Post #3635222

2026-07-06 18:55 UTC

@SteveBellovin@infosec.exchange @mattblaze@federate.social I frankly have a hard time even conceiving of this kind of university. Funding and grants are central to my experience with the university as faculty since 2019. The university does everything it can to enable faculty to bring in those $$. My chair updates us regularly on our grant expenditure. I get emails every month reminding me to reach out to the grants office with what calls we are applying to. We have a private foundation relations person who has been meeting with the faculty to try to match possible donors. And we still saw almost a 30% reduction in grant expenditure last year if I'm remembering right.

Replies (1)

@SteveBellovin@infosec.exchange 2026-07-06 19:19

@ktoddbrown@social.coop @mattblaze@federate.social That's great. But grants are the lifeblood of R1 universities, so of course they want them. Bell Labs Classic was an anomaly. AT&T was once a regulated monopoly, guaranteed a certain rate of return, so it had the ability to spend money on a research lab. The Labs produced great things, stuff that did (or could have, with better upper management…) paid for Research many times over. Even in later years, that was true—I knew three people who alone saved the company enough money to pay for three years of funding AT&T Labs—Research. And then, for lots of reasons, the bean-counters stepped in. The last head of Research before I left was an MBA type with a "certificate" in computer programming. The AT&T Fellows requested a meeting with him to discuss low morale. He walked into the meeting and started it by announcing that if people were going to go elsewhere for twice the salary, there was nothing he could do. We explained that people were taking pay cuts to leave. Not knowing something like that about your staff means you aren't even a good MBA. We went on to have a decent meeting; he pronounced it valuable and said we'd meet again in a month. Three weeks later, his admin told us of a scheduling issue and that it would be rescheduled. It never was. At that point, I was certain I was leaving. A combination of lack of funding to go to conferences or buy laptops, less freedom to do interesting research, less freedom to publish (let alone talk to the press)—and yes, the departure of other interesting people to talk to; within the space of a year, the whole security group was gone—sealed the deal. What I went there for was no longer there; it was time to do what I originally wanted to do, which was teach. It was a great place while it lasted—I could and did discuss C with Dennis Ritchie or C++ with Bjarne Stroustrup, with Peter Schorr down the hall and a whole math center to discuss discrete log-based protocols. If I ever had an astrophysics questions, I'm sure I could have walked into Arno Penzias' office and asked him—and he was a Nobel Prize winner and the VP of Research.

Open ##3635221