How to Succeed in an Academic Science Career

Bring In A Grant To Pay Your Own Salary and Don't Concern Yourself With Tenure Or Shared Governance.

By Juan Carlos G. Marvizón

My academic career is going very well. For one thing, I was just promoted to associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Well, make that adjunct associate professor. They told us at orientation, when I became adjunct assistant professor, that it was okay to drop the adjunct from our signature. It wasn’t that important, I guessed. Later, I found that maybe it is important. For one thing, it keeps me from being a member of the academic senate. So I’m excluded from shared governance. Big deal! Who has time for that, anyway?

What is serious, however, is that I don’t have a fixed salary. It isn’t just that I’m not tenured or even tenure track—I don’t have any salary from the university. I’m 100 percent on “soft money,” which means I have to get all the funds for my salary from grants. To be on “hard money,” your position has to be categorized as FTE, or “full-time equivalent.” FTEs are few and far between, which means they are not for foot soldiers like me. They are for VIPs—institute directors, chiefs, stuff like that, I guess. A shroud of secrecy surrounds FTEs and how they get apportioned.

Anyway, who needs an FTE? I have two grants! Most of my colleagues have just one. Some have only about a year of funding left in their grants, so their careers hang by a thread. When you lose your funding, you lose your job. Of course, it isn’t as if one day you are happily toiling in your lab and the next you are in the street. You see it coming. You have several agonizing months to ponder your dismal future. I know, because I’ve been there.

It last happened to me when my National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant almost didn’t get renewed. I thought I had it made: I had published ten papers in the previous grant cycle, three in the prestigious Journal of Neuroscience. Despite that, my first grant-renewal submission didn’t fare too well. I scored well on my second submission—close, but no cigar. I had only one more try, because the NIH has a three-strikes-and-you’re-out grant policy, so I panicked. I completely rewrote a large part of the grant, taking it in an entirely new direction. Big mistake: I went backward in my score. My career was doomed! I found new jobs for the postdocs who worked for me. I begged my collaborators, and they gave me funding to do the odd research job. I cut my salary to make the support last as long as possible. I started writing new grants, but I knew they would not get funded in time to save me. The moment the money ran out, the university would terminate my position. Without a university appointment, I couldn’t write any more grants. Luckily, at the last minute, the NIH decided that my project was in a high-priority category, and it funded my second submission.

Although I am a professor, I don’t do much lecturing. However, training my postdocs and undergraduate students in lab work does count as teaching. Sometimes, I offer to lecture in subjects close to my expertise. I don’t get a dime for doing so, but it helps at promotion time.

There’s actually a bit of a problem with this set-up. University policy dictates that 15 percent of the salaries of faculty in the professorial series has to pay for teaching. That means that I have to pay 15 percent of my salary from something other than a grant, because grant money is allocated to research, not teaching. And if I can’t find money to pay for that 15 percent, I lose my appointment as a professor! So, where does that money come from? Senior professors have so-called unrestricted funding: pools of money that can be spent as needed. Typically, they arise from donations, gifts, and industry money with no strings attached. Those of us who have no unrestricted funding would try to negotiate some type of exchange with the senior professors. Needless to say, this creates an incentive for some less-than-ethical arrangements.

Recently, I heard that a “solution” for this problem was being considered. In some exceptional cases, one would be allowed to decrease the percentage of the salary devoted to teaching from 15 to 5 percent. This would make the problem easier but would not solve it, because sometimes finding unrestricted funding for 5 percent of your salary is as hard as finding 15 percent.

Of course, at this point you may be wondering why the university doesn’t simply pay its professors for teaching. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be? I once suggested taking one FTE and splitting it up between several professors so that each would get 15 percent of his or her salary. I was practically laughed out of the room. FTEs are sacred!

I joined the AAUP because I believe in the power of unions. A local chapter of the AAUP can propose solutions to problems like those facing adjunct science faculty on soft money. Most important, it can ask the key questions for us and break the secrecy surrounding important issues. If we tried to do that as individuals, we might be targeted for retaliation. In big institutions like UCLA, professors like me who devote most of their time to scientific research are highly expendable. There are too many of us, for one thing, and lab space is at a premium. The funding we bring to the university through our grants is a drop in the bucket compared with the money the university attracts from wealthy donors and industry.

Sadly, many of my colleagues are uninterested in joining together to fight for our interests. Everyone seems convinced that if he or she struggles hard enough, gets that next grant, everything will be okay. There is also, I suspect, a strong undertow of fear. I find it tempting to adopt the same mindset. Compared with most people my age, I’m ahead of the game. I’m productive, well funded, and have a great research group and plenty of good ideas. By now, I think I know how to play the funding game. I should be okay.

Like I said, my academic career is going pretty well, here at UCLA.

For now.

Juan Carlos G. Marvizón is adjunct associate professor in the Department of Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine of the University of California, Los Angeles. He has been awarded grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Veteran’s Affairs.

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