If you wanted to destroy American success in academia, how would you go about it? First, you'd cut the research grants that provide extra salary. Then you'd abolish the use of teaching assistants and make the faculty members do all the work at the coalface. Instead of just lecturing, setting final exams and controlling what the assistants are doing, they would run the "help sessions" with smaller groups of students, set weekly class tests and interact with external examiners/assessors to prove that what they're doing is right. Crazy? Of course, but it happens in Britain.
In Britain, research grants do not pay top-up salaries. People apply for rather small amounts of money. You can put in a proposal for £1,700 and it will go out to three or four referees. You spend time writing the proposal, they spend time reading it and filling in forms to comment on it, and the grant- giving body, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), for instance, spends time administering it. And all for £1,700. Not only does the EPSRC spend money administering small amounts of money, it produces a regular glossy brochure extolling its work and talking about research projects in other areas of science. In all my years in America, I have never received a glossy brochure from the National Science Foundation or the National Security Agency, though I received hundreds of thousands of dollars from both these bodies, in sums of at least $50,000 each.
Ah yes, some people will say, but it's different in Britain. Academics are paid for 12 months of the year, whereas in America they are officially paid for nine months, and can do what they like with the other three - work on a research grant, go backpacking, fly kites or just sit by the pool. Fine, but this is a convenient fiction in the sense that the salary is paid in 12 equal instalments and if you have a research grant you work on it all year round. No one cares if you fly a balloon from one coast to the other in the summer, as long as you get the research done. And while British academics have 12-month contracts, so do most people, but many get bonuses. Why can't we pay bonuses to academics, like the extra salary on research grants in America? No need to match the levels that investment bankers have hitherto received. I'm talking about £10,000 or so to a world expert who is pushing forward the boundaries of some specialised field. Their salary is probably less than £100,000 and may be below £50,000, so £10,000 is worth the serious work of reassessing one's research every two or three years and writing a proposal to convince others of its value.
