The prospect of massive cuts in US federal government science funding has caused an increase in the usual heated internet debates over science funding. These typically involve people arguing either:
- “Funding for science research is an unalloyed good that leads to a more prosperous society. It’s a small fraction of the federal budget, should be much larger.”
- “Funding for science research is a scam that just lines the pockets of an entrenched and privileged elite. It comes out of the paychecks of hard-working people, should be much smaller or completely removed.”
I don’t want to enter into this kind of debate for lots of reasons, but thought it might be a good idea to write something about what I’ve seen of the effects of US federal government spending on research in the two subfields I know well (pure mathematics and theoretical physics). Both of these fields are far removed from the politically charged subfields of science (e.g. climate research), so opinions on whether research on them is inherently good/bad don’t follow the usual red state/blue state divisions. They’re also different in a very significant way from experimental sciences, where grant funding is completely crucial (you’re not going to do an experiment without money to fund the needed equipment).
The two subjects share other significant similarities: a researcher with a job doesn’t really need grant money to think about what they want to think about, the amount of grant money involved is relatively small, and what it can be spent on is a limited list of things (summer salary, travel, conferences, grad students, postdocs). In both cases, among these things what is most expensive is graduate students and postdocs. In the case of graduate students, university accounting charges grants for their tuition (which is something that would never otherwise be paid), so paying for a graduate student on a grant is a lot of money.
What I’ve always found remarkable is that despite all the close similarities, the situation is significantly different in these two fields (at least in the US). Oversimplifying a bit, the source of the difference is:
- In math departments (especially at top research institutions), graduate students are rarely paid as research assistants on grants, almost always as teaching assistants. The money to pay them comes from tuition. There are a few NSF-funded students, but the NSF only funds US citizens. When faculty have NSF math research grants, the size is not enough to pay the large sum a graduate student would cost.
The typical academic position at a top research institution for someone fresh out of a math Ph.D. is a term-limited non-tenure track teaching appointment, with the amount of required teaching kept low enough to allow time for research. There are some NSF-funded postdocs, but significantly fewer of these than the teaching jobs. The next step on the career ladder would be a tenure-track teaching position.
- In physics departments it’s typically been the opposite: graduate students are mostly paid as research assistants out of grant money (perhaps in some years holding a teaching assistantship). The situation with postdocs is also the opposite from that in math: these are essentially always pure research positions funded with grant money, do not involve teaching and funding from tuition money. Federal grants for theoretical particle physics come from two different agencies, NSF and DOE, more from DOE.
While both mathematicians and theoretical physicists are hoping to end up at the same place (a tenure-track teaching position funded with tuition money), they are getting there in two very different ways, with the mathematicians mostly funded by tuition money, the physicists funded by NSF/DOE grant money. The way they look at grant money is significantly different: for mathematicians it’s a nice supplement and a bit of a help for their research, for physicists it’s existential: no grant money, no job. At the time of a tenure decision, physicists to a much greater extent will be judged on whether they have a grant and how big it is. Once they have tenure, the situation is again very different. An NSF research grant for a mathematician is rarely going to pay for grad students and postdocs. To have other more junior people around to work with, you just need to maintain good relations with your colleagues on the graduate admission committee and the junior faculty hiring committee. Things are very different for physicists: the only way you’re going to get junior people to work with is to get a grant to pay for them.
I spend most of my time in a math department, and the issue of grants doesn’t come up very much, it’s not a big concern for most people. Whenever I go to talk to people in a physics department I’m struck by how the grant issue quickly comes up, with “what would this mean for my grant” something people are clearly thinking about.
In mathematics, it’s pretty clear what the implications of huge cuts in NSF funding will be: individual researchers will lose summer salary money, travel money for themselves and their collaborators, money to organize conferences. The number of grad students and postdocs will go down a bit. Most mathematicians look at this and think it’s obviously a mistake for society: why save a small amount of money by targeting cuts at the richest source of new mathematical ideas, some of which might even ultimately be of significant societal benefit?
In physics, it’s also pretty clear what the implications of huge NSF/DOE funding cuts would be: huge cuts in the number of grad students and postdocs, as well as the number of people in the field that universities would be willing to hire to tenure-track positions. Again, the amount of money involved is not that big, so the attitude is “why should my field be decimated and my research career destroyed to save a little money?”
Note that I’m not at all here discussing experimentalists. For them, the situation is even more straightforward: no grant, no experiment. Big science funding cuts means many fewer experiments.
