If you read nothing else in this excellent post, read the conclusion:
> A key component of this U.S. research ecosystem was the genius of the indirect cost reimbursement system. Not only did the U.S. fund researchers in universities by paying the cost of their salaries, the U.S. gave universities money for the researchers facilities and administration. This was the secret sauce that allowed U.S. universities to build world-class labs for cutting-edge research that were the envy of the world. Scientists flocked to the U.S. causing other countries to complain of a “brain drain.”
and:
> Today, China’s leadership has spent the last three decades investing heavily to surpass the U.S. in science and technology.
In my field (a type of radar related research) in which I've worked for almost 30 yrs, papers from China have gone from sparse and poorly done imitations of western papers (~15-20 yrs ago), to innovative must reads if you want to stay on top of the field. Usually when I think of a new idea, it has already been done by some Chinese researcher. The Biden administration seemed to recognize this issue and put a lot of money toward this field. All that money and more is going away. I'm hoping to stay funded through the midterms on other projects (and that there are midterms), and hoping that the US can get back on track (the one that actually made it 'great', at least by the metrics in the post.
> papers from China have gone from sparse and poorly done imitations of western papers (~15-20 yrs ago), to innovative must reads if you want to stay on top of the field. Usually when I think of a new idea, it has already been done by some Chinese researcher.
Not germane to the main thread, but are the “new idea” papers written by Chinese authors mostly published in English, Chinese, or both?
If Chinese is part or all of the output, what method do non-Chinese reading researchers use to access the contents (e.g., AI translations, abstract journals, etc.)?
As a language nerd, I’m curious. I know that French, German, and Russian used to be (and sometimes still are) required languages for some graduate students so that they could access research texts in the original language. I wonder if that’s happening with Chinese now.
In my experience Chinese academics are far more bilingual than western ones. I think that for Chinese academics the English publications are generally of a higher quality and more prestigious, but I’m sure that too will change over time. I can definitely say that Chinese publications have gotten much better in terms of quality over the last 20 years and there are now a lot of results worth translating.
At this point ML translation is sufficiently good that it does not make a material difference for the readership. This means that there is not a lot of political advantage around having a more dominant language. The bigger point is about the relative strength of the underlying research communities and this is definitely moving in favor of the Chinese.
*Chinese academics are far more bilingual than English-speaking ones.
Here in France, every academic I know, and I know quite a lot of them, are all perfectly fluent in English. Most of what they write is in English, or at the very least translated into it.
> Chinese academics are far more bilingual than western ones.
In what sense, since most of the western world doesn't have English as a native language, and many US researchers were born in other countries?
Sorry poor turn of phrase. I meant this in the sense of the publication language. Yes - most academics everywhere speak a few languages.
Chinese language publications may eventually serve the role of rapid communications, but for important results it will always be in English due to their ”trophy culture”.
That makes sense. The same trend is already happening in the west with Arxiv and Bioarxiv. Neither is as prestigious for the purpose of a lot of facility politics/rankings but in an active field both are more meaningful markers of the cutting edge than prestige publications like nature. I imagine these journals will retain their function as markers of prestige even as most of the community’s research output happens in more informal channels.
I recently read a paper on health benefits of cheese and looked at the authors and they were all from Chinese universities, was expecting a US agricultural university, like UC Davis does a lot of work on products of California and was unaware that cheese was any part of mainland China’s traditional nutrition sources, I.e. why did they study this?!
I don't see any reason why specifically "indirect cost reimbursement" is anything to do with this. Sure, individually billing labs is administrative burden, but it's a tiny drop in the ocean of inane bureaucracy that university researchers already have to deal with today. And maybe if we got rid of the blanket overhead percentage, it would put pressure on universities to cut a lot of the crap. Researchers are much more likely to push back when they see a line item for how much that nonsensical bureaucracy is costing them.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of research funding, and quite frankly repeating it without even basic research borders on negligence.
Universities use indirect funds for maintaining facilities, the shared equipment, bulk purchases of materials, staff for things like cleaning and disposal. It is pivotal that these funds are available in the right amount or research physically cannot happen despite being "indirect" (due merely to the legal definition of the word). And these rates are aggressively negotiated beforehand.
Can university administration be trimmed? Can their heads be paid less? Of course. But the idea that that's going to happen is absurd. If you want to stop that, you make laws and regulations. If you want to stop the science, you gut the financial viability of research.
Indirect rates are negotiated. What are the incentives for the government negotiators to get the lowest possible rate? I honestly don't know; I'd like to understand more about the underlying drivers here.
Why does any business' requisitons staff manage their purchases? Because it's quite literally their job. They have limited money to allocate based on their budget, and their lifelong career is trying to make that money work as effectively as possible at keeping the American research "institution" powerful. That's why grants have application processes and contract negotiations
And it's also why it's so insulting to just dismiss this whole process and claim rampant fraud with zero evidence. It's basically accusing thousands of people of being lazy and felonious and maliciously negligent. It's telling thousands of researchers who struggle for funding that they're apparently just morons for not getting in on the "infinite cash" we purportedly hand out like candy. It's saying universities don't need buildings or janitors and shouldn't take bulk discounts on their raw materials. Etc.
This isn't even getting into the absurd misunderstanding of economics of treating a government grant like a hamburger purchase. The US gives money to a US university which purchases US materials and pays US staff that are all taxed to give money to the US government. And their findings develop knowledge and cultivate skilled labor in the US that produce higher value exports for the US which are taxed to the US government. They aren't buying a hamburger, they're taking on what has proven to be one of the best investments in world history.
