot to do; doesn't require any lab equipment."  President: "You should change fields!"

These other characters were kind and gentle compared to Shelby Thames, but I think the general lesson applies.

As for USM being a research-oriented university only in spots, that is also true of Clemson.  In Education at Clemson, senior faculty have been known to discourage junior faculty from publishing.  In the Humanities, tenured professors sometimes get annual evaluations that pick over their average scores on student evaluations of each course (which are carried to two places to the right of the decimal point) while their conference presentations and journal publications are scarcely mentioned.