Why do academics have to get their own grants?
Stack Exchange network consists of 182 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.
Academia Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for academics and those enrolled in higher education. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Usually in industry, we are either employed (in which case our company pays us), or founders (in which case we go look for funding). To the extent that we need to spend the company's money, or hire people, we deal with the company. If we are our own bosses, we co-founders can consult each other for expenses (similar to "peer review"?) if it's important.
It seems like academics are not only employed by an institution, and have to deal with the institution, but also deal directly with e.g. the NSF. This seems to me like being employed as a research lead at e.g. Google, but still having to pitch VCs. Or like the big boss micromanaging skip-level reports. Are these bad analogies?
