Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my time in academia (~20 years) I have seen the demands and competition increase quite significantly, however talking to older researchers the this really started in the 90s the demands to demonstrate measurable outcomes increased dramatically and funding moved to be primarily through competitive grants (compared to significant base funding for researchers previously). The issue is that while previously it was com…
This is interesting. Is there a reason why this started happening in the 90s?
And I completely GP, having been in or in contact with academic research since the late 90's, there has been a very strong shift from a culture where the faculty had means for independent research, and were trusted to find their own direction, to the system we have today where a research project has much tighter overlook and reporting than most corporate projects.
A professor with a 4-5 person group will typically need two staggered pipelines of 4-5year funding projects to run risk free. In the EU it is virtually impossible to get funding for projects that do not involve multiple countries, so you need to set up and nurture partnerships for each project. Coordination the application process for these consortia is a major hassle and often outsourced at a rate of 50kEUR + win bonus. And you of course need to run multiple applications to make sure to get anything. When I talked to mentors about joining academia around 2010, the most common response was "don't".
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_public_management [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization