That's the way it should be seen, but it's often not.
I was at a conference not too long ago and chatting with a fellow faculty member at another university, pretty well-known in his field (in a medical school department), who told me a story about how his chair berided him for doing peer reviews at all. The colleague was like "but this is part of our job as a scientist" and the chair's response was "but what account number is that coming out of", as in, "who is paying for that?" The chair proceeded to explain that unless the department was being paid for his peer reviewing time, he shouldn't be doing it.
He subsequently explained that he feels like he's checking out of academics per se and trying to shift to public outreach activities because he's tired of trying to make a case for research integrity for its own sake, as opposed to being a vehicle for bringing funds into the department.
Things in higher education are quickly moving toward a state (or have already moved toward a state) where it is implicitly assumed that your job as a researcher is to bring in money, not to do research. That is, if you are paid by the state, you are not being paid to do a job (research) you are being paid to bring in even more money. You're a salesperson or adsperson not a laborer. Grad students are the laborers. I strongly disagree with this model, but it's where we are.
I used to think that conversations like the one with my colleague were kind of fictional dystopian kinds of conversations until I actually had one. And he was dead serious.
Universities are quickly becoming places to rent space for research, basically.
I was at a conference not too long ago and chatting with a fellow faculty member at another university, pretty well-known in his field (in a medical school department), who told me a story about how his chair berided him for doing peer reviews at all. The colleague was like "but this is part of our job as a scientist" and the chair's response was "but what account number is that coming out of", as in, "who is paying for that?" The chair proceeded to explain that unless the department was being paid for his peer reviewing time, he shouldn't be doing it.
He subsequently explained that he feels like he's checking out of academics per se and trying to shift to public outreach activities because he's tired of trying to make a case for research integrity for its own sake, as opposed to being a vehicle for bringing funds into the department.
Things in higher education are quickly moving toward a state (or have already moved toward a state) where it is implicitly assumed that your job as a researcher is to bring in money, not to do research. That is, if you are paid by the state, you are not being paid to do a job (research) you are being paid to bring in even more money. You're a salesperson or adsperson not a laborer. Grad students are the laborers. I strongly disagree with this model, but it's where we are.
I used to think that conversations like the one with my colleague were kind of fictional dystopian kinds of conversations until I actually had one. And he was dead serious.
Universities are quickly becoming places to rent space for research, basically.