The other big difference I see between pure math and theoretical particle physics is the relative intellectual health of the subjects. There’s plenty of useless math research going on, but there’s also a lot of very significant progress going on and many subfields are quite healthy. You can argue about whether “crisis” is the right word, but I don’t think there’s an honest case to be made that theoretical particle physics is a healthy subfield making significant progress. While a lot of the reason for this is not the fault of the theorists (SM too good, no experimental hints of how to do better), arguably the way grants have worked in the subject is partly responsible for the problem. If what everyone is doing is not working, but to get a grant you need to be doing what others are doing, then having grants be necessary for your career makes a bad situation worse.
So, from what I can see it’s clear that losing NSF grant money would be a net negative for US math research, and math researchers look at this as being pretty annoying. For US particle theory research, losing NSF and DOE grant money would have much bigger implications and researchers see this as a very personal and existential threat. Those who have been concerned about the health of the field and the negative effects of grant money on it are not necessarily all that sympathetic.
If you just want to engage in the usual arguments about government-funded scientific research, please don’t do it here. On the other hand, I’d be quite interested to hear other perspectives, especially from those who know more about the details of how grant-funded research works (my own information is limited and mainly math department based, it’s quite hard to get one’s hands on good numbers for what is going on with this kind of funding).
There’s another, related difference.
In math, if you want an academic job, you generally need a teaching letter (that at least shows you are not a terrible teacher) and thus some math departments, like MIT, require math students to teach at least one term — I can actually see a case for making them teach at least two terms so that they can get more practice teaching. Of course, many students teach a lot more than two terms.
In physics, grad students typically don’t teach, postdocs typically don’t teach, so people don’t get much practice teaching until they have a tenure-track job. In my experience this doesn’t seem to lead to more terrible teachers in physics departments, even though you might expect it to. Maybe physicists going into academic jobs are self-selecting for not being terrible teachers.
One source of the difference here is that physics departments don’t teach service courses like Calculus and Linear Algebra, where most students taking them are studying some other STEM field, so math departments need a lot more TAs.
This is not a fair representation of how graduate student funding works at a lot of US institutions.
1. At most UC campuses (for example), theoretical physics graduate students are primarily (if not entirely) funded by TAs. What guarantees the funding of incoming theory students is the large number of service courses in the physics department, and hence TA positions, not federal funding directly.
2. However, indirect costs / overhead on federal grants is a large component of the budget of all major research institutions. If this overhead disappeared, it is plausible (or even likely) that many universities would reduce the number of TAs as a cost saving measure. In that regard, a cut to the NIH overhead could have major implications for math and physics graduate programs, even if NSF and DOE funding remain unchanged. We have heard anecdotally that some physics departments have already told admitted students that their funding cannot be guaranteed this year because of the potential impact of the NIH funding overhead cut.
Thanks Daniel,
I had heard that physics theory grad student funding at many institutions over the years has evolved to be more like math grad student funding, as theory groups no longer had the large grants necessary to fund many grad students. Back when I was a grad student in physics I believe at least some years I was funded on the theory group grant, but maybe that’s unusual now.
As for problems about to hit universities and grad student funding, there are a whole bunch besides possible cuts at NSF/DOE, so yes, things are looking bad on lots of fronts, with the NIH change just the beginning.
“Things are very different for physicists: the only way you’re going to get junior people to work with is to get a grant to pay for them.”
This is still pretty much the way it is for theory grad students at my institution.
@Peter Shor:
Physics departments most certainly do teach service courses, namely first and second semester introductory physics. It is typically required that all STEM majors take a year long physics course sequence. A typical breakdown is Physics 1&2 for physics majors, Physics 1&2 for science and engineering majors, and Physics 1&2 for life science majors. It’s likely that there are more students in the math service courses, but at a large university there will still be hundreds of students taking first year physics. And unlike math courses, these courses have a laboratory component, so that often doubles the number of TAs required. Most physics grad students in the US do in fact teach, at least for a couple of semesters. It’s not necessarily about the origin of their stipend, but the department mandates a certain amount of teaching because they need the manpower.
I don’t know if this still occurs, but there used to be a serious exploitation of physics graduate students at some institutions. More students would be admitted than there were slots for them with potential advisors. The excess graduate students were needed as TA’s. Then a certain fraction would be culled by the written qualifying exam to reduce the cohort to the number needed by research advisors. Some of those put through this abattoir were admitted to other graduate programs or escaped with a masters degree, but it can’t have been a good experience. I heard a rumor that at one university, the attrition rate resulting from this nastiness was 50%.
