Why do researchers need universities?

Question

This is a follow-up question to How are junior professors evaluated for promotion? and probably an even more naive question. If I'm understanding the answer correct, professors need funding to do research, but once they get it, the university takes some of the grant as overheads (to pay for office space, electricity, etc), and the cut the university takes is substantial.

Given that then, why do professors need universities? One could just apply for the grant as per normal, and once one gets it, buy a slightly bigger house and convert one of the rooms into a lab. One loses nothing to overheads, gets to work from home, has zero teaching duties, can choose to settle anywhere (no two-body problem!), and can even monitor an experiment 24/7. This gets even easier if one works in a field that doesn't need a physical lab. Further, presumably the grant covers postdoc salaries, so one would still be able to pay for postdocs (although probably not PhD students since a professor without a university will not be able to award a degree).

The obvious answer is that one cannot apply for a grant without a university, but Google indicates that's not the case, e.g. NSA grants in mathematics only looks at one's previous accomplishments & potential applications of the research result, both of which are independent of the university. I suppose one could lose journal access, but there's always stuff like arXiv / ResearchGate, emailing the authors of the desired paper, or even Scihub (oops). It's conceivable that not working for a university loses one some prestige, since one can no longer claim to be a professor. However even then I'd expect at least some academics to choose this path, valuing the convenience & extra research funding over prestige.

If the answer to this varies from field to field, I'm most interested in the sciences.

Answer 1

If I'm understanding the answer correct, professors need funding to do research, but once they get it, the university takes some of the grant as overheads (to pay for office space, electricity, etc), and the cut the university takes is substantial

The number of services provided by a university is substantial, of which space and electricity are the least of them.

Maintenance, janitorial, and IT services - machines break, rooms get dirty, and technology has inexplicable problems. Universities have infrastructure in place to deal with all of this.

Access to literature - Universities maintain subscriptions to the journals, standards, and other references a researcher needs.

Laboratory equipment and specialists - Most scientific research requires specialized equipment, which can cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars to several million. Universities can afford to maintain such equipment, and the expert technicians needed to run the equipment at maximum efficiency.

Other researchers - A university department provides ready access to and familiarity with other experts in your field for potential collaboration. Additionally, it provides a way to find potential collaborators from other fields for the times when you find your research leaving the bounds of your expertise.

Students - an unfortunate amount of research is tedious. A university provides a ready framework for delegating simple but time-consuming work to students so that a researcher can focus on the parts of the research that only they can do.

Contacts - Universities maintain contacts with businesses, governments, and other research institutions that can open more doors than any one researcher could do on their own.

Reputation - Being a member of a respected university means that people who trust that university will afford some measure of that trust as well.

Legal services and other expertise - While it would be nice if research could exist completely separate from the outside world, this is not the case. Universities have systems set up to support and advise their researchers when problems arise during their research.

Many of these things could be aquired by a solo researcher, of course. But doing so would cost time and money, likely amounting to more than a university takes in overhead. And things like contacts and reputation are difficult to purchase.

Answer 2

Another point is about the social environment. Research is a process with many needs, and one of them is contact with like-minded people to share insights, problems, day-to-day peer review, and so on. The lab is not only where the researcher does physical work, but a place where other researchers, students, and whole communities meet to have social exchanges. The university does this at a much larger scale. Even hard sciences like STEM need this social aspect.

The lone and autonomous scientist is a romantic view. Some papers on fringe areas have more than a hundred co-authors today.

Answer 3

There are really two questions here. 1.Do researchers need support? and 2. Do researchers need support from an organization that also teaches?

The answer to the first question is: As arrogant as some researchers are, they need support, from any number of other people. From human resources, to accounting to janitorial. If any researcher honestly thinks they are capable of doing all of those things better than professionals they are either laughably naive or simply stupid. If those researchers think they don't need those things and believe they can work in a vacuum, the same statement applies.

The answer to the second question is a bit more complicated but comes down to a couple of ideas, on the concept of giving back. Those researchers learned somewhere, most often a university and want that system to continue because they recognize the value even if it does "cost" them some percentage of their funding. The other is that most people recognize the value of new ideas and having to explain yourself to those with less knowledge than oneself. Universities also provide for continuity of research, very few projects are one and done, the environment of constantly changing students provides a way for ideas to grow and evolve or be supplanted by better ideas.

Finally from a funding perspective, funding entities recognize the value that universities provide to researchers and society as a whole and probably include that in their calculation when choosing what projects to fund.

Answer 4

It is true that research (even research funded by government grants) can be done elsewhere than at universities. But "professors" mainly do teaching, which is what the universities are set up for.

My answer: researchers do not need universities. Professors do. Even professors who also do research.

added
Maybe another way to make my point. If you are doing research but not teaching, then your title should be something other than "Professor".

A line in the musical The Music Man asserts that band leaders are called "Professor" by courtesy, and need not actually be attached to a university. That should not apply to non-teaching researchers.

note This answer is for the original question title "Why do professors need universities?".

Answer 5

A couple more reasons:

Job security. For a tenured professor, it's nice to know that if the next grant application falls through you will still be getting a regular income.

Economy of scale. Setting up a lab from scratch for the sole use of one researcher would be seriously expensive. But sharing a lab with another group, in an existing building, and reusing some equipment from a previous grant, that is more feasible.

