Funding science, part 2: Should scientists be salesmen as well?

In the first part of this article, I had mentioned the “all-out scramble for external funding” that has taken hold of the centre's scientists. Since the development of this “self-funding” mentality is quite general in our modern scientific system, I think it deserves some attention.

I shall start with a seemingly trivial remark about semantics and vocabulary choices. Whenever a colleague will or has presented an idea for funding somewhere, he or she will usually talk about “selling the idea”, meaning finding ways to gain the approval of whoever takes the decision to fund or not. Of the many ways to express this (try to convince of the usefulness, or the interest of the project; or simply present as concisely and understandably as one can), the chosen phrase is characteristic of salesmen's mentality. I see three problems with that mentality. First, it turns an idea into a thing, although an idea is not a thing. An idea is alive, dynamic, and its concrete realisation will change according to external constraints and the solutions man will devise for them (new ideas). A thing is finished, static, dead. Turning something alive into a dead thing is typical of a materialistic society that confuses movement with action and misunderstands the essential core of human ingenuity. Secondly, this choice follows a general trend in our society to reduce everything to an exchange of goods. 

0Placing this exchange at the centre of society misses the transcending nature of human existence towards inner growth and freedom. In a social system entirely based on trade, and thus on the concept of private property, the value of an idea is its market value, and not its usefulness. Which leads me to the third point. A good salesman can sell anything, be it good or shoddy, i.e. he can manipulate a fellow human being into buying whatever his luggage is packed with. Hence, “selling an idea” does not really imply the idea has to be interesting by itself. I think this attitude poses serious ethical problems, and is liable to cause lasting damage to whoever comes under its influence. The willingness to manipulate someone's opinion is incompatible with a rational debate, and transforms what should be an honest conversation into a show of strength of will and cunning. In the end, whatever idea has been pushed through in this way will not have been submitted to any serious examination of its strength and weaknesses, although this should be the very purpose of presenting it in front of a committee. And both the salesman, all bent upon selling his ware, and the “client”, blended by the salesman's pitch, stops to assess the real quality of that very ware, and gradually lose the ability to recognise good ideas from worthless ones, used as they become to react to a superficially attractive “packaging”.

Most funding these days are termed “competitive”, and increasingly rest on the assumption that bigness is more effective. When one comes to think about it, this is as crazy a resource squandering scheme as it goes. Scientist, whose training, inclination and interest should lie in doing science, end up chasing partners to build research consortia and submit common research proposal, which if accepted will have to be turned into a scientific output (usually by the PhD students of the project), but all the while already chasing the next consortium and writing the next proposal. Getting grants becomes the one major occupation, the other being writing papers (or chasing co-authorship). Proponents of the competitive system may argue that (i) it ensures the best of scientific ideas receive funding, thus minimizing “unnecessary losses”, (ii) there is not enough funding available for everyone, so that selection has to be done anyway (iii) it keeps scientists on their teeth and motivated, who otherwise would loaf around. I will briefly discuss the first two points, and keep the last one for a separate article, as I feel there is much to consider on the subject of this alleged “natural human laziness”.

As far as quality is concerned, the competitive system is a poor system that exhausts scientists’ strength (they must work long hours writing proposals so as to be able to work scientifically), without in any way fostering good science. Very much like the performance indicators, it suffers from its non-specificity. Good scientists and charlatans seem to pass the test equally well. I even suspect it to be sometimes biased in favour of mediocre scientists who have found ways to fix the game to their advantage, using these salesmen skills I was writing about above, or some kind of monopolistic position (the measuring machine they built is unique, so everyone has to take them on as project partner) and a good deal of scheming cronyism as well. Anyone with some common sense cannot but be aghast at the incredible lack of innovative ideas of many large EU-funded projects. Beyond a pretentious and superficial layer made out of interwoven technical terms and trendy keywords, the single true purpose of these projects is glaring: feed the participants.

The problem of lack of funding is an interesting subject that would deserve much more attention than it does. First, I am not certain there is such a problem, in the rich developed countries at least. I suspect instead that the lack of funding is exaggerated purposefully as a means of social control. Isn't it strange that these apparent restrictions have grown in a time of unprecedented creation of wealth in the western world, which also happens to be a time of a powerful reactionary attack on the social achievements of the fifties (and of a redistribution of wealth between labour and capital in favour of the latter)? For conservative authoritarians, freedom and independence of thought in science cannot but appear as a direct threat to their interests, which are to keep people's heads bowed low.

But this may not explain all. An unsustainable and artificial inflation of the number of scientists may also be to blame, itself the result of the system of grants chasing. With each grant come a number of PhD positions that are often used by the work package leaders as work force for the project, while they busy themselves with the next proposal. This custom not only debases the formation of many a PhD student, it also creates a bubble of young doctors, only some of whom will have been offered proper supervision, training and an interesting project to start with. Their initial motivation for working in science might also not be particularly high, but once they end up with a PhD, they might stay “in the business”.

So what could be the way out of this situation?

I think an essential prerequisite is to slow down the artificial growth of the scientific population. The systematic recruitment of PhD students as cheap workforce must stop. Principal investigators must be able to work on their own project scientifically, with minimum time dedicated to writing project proposals. That initial writing phase is important to organise one's thoughts, but should not be extended so much that proper experimental or theoretical work has to be delegated to others. PhD studentships should become a possibility rather than the rule, and only be offered when a study seems fit for a young researcher, both because of its potential scientific interest and of the mentor's willingness to accompany an apprentice.

Then, the distribution system of financial resources has to change radically, and must become largely self-organised by the very scientists who need these resources to work. Some centralisation would have to be kept to distribute funding, but the final decision as to which work should be undertaken next given the available financial resources must be taken in common by all concerned scientists after an open debate. Ideally the size of that public consultation would be small enough to make sure everyone knows everyone else. I think fifty is the upper limit to keep a good degree of personal knowledge between people.

In order to ensure an honest and constructive discussion as to what to finance when, we must do away with the ideology and practice of competition as well. Competition has too often been praised for enhancing human creative abilities, in naïve analogy to a hundred meters sprint at a track-and-field meeting. Kant has long ago warned about empty analogies that simply confuse matters. A sportsman may be spurned to run faster by the sight of his competitors outrunning him, but I do not see how a scientist may come up with good ideas by being put under pressure to do so. The two processes have nothing in common. One does not squeeze ideas out of a human mind. Under a truly collaborative funding scheme, there is no need to think in terms of competition at all. Instead, the group of colleagues decide together upon the research priorities.

The new scheme for internally funded projects at the research centre is a very good counter-example of that type of self-organisation, but a very good example of inefficient “idea selling”. Project ideas are first to be screened by presenting them to the department's direction. The first meeting of this sort was only sort of public and not at all collegial, as the presenters had been invited in peace meal fashion (they could stay to listen to the others, though). The unit director then decided unilaterally which ideas would be retained for presentation to the CEO (still, interestingly, calling it “bottom-up”), without even presenting arguments for or against projects (the FNR at least does so, although one does not get to read other people's proposals, which is a pity really). The last step in front of the CEO did not involve the researchers themselves. The unit’s director represented them instead. So in the end, someone who understands very little about the project presented it to someone who understands even less, and this allowed the latter to make an informed (and unilateral) decision. This does not look like a realistic, common sense based solution to me.

Pablo N