I want to gently push back against what I understand to be the claim about math funding in the US here: namely, that if funding were to be dramatically cut, things would largely go on as usual. As you say, a few things would be lost: summer salaries, travel funds, conferences. A few things you don’t mention would also be lost: indirects, which would affect things like start-up funds, funding to institutes (AIM, SLMath, etc.), and so on. I broadly agree that for people with (say) tenured positions at good institutions, things will be somewhat worse in the short-term but not dramatically so.
That said, the profession will become much less attractive. For example, summer salaries amounts to a ~20% paycut for many mathematicians, barring a significant reorganization of funding. It’s already difficult for the profession to attract and retain talent when the alternatives offer triple the salary; this is about to become much harder. And the kind of sudden (and IMO more or less thoughtless) reorganization of the system destroys one of the main non-financial motivations for entering mathematics (and the academy more broadly) — that it is a stable profession.
I think the long-term harm here will largely be that we will be much less able to attract and retain talent, and that there will be an attendant decline in good research output.
I’m an experimentalist in a physics department, and I pay for grad students (RAs) using grants. The salary + benefits + tuition + fees all come directly from grants, and the university also charges indirect costs on all of these.
I know that TAs in the department also receive a salary + benefits, but I don’t know where the money for this comes from. I guess I assume it’s a mixture of undergrad tuition and indirect costs on grants going into the department. Similarly for grad student tuition.
In math departments, do grad students receive a salary? If grants don’t pay the tuition, who does?
I’m surprised by the comment above that a cut in NIH indirect costs would have a major impact on math and physics departments. Do some of the indirect costs for NIH grants to a biology department really end up paying tuition or stipends for math and physics grad students? I would think that departments would guard their portion of the indirect costs very jealously 😉
More generally – does anyone have a source for a good report on what indirect costs actually pay for and where they go within a university?
In hep-th, it is common in the US for PhD students to do TAship until they find an advisor. Usually, other physics fields do 1 year TAship in the first year until they find an advisor who will pay for them from 2nd year. Unlike in Europe, US universities admit a student into some subfield like HEP or Condensed Matter or Astrophysics, but among several professors in that subfield who will be their advisor is not fixed.
In practice, many students cannot find a hep-th advisor by the end of 1st year. This is mainly because every year too many students ask hep-th profs, but only few positions are there. So generally, the profs give some example/trail research problem that might not be good enough to write a paper. So, in their 2nd year, they will be doing this trial project, but for this, the professor will not give a stipend, so even in the 2nd year, they have to again work as a TA for some electromagnetism course or quantum mechanics course taught by some random prof, not necessarily the advisor they want. At the end of 2nd year, after 4 semesters as TA, if they manage to convince the prof, he will start funding the stipend from his grant. Otherwise, they will have to move to some experimental groups, which generally easily take any students as they need more people and have more money. So, in practise, 2 or 3 years out of 5 years of the PhD, they will be working as TAs without grant money. I guess if the grants are gone, instead of only half PhD being financed by TA, the entire PhD will be financed by TA. The bigger problem will be travelling to conferences, which without grants means PhD students will have to pay from their stipends, which are very low.
Hi Daniel,
I wasn’t intending to make any argument at all about what will happen, which at this point seems to me completely unknown and unknowable. Elon Musk may tomorrow change his ketamine dose and things will be completely different. Someone more devoted to hating foreigners may already be hard at work and getting ready to announce immigration policy changes that would have an even bigger impact than the grant stuff.
It’s true that this post was partially motivated by seeing your online argument with Sabine Hossenfelder. I think that she’s making a mistake by arguing about funding of science research in general and that others are making a mistake by engaging in such an argument at that level of generality. What I was trying to point out is that both she and you are starting from a detailed knowledge of what the situation is in a particular subfield of scientific research (which turn out to be exactly the only two subfields I know something about) but the situation in those two subfields is quite different, for interesting reasons.
Your arguments for specific ways huge cuts in NSF grants would have negative impacts on math research are good, but I’d warn against relying on the summer salary “math professors need a financial subsidy from the federal government to make their job worthwhile” argument. I think you’ll find not a lot of sympathy for this from those who are not math professors with NSF grants. One problem with the whole summer salary thing is that it was instituted a very long time ago, at a time that faculty researchers were often quite poorly paid and needed to teach over the summer to make ends meet, so couldn’t concentrate on research over the summer. That’s rarely the case these days.