Answer 6

There are people who do research outside of the context of a university. I work for a government contractor that gets US government money to do AI research.

In the US we also have institutions called National Labs that do research (some are affiliated with a university though), private companies that fund research (especially in math/CS/stats and biology/chemistry/medicine). This is only a partial list, I’m sure there are much more.

Answer 7

In all these excellent replies and comments, no one appears to have mentioned a critical point about government funding. Even if you found a (U.S.) government agency or organization that was willing to fund a self-employed researcher, you would by Federal law be required to have a FAR-compliant (Google) accounting system. This applies also to corporations and any other recipient organizations.

I have personal experience taking a leave of absence from a university to join a start-up temporarily, to transition some of my research results to practice. One of my research sponsors at the university wanted to continue funding my work at the start-up. That required the start-up to install a FAR-compliant accounting system. Maybe there were or now are less painful ways to get that started and use it, but the start-up's experience was quite a hassle (but worth all the money from the Government sponsor). I hate to think what it would be like for a self-employed researcher.

Answer 8

Professors need to find students to do their research for/with them. To find good students, the best bet is to teach - it allows you to directly see them work and evaluate how they do in your subject. Being part of a university allows you access to students to use as a recruitment pool.

(Also, not everyone likes to have their co-workers know where their home is, and once you start renting office space elsewhere, you start running into all the administrative issues that a university also deals with and needs those overhead costs for...)

Answer 9

Your question contains the implicit assumption that the money that goes to the university for overhead would be available to the recipient for his/her use if not at a university. In the US, this assumption in general would not be true. In preparing a grant application the researcher lists the costs of the project, including salaries for the researchers, post-docs, travel costs, purchases,etc. Then the university overhead rate is applied to these costs. All costs must be justified in the grant application, so a professor couldn't just quit the university and double his/her salary for the purposes of the grant application. If somehow he/she could perform the research with no overhead costs, then none will be awarded. The independent researcher could claim overhead costs in the application, but these need to be real and have backup justification, so they can't just be diverted to more research funding.

Answer 10

A few answers to this question, from the perspective of a junior faculty member in a U.S. state university. Let's assume for the moment that this is allowed by the grant in question, which is often (and I'd say nearly always) not the case. But indulging the hypothetical.

One could just apply for the grant as per normal, and once one gets it, buy a slightly bigger house and convert one of the rooms into a lab.

I am lucky enough to have a grant with a decent overhead rate - but it only lasts for three years. "Buying a bigger house" is an extremely aggressive investment that will obligate me for years in property taxes if nothing else for something that may go away.

gets to work from home

I already spend pretty much as much time as I want working from home.

has zero teaching duties

I already have zero teaching duties...

can even monitor an experiment 24/7

This really doesn't strike me as a positive thing from the perspective of work-life balance.

Further, presumably the grant covers postdoc salaries, so one would still be able to pay for postdocs (although probably not PhD students since a professor without a university will not be able to award a degree).

You are vastly underestimating the amount of staff I have access to. I have an HR person who handles things like payroll. I have departmental staff that keep track of my budgets. A person who helps with proposal development (getting things in the forms needed for submission, etc.) and budget prep. Someone else who will review the complex contracts that come with large grants, data use agreements, etc.

And that doesn't even touch on things like the techs who keep the HPC cluster running, the internet up, the parking lot plowed, etc.

My overhead pays for some of their time. The overhead on my grant cannot possibly hire all of those people.

I suppose one could lose journal access, but there's always stuff like arXiv / ResearchGate, emailing the authors of the desired paper, or even Scihub (oops).

This doesn't even get close to replacing proper access via a library

It's conceivable that not working for a university loses one some prestige, since one can no longer claim to be a professor. However even then I'd expect at least some academics to choose this path, valuing the convenience & extra research funding over prestige.

"Environment" is a major part of a grant being evaluated, at least on NIH grants, and not being at a university or research institute makes that a much harder sell. While some researchers undoubtedly choose that path, that depends very heavily on their own personal reputations, which many researchers cannot necessarily rely on.

Answer 11

Professors need universities because, by definition and etymology, a professor is transmitting knowledge by teaching it.

In some systems, you have professional researchers which are not professors and which are paid full time to do their research (since they belong to some other research institution than a University). For example, in France, we have the CNRS. See this answer.

Notice also that, as explained by all answers here, research is a social activity which needs teams to be done.

One could just apply for the grant as per normal, and once one gets it, buy a slightly bigger house and convert one of the rooms into a lab.

Then: how do you control that the grant is paying research? Notice also that management and administration require different skills and mindsets than doing research. Most researchers have to do some management & administration tasks (quite often too much of them) but are not happy and not very efficient at these tasks.

Answer 12

1. Some for economical reasons. Their research could cost money and require a lab / equipment that costs more than they could afford to raise individually. Maybe they enjoy having a stable income which being in the employ of a university brings. Usually professorship gives a quite high pay.

2. Some for social reasons. They need the social connections at the university to find inspiration to do research and find collaborators for their research. Maybe they also enjoy teaching, in which case it is easier to find students to teach if you have a formal duty to do so. Also easier to get "padawans" / research students to inspire to carry your legacy forward once your time is over.

3. Some for status reasons. They enjoy the social status that comes with a professor title.

There's probably even more, but these were the first that came to mind.