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I have a question for tenured profs, why one needs to apply for grants after getting tenured? my guesses: to increase its own salary; to buy equipment; to supp

• _delirium 13y ago
  Those are basically the reasons you'd need grants, yes. And yes, it's possible to go another route, and do research alone or with few students, in which case you don't need many grants (perhaps any). In areas where not much grant money is available in the first place (pure mathematics, say), that is what people do by necessity. The author of this post comes from an area, systems, where large-budget, many-student labs are the norm, partly because of the type of research, and partly just because the (relative to other areas) availability of funds means most of your colleagues are going the large-budget, many-student-lab route.
• gregpilling 13y ago
  The university takes an overhead charge on any grant money, perhaps 40% of the total. The professor can then use the rest of the money to purchase equipment (computers, tape recorders paper), pay research assistants (grad students), travel to conferences, buy datasets or software like SPSS, or pay themselves summer salary or extra salary. If your research requires none of these things, and you have tenure and don't care about showing your field that you are capable of bringing in grant money to help fund your department, then you don't need to worry about grant money. This is probably less than 1% of the tenured professors. It also has to do with ego; your peers will know who is bringing in the big grants and who is not.