In addition, having the subsidy be a fraction of salary means larger sums go to the best paid people, who least need the money. At best, this is an inefficient use of resources, at worst it looks like already coddled professors using their influence over the NSF to grab as much taxpayer cash as possible for their personal bank accounts.
gret42,
Math grad students are paid a salary. It’s exactly the same system as for physics TAs. The only difference is that math grad students are typically funded as TAs the entire time, whereas physics departments I gather fund grad students only some of the time as TAs, typically expect them to be paid as research assistants most of the time.
When grad students are TAs, to the extent a university’s income is mostly tuition, that’s where their pay comes from. If the university is public, instead this often mainly comes from state funds. If its Harvard or Princeton, a sizable part may come from the endowment. Tuition for Ph.D. students on grants is very real, it comes out of the grant. For students paid by the university as TAs, overall it’s something that the university counts as being paid to TAs, but then simultaneously taken back. Although no net effect, it has real meaning within the way university accounting works.
NIH and other ICR income shouldn’t be directly relevant to funding for math and physics grad students, but it will have indirect effects. If ICR income is not available to fund various necessary things, the money will have to come from elsewhere, reducing what’s available to pay TAs. Depending on how a university is organized, financial problems at one unit (e.g. a medical school heavily dependent on NIH funding) may or may not significantly affect other units.
The only funding cut that has been announced is the cut on indirect costs by the NIH.
The actual money given to NIH, NSF etc. is by Congress and not the President. It seems likely that there will be a continuing resolution that funds the government through September at current funding levels and then the GOP will have to invent new mathematical techniques to not cut medicaid/social security, deliver on Trump tax cuts while only increasing the deficit by $4 trillion. They need to do all this with their very narrow house majority. Maybe they will invent beyond imaginary numbers.
So let’s stick with the indirect cost cut and assume it applies to NSF as well.
A typical NSF particle theory grant used to be around 150k/year per senior investigator (assuming you were in the “must fund” category). Even though total NSF funding has been stable for a while, in the last couple of years, this was decreased to around 120k/year. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this ~ 25% cut was true in other disciplines (e.g chemistry) as well. This cut would thus appear to be due to the NSF shifting its priorities. While I am not privy to details of the NSF’s deliberations, Senator Ted Cruz has offered some analysis showing how ~ 25% of the NSF funding in the last two years were spent on certain new disciplines that are traditionally not recognized as science.
So let me stick with 150k/year and see what it buys. With 15% overhead, 150k/year would be 2 months summer salary for the PI, 1 postdoc/year and around 10k for travel. I am also including benefits for the PI and the postdoc in this. This is very strong support for fundamental research. The 15% overhead nets the university ~ 20k/year – this goes towards providing a desk for the postdoc in the physics building and administrative support in terms of dealing with travel receipts and such. This is more than adequate.
What else does overhead pay for? It helps pay for startups for new faculty. Startups are of course very important to get junior researchers off the ground. One can debate whether the government should pay for these , but it is not unreasonable for an organization to try to recoup costs associated with maintaining its vitality. To get a sense for these, let’s keep the direct costs the same and increase the overhead rate to 30%. This gives the university an additional 20k/year. In a group with 5 senior faculty, this is an additional 100k/year – if they hired a new person every 5 years, this would provide enough resources to give a new faculty member 500k in startup, more than sufficient to provide them with postdoctoral support and some grad student support along with some summer salary and travel. This assumes that there is no additional money being used to support faculty research from endowment returns.
The actual overhead rate in major research universities is something like 65%. So if I kept direct costs the same, that nets the university almost 45k/year/investigator in additional money. I don’t know if the costs/grant size ratio in other areas/departments scales the same way. Assuming they do, where does the extra money go?
The following offers some interesting analysis:
https://www.progressivepolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/PPI_College_Admin_Bloat.pdf
Note this analysis is from a liberal policy group.
Photino birds,
The big problem is the graduate student TA funding, with the cost of funding a grad student TA a couple orders of magnitude higher than the cost of paying for travel to a conference. If the research grants supporting grad students disappear, the university can’t just say “we’ll make them all TAs”, because, remember, the cost of a TA salary + tuition is a very big number, and the money has to come from somewhere. If this happens, universities will have to significantly reduce the number of graduate students in fields that lost funding.
Peter – thanks for the info, esp on the situation in Math departments.
Attendee – I’d love to get more info about these “faculty” vs “non-faculty” numbers. For example, if faculty only includes teaching positions, that means that soft-money research positions would end-up counted as “non-faculty”, and thus give an impression of “administrative bloat”. But that type of position is all grant-funded, so cutting them doesn’t really reduce costs.
