I hope the future of higher education won’t rely so heavily on money. This sounds a bit naive on my part but I feel the pressure to assure funding on the parts of professors is really detrimental to research. People are only concerned about doing research that can get funded. They cannot pursue their own interests because if they do not receive money, they cannot do the work. This causes research to become a bit boring, in my opinion. Everyone is studying the same things, people are afraid to take risks because there’s no money in risks.

When professors are focusing only on money, their research suffers. They spend all of their time writing grants on research that hasn’t yet been done because they’re too busy writing to do anything. They can’t do research because they don’t have money and they don’t have money because they can’t do research. I feel like this cycle sucks the joy out of research. How can you enjoy what you do when you can’t do it anymore? When a person joins academia, they essentially become an administrative person. They fill out paperwork and write grants. There’s nothing wrong with this but they’re no longer the ones conducting research. They can still use their knowledge to mentor students but they’re not on the frontline, doing things themselves. As someone who really loves doing research and does both wet lab work and computational work, the idea of no longer having the time or opportunity to do so is a bit sad. Being the one to think up new ideas for my project and then actually running the experiment myself is something I love so much. Learning new techniques and technologies and incorporating it into my work is always so exciting. But when you’re in academia and have to work on getting money, you no longer have the time to do this.

I guess I wish the future of higher education allows professors to allow research to thrive by allowing professors the chance and opportunity to do research without having to worry about funding, which seems like a pipe dream at this point.