Is It Cost Effective to Hire Researchers?

 

One of the opinions that I hear over and over again from several people working in Icelandic universities  (not least at my institution) is that hiring academic members of staff who teach full time is economically more viable than hiring academics who are research active. The reasoning goes that people who teach full time generate money because they teach students, and each student brings in money from the government. On the other hand, researchers devote some of their time to activities other than teaching, and research is not seen as generating income.

I hope that some of the proponents of this point of view attended Mogens Nielsen's presentation at the workshop on science funding that was  held on Thursday, 29 March, at Reykjavík University.  Indeed, one of the arguments  Mogens put forward very clearly was precisely that income from teaching is today only less than 20% of a modern Faculty of Science. (As the dean of the Faculty of Science at Aarhus University puts it, teaching income is only the VAT for the whole budget.) The rest comes from research funding, and increasingly so. No university can hope to increase its budget by increasing the funding arising from teaching; there are hard limits to how many students one can teach while being paid to do so. On the other hand, hiring active researchers will increase the possibility that Icelandic universities have to partake of the research funding that is available out there in the big, wide world. 

Basically everybody who took part in the meeting expressed the viewpoint that Iceland should strengthen its doctoral programmes. How on earth can one create a suitable environment for a good doctoral programme in institutions where most academics are full-time teachers? How can we prepare young researchers if we never did creative research ourselves? Can people who do not know how to cycle teach others to ride a bike? 

I leave readers of this blog to mull over the figures and those questions. I trust that there will be several postings on this blog related to musings inspired by that excellent workshop. Spread the news!