Similarly, as the white paper you posted points out, the positions required to help administer grants (accounting, contracting, HR) aren’t necessarily “bloat” – they are the cost of doing business. Which is not to say that there aren’t opportunities for cost savings via reductions in paperwork / regulations forced by funding agencies and universities themselves.
The above are examples of why something that appears as “bloat”, when looked at from a very high level, may be less so when you get into the details. I’m sure there are other examples.
Nevertheless, I do think it’s critical for universities to address the “bloat” issue themselves, because otherwise federal and state governments are going to deal with it for them (likely in ways that they aren’t going to like at all).
> Senator Ted Cruz has offered some analysis showing how ~ 25% of the NSF funding in the last two years were spent on certain new disciplines that are traditionally not recognized as science.
That’s simply not true. I’ve looked through all the physics grants that Ted Cruz flagged, and over 99% of the funding has nothing to do with woke politics. It’s almost entirely all false positives caused by a clumsy keyword search:
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1ip1a66/only_about_40_of_the_cruz_woke_science_database/mcohz3v/
Despite this, the list is being used to sell a narrative to justify deep cuts. If they occur, they will predominantly hurt experimentalists pushing at the frontiers of what we can measure. I’ve talked to some fancy theorists who are confident they’ll be untouched, due to private foundations and benefactors, but decreasing the ratio of experimental progress to theoretical speculation even further can’t possibly be good.
Hi Peter,
Of course I agree with you that “math professors have the following amenities, which are going to be taken away” will not play well with the public. Nonetheless it is true that our profession has certain compensations not granted to the professions that we’re competing with, and taking them away will harm the profession’s ability to attract and retain talent and reduce research output.
As to summer salary and so on (and the grant system in the US as a whole) I agree it should be reformed! But it should be done thoughtfully.
Kevin Zhou,
Thanks!
I do want to point out that I’ve spent twenty years moderating out woke vs. anti-woke arguments from this blog’s comment section, not going to change that now…
gret42,
Research faculty are not supported from overheads. They are not part of the definition of “bloat” (= difference between overhead charged and actual cost of service, including money saved for startup). They try to get their entire salary and benefits supported by grants, as opposed to the teaching faculty who only get summer support. The research faculty then pay overhead on their full salary + benefits. For example, if they make 150k/year and pay 30% in benefits (both of these numbers are on the lower side), the grant would have to be around 320 k/year to support them with 65 % overhead. The overhead alone is around 125k/year. For research faculty who are theorists, that would be a sweet deal for the university since all they provide the faculty member is just an office and occasional admin support – maybe 30k max/year in costs. Experimentalists get lab space, but they also pull in more money from the government. Now, it is true that there aren’t very many theorists who are research faculty – but that is largely because there is no way they can get NSF or DOE to shell out 320k/year to support them.
Yes, I agree that part of the problem of bloat is the bloat created by the government itself. Bureaucracy seeds more bureaucracy. It is a nonlinear system. The ease with which Excel sheets can be created has made this problem worse.
The reference to ‘useless’ research in maths was interesting. Most mathematical research seems to involve proving a conjectured property of Frobenioids, or something similarly useless/pointless from an outsider’s point of view. Do you mean ‘useless’ in the sense of not interesting even within the context of the (sub)field?
Felix,
Yes, I meant “useless” in the second sense you give.
@ Kevin Zhou:
I have not personally gone through the list of grants. I agree that the list generated by Senator Cruz was obtained by keyword searches and is thus likely to contain errors. In deference to Peter’s wishes, I do not want to get into a debate about wokeness here.
To clarify my comment earlier, I do not think that the MPS division in NSF has funded woke projects – but, my sense is that money was internally moved from traditional NSF divisions to the Directorate of Education. You can peruse the list of grants there – some of them are worthy. Others sound like they are from Portlandia.
@Attendee:
The Directorate for STEM Education (EDU) is funded from a separate line in the NFS budget. Can’t have funds transferred from the line that funds MPS and the other Directorates to EDU and vice versa. However, MPS has certainly paid for the creation of TIP and all kinds of other NFS initiatives.
@Eednetta – thanks for pointing that out. I do not know the details of NSF budgeting. Does Congress explicitly specify how much MPS gets versus EDU? Or does NSF get its budget from Congress and it then decides how the money is spent across various divisions? I only have some anecdotal evidence of approximately 25% cuts for individual across several programs in MPS. If it is more widespread, I am curious to know what happened. It may even be that MPS decided to support more groups. Perhaps Senator Cruz’s time could be spent looking for wokeness there as well.
I am sorry, my dyslexia was acting up. Meant to write NSF, not NFS. Adding two bits as background information:
Unlike DOE, NSF has wide latitude to decide how and to what funds appropriated by Congress are distributed internally. The science directorates have only one major budget line feeding them, the Research & Research Activities (R&RA) line, which was about $7.8B in 2024 (see here for the breakdown: https://ww2.aip.org/fyi/fy2024-national-science-foundation). Out of that, MPS got $1.6B, and the Division of Mathematical Sciences got $248M.
The NSF Director decides how R&RA funds are apportioned to each directorate and division. The present NSF Director has been seeking since the start of his appointment to dilute the NSF mission by creating the TIP directorate, which nobody asked for and nobody wants. For perspective, TIP got $880M in 2024.
Agreed with what Daniel Green posted here (Grad chair of a large Physics department here). A cut to NSF or its overhead implies fewer available TA positions and, to make matters worse, more grad students relying on those TA positions. This would immediately impact how many grad students we can admit.
In my view, fewer grad students in the program would most impact experimentalists who need those students to help run their experiments.
Relatedly, in my department we already made the historically typical number of offers, but are now bracing for an unusually high *acceptance* rate, as students suddenly have fewer options/offers elsewhere.
Attendee –
I do understand all that, so I must have been unclear in my response.
Many people say things like “the student/non-faculty ratio is 2:1 … look how bloated the universities administration has become! That’s why college costs so much!”
But if “non-faculty” includes soft-money research faculty, that isn’t an example of “bloat” that is driving up undergrad tuition cost. Neither is it an example of costs that can be reduced by cutting “administrators”.
My question is: how do these reports define faculty vs non-faculty?
I know this posting was prompted specifically by the crisis in the USA, but it may be of some interest to note the contrast with the maths/physics setup in the UK. Firstly, neither of these constituencies has to deal with the concept of summer salary. The purpose of a university is scholarship, and this has to mean both teaching and research. Even if your only institutional income is from tuition fees, that has to pay for at least basic research time as well: in the long term, the quality of the teaching depends on that background activity. For both maths and physics, the majority of PhDs are funded by studentships awarded as a block to institutions by Research Councils (NSF equivalent bodies). Those students get enough to live on, but most choose to supplement their income by TA duties, which the university needs in order to deliver all its teaching, but which most students feel is also of academic benefit to them. Both maths & physics can bid for research grants to support postdocs. Ironically, even pure maths is supported by EPSRC (Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council). As the real value of domestic funding has declined, the gap has been filled by grants from the ERC (European Research Council), which thankfully the UK was able to rejoin after the disaster of Brexit. Again, maths is eligible for such funding – which provides postdocs and also extra PhD places. One result of the ERC funding is that recruitment decisions are often biased towards grant holders – not just as a badge of quality, but because an ERC grant can also pay the grant-holder’s salary. So someone with an ERC can offer an off-the-shelf research team that is free for 5-6 years – and that’s often a big enough bribe for an institution to promise tenure post-ERC. A similar situation applies with Royal Society University Research Fellowships, which provide 8 years of salary plus funding for postdocs – again open to maths as well as physics. So in short I think the UK has much less of a distinction between life in maths and theoretical physics. I know less about how things are elsewhere in Europe – but again the ERC will dominate the funding landscape.
@gret42 –
The report cites this paper for their analysis:
https://doi.org/10.1080/00346764.2021.1940255
They claim that they explicitly count executive/administrators, other professional staff (librarians, curators, archivists, student services, academic and education services) and non professional staff (service occupations, sales and related occupations, office and admin staff) in their definition of “bloat”.
It would seem like they excluded research staff from that list. How careful were they in doing so? I dont know – I am a physicist and so I dont know that field to vouch for their research. But, from an order of magnitudes perspective, I dont see how research faculty (even if they were accidentally included in that list) would explain the claimed increase in such staff. In physics departments, there are typically far fewer research faculty than teaching faculty simply because of the difficulty of supporting them. I think Caltech and MIT had more research faculty than other places because of LIGO – they needed a lot of hard technical expertise and did not want one project to swallow up their departments.
I dont know if the situation in biology/chemistry departments is different – some of their labs look like mini corporations to me. But I think once you include other schools (law, business, engineering etc.), where there are plenty of high paying jobs in industry, I would be surprised if research faculty are really that big a component of the total staff.