For Researchers, Risk Is a Vanishing Luxury - The Chronicle of Higher Education

For Researchers, Risk Is a Vanishing Luxury - The Chronicle of Higher Education: "How to Foster More Risk in Research Facing flat financing for science over the past decade, universities have responded by rewarding researchers who pursue sure bets likely to result in incremental advances, rather than risk takers who might bust paradigms or fail in the attempt. While policy makers experiment with ways to counter the trend, universities can take smaller steps now to foster more risk among their faculty researchers. Hire people, not publication records. Rather than scanning résumés for a Science or Nature paper or relying on citation-driven metrics as a shorthand for scientific promise, hiring committees should give priority to cover letters, soliciting guided, terse descriptions of researchers’ scientific strategy and how they’ve attempted to further it. Such abstracts, combined with video conferencing, can allow a far greater range of candidates to be considered. Give innovation grants. Most federal financing places great importance on preliminary results to award support — data that high-risk ideas often lack. Small grants from universities that privilege novel ideas can provide scientists with the resources to generate findings that can then be used to win significant federal grants. The hardest part of making such grants work, however, is getting winners to take any time off their primary research, said Max Michael III, dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "People get nervous about unplugging." Emphasize risk in certain spots. By their sheer size alone, large departments can take a chance by hiring faculty members who are pursuing riskier research, and universities can pick a few disciplines in which they want to emphasize innovation. Such departments have a higher chance of home runs, even if they may also strike out more, as Jonathan R. Cole, a former provost at Columbia University, has written. "It is not a department’s overall batting average that makes a difference to external judges, it’s the absolute number of players with outstanding rec­ords of achievement." Rethink tenure. It’s become a convention that, for any scientist to win tenure at a research university, he or she must win an independent federal grant and, often, be on track to have that grant renewed. Few expect that requirement to be changed anytime soon, given the tight money for science. But, as the president of the Johns Hopkins University has recently written, relaxing that requirement may become necessary if, as many suspect, potential innovators are abandoning the university system entirely."

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