Is it possible to survive in university academia without applying for grants?

Question

I see that many professors spend all of their time applying for grants, minus a little bit of time to interact with the graduate students on their grants and a little bit of time to fulfill their teaching obligations. They are of course doing a great service to their graduate students, who perhaps otherwise would not be able to do research, but it doesn't seem very enjoyable to be in such a position.

I've spoken with many researchers at national laboratories who say they chose to go that route so that they could be mostly freed from the grant game (of course some of them still have to write grant proposals).

I enjoy doing research, but my real passion is in teaching, so my goal has always been to be a university professor. However, I am not fond of the idea of "hustling for money" (as one researcher at a national lab put it). I personally would much rather spend most of my time preparing strong lectures. (I would consider high school but the topics I would like to teach only are offered in universities.)

So, my question: can one survive in university academia without grants, perhaps at the cost of not having graduate students? Is it enough to be an effective teacher, with a strong albeit grantless research portfolio?

Answer 1

There are certainly some situations in the US where you can be a tenured professor, do some unsupported research, and never bring in grants. However, the expectation that you will bring in research grants is fairly wide spread, and having at least some grant funding is necessary to obtain tenure at a surprisingly large number of institutions (not just the "Research I" nationally ranked universities.)

Research funding varies dramatically between disciplines. In the following I'll restrict my attention to mathematics since you mentioned that was your area. I'm including statistics since in many cases statisticians get jobs in mathematics departments at these kinds of institutions.

The exceptions boil down to universities in which research is not a high priority and teaching is more important. These institutions are typically "Regional Comprehensive Universities" often with names of the form "directional state university." For example, in New Mexico we have "Eastern New Mexico University", "Western New Mexico University", "New Mexico Highlands University", and "Northern New Mexico College"

Teaching loads at such institutions are typically high (3-3 or 4-4, plus lots of advising) and graduate programs are small or non-existent. Undergraduate science and engineering degree programs are also small. Many of these universities don't offer any degrees in engineering. Much of the enrollment in math and statistics courses is in freshman level service courses like college algebra and intro to statistics.

In order to get hired into a tenure track position at such an institution you'll need a PhD and some teaching experience (many candidates for such positions will have worked in "visiting assistant professor" positions for a few years.) There will typically be some expectation that you will publish research during your time as an assistant professor, and you may be encouraged to apply for research grants, but very few faculty at such institutions actually have grant funding from the NSF or other federal agencies.

In mathematics, the number of tenure track positions has been in decline in recent years. The competition for these kinds of positions has become extreme, with institutions reporting hundreds of applications for each position.

Answer 2

You say in your comment that "[t]here are no real costs associated with my research," which is a huge misunderstanding about the costs of research. The vast majority of research budgets (in the US, based on my experience) are salaries for the researchers. While NSF limits professors to 2 months of salary across all grants from NSF without special permission, many graduate students and postdocs are funded mostly or entirely off grants won by those professors. If you want to have a grad student work with you on your research, you need to fund their salary and tuition, as well as their fringe benefits and the university's overhead charge (which keeps the lights on and pays for admin staff, etc), and at most universities this money comes from external funding. I guess that students who TA can also do unfunded research with a professor as they work towards their PhD, but this seems unfair to them unless the other requirements (classes, quals, etc) from their department are minimal.

Most universities in the US cover 9 months of salary for professors, so if you want to be paid that other 25%, you need to bring in external funds or teach classes during the summer semester/quarter.

How much of this you choose to do will depend on how ambitious you are. If you want tenure and raises, you will almost certainly be required to win some grants. Though, once you have tenure, you can basically stop winning grants and support no students, though your colleagues will probably stop giving you raises at that point as well.

Answer 3

In many US institutions, including R1, there are professors whose primary role is teaching (plus some services, but no research). These are called Lecturers or Teaching Professors, depending on the institution. Another possibility is teaching at a community college.