I do not believe that sharing costs of facilities and equipment is so difficult that research universities can't handle it while every condo association in the US somehow manages to pull it off. I do not believe you that this is aggressively negotiated down by the government because private research grants come with much lower indirect costs percentages.
> Can university administration be trimmed? Can their heads be paid less? Of course. But the idea that that's going to happen is absurd.
Well I guess we just have to pay for endlessly expanding bureaucracy then, because apparently expecting research universities to be somewhat efficient with their resources is "absurd."
> If you want to stop that, you make laws and regulations.
Good idea! Maybe we can limit how much they can spend on overhead. Oh, wait...
You're clearly not involved even remotely in academia and are just parroting bullshit you saw on your news outlet. What's even the point when you can just declare "no, it's totally a problem and they can just magically make money appear and I'm totally aware of the negotiation process for grants". Good Lord.
I can see I've hit a nerve here. But it's ok. I understand that the fact that private research grants contain indirect percentages less than half of the federal rate and yet still the universities not refuse them is a very difficult thing for you to argue against. It's understandable that you would resort to appeals to authority and ad hominems when you can't present a logical argument.
> I understand that the fact that private research grants contain indirect percentages less than half of the federal rate and yet still the universities not refuse them is a very difficult thing for you to argue against.
Here's an easy approach to a counterargument.
Private foundation grants account for less than 10% of all research funding in the sciences [1]. The fact that researchers apply for and receive private grants has _nothing_ to do with whether their funding restrictions would be sustainable when scaled up.
There are fixed costs associated with running research labs and facilities. Just because private funding can (sometimes) come with lower allocations for overheads doesn't mean that research can continue at pace without the public grant overheads. The vast bulk of research money is public not private.
While I will happily concede that there is always room for improvement with how we fund research, your suggestions are impractical and would heavily handicap existing efforts.
I guess the problem is that I just don't trust them. It's a bunch of university administrators and government bureaucrats (two groups I trust on the level of used car dealers) spending other people's money. I think the solution to this is transparency. If these universities want to continue getting tax exempt status and generous overhead allocations out of taxpayer funds, then they should be required to release their budgets to the public. It they are actually spending all that money on reasonable research costs, then fine, but I want to see the receipts.
You are fundamentally misunderstanding the balance of power here.
In your mind it seems to be "those people come pleading for money so they can do research, giving it is essentially charity"- but it couldn't be further from the truth.
Most top-tier researchers can do their science anywhere. If you don't make stuff easy and comfortable enough to hold them, they'll just leave the country. A significant chunk of science spending is an attempt to bribe researchers to stay. Drop that and other countries are going to get those invaluable people.
I can tell you that several major EU universities have started massive outreach programs and are starting to snatch all the top researchers from the US. The damage this will cause to the US' scientific leadership is not even quantifiable, it's completely insane.
Shooting your own foot because you "don't trust bureaucrats". Oh well.
Anyway, at my university the first few top researchers already arrived, this is going to be exciting in european research. If you guys don't want this massive advantage, we'll gladly take it.
Please stop correcting them, maybe then all my friends will come back and do research here instead of in the US.
One of my friends, who is a tenured professor in a top 10 US university, already switched our Signal messages to expire after 24h the other day. I asked him why, and he said "you never know what the current administration might use against you".
So yes, I'm all for having our people back if the US voted that they don't want them.
It is not charity for the researchers. That's money earned. It's charity for the bureaucrats who administer it. As for the facilities and administration it pays for, I take no issue with the facilities. I want to take an axe to the useless bureaucrats and lawyers involved. My dad is a university researcher and he faces endless bureaucratic nonsense to run his lab. If we want to keep researchers here we should start by making it easy for them. It's a cost savings too.
A couple things:
1) We refuse them when we can. Like if you have a lower indirect rate, my institution's policy is that has to be located somewhere that's documented, you can't just do it. I did have one where the sponsored programs folks just said no.
2) As mentioned, they're sort of a drop in the bucket, and also important to junior faculty, so they're a little bit accepted as loss leaders.
3) At several institutions, it was made clear to me that if you relied on these, and not "full fat" grants, by the time you came up for tenure, things would be bad.
The great irony is every research administrator I know (and I know a lot) sort of hates these. If they had wanted to, "You cannot charge a private organization a indirect rate lower than your negotiated federal rate of the same type" (there are different rates depending on the nature of the project) would probably have been met with "Yeah, that tracks."
Instead, they're trying to use it as an excuse to absolutely gut research.
There it is again. Private research grants are often taken at loss, subsidized by the actual scientific funding infrastructure that has made the US the world superpower of science.
> Good idea! Maybe we can limit how much they can spend on overhead. Oh, wait...
These rates are negotiated with the federal government. There's already a mechanism for this.
>Good idea! Maybe we can limit how much they can spend on overhead. Oh, wait...
Sure, that's Congress' job. The executive branch's current attempts to reduce it via executive order have no basis in law and therefore are not valid.
I don't know that I'd rely too heavily on midterms in 26. Gerrymandering and all that.
Gerrymandering? More like scrubbing the voters of the right to vote (SAVE act) or voter intimidation (all those militias standing ready!)
I don't know why this is getting shadowed. You're absolutely right. Gerrymandering is a threat.
Illinois and Maryland look pretty secure on that front. Perhaps the Democrats can try to gerrymander NYS again, without getting slapped down by the courts