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Exactly. And to piggyback on your comment, modern academic science is the way it is because their "investors" (i.e. granting institutions like NSF) have certai
by porkloin 10y ago
Exactly.
And to piggyback on your comment, modern academic science is the way it is because their "investors" (i.e. granting institutions like NSF) have certain stipulations for grant funds or at the very least prefer certain applications over others. Applications that have some aspect dealing with STEM education, for example, are incredibly popular with NSF and other institutions at the moment.
When you talk to research academics in the sciences, they often complain about what a burden education and outreach are on their time. Most of them would rather spend 100% of the time on their research. However, their public sector "investors" have an agenda for how their money is spent. They want to see certain results - it's not just enough to see more sea slug research, they want to have grantees also encourage STEM education growth.
- mattkrause 10y agoThe outreach stuff itself isn't that bad, and it can be fun to see a bunch of 'civilians' get excited about a topic that you yourself care deeply about. It is frustrating that you need to shoehorn it into all sorts of proposals where it doesn't make a ton of sense: Why is the funding for a bunch of PhDs to study A linked to their willingness to explain B to a bunch of K-12 students? On the other hand, the administrative stuff (writing your own grants, reviewing other people's papers and grants, and getting things like purchase orders and experiment approval through the university) takes a huge amount of time and is fantastically unrewarding.