Dear Anybody,

How is it for you? You are in Japan, China, India, Russia, Belarus, UK, USA,...You are in 33 different countries. How is it for you? Do they ask you to do research, administration, teaching, to write proposals and form consortia, to write journal papers and get industrial support and do they tell you that there is no money for keeping up your salary with inflation? Do they put you through "research assessment exercises" and "teaching quality assessments" and give you marks for being a "good boy", or a "bad girl"? Do they count papers, citations and grants? Have you ever had a proposal rejected because it did not have industrial support, only to have it resubmitted and re-rejected because it was "so relevant to industry that industry should fund it"? Have you ever felt that you were asked to walk on a tight rope over a river with crocodiles below, ready to pick a little omission or fault so that your proposal is rejected? Have you ever felt that you were playing crazy golf with the hole at the top of a hill, so that if you push too little, the ball does not reach it and if you push too hard, the ball goes to the other side? I bet you have, if you live in a country that believes in market forces! Market forces perhaps have shaped the world, but market forces in research is a totally modern idea. We have terms now in the academic vocabulary like "lobbying" and "professional proposal writing" (apparently it costs about 7000 UK pounds to have your proposal written by an expert).

However, throughout the millenia, humans have found ways of beating even the most stifling and oppressive systems: Researchers fight back now! The common secrete is that people no longer submit proposals on what they want to work on; they rather do the work first, one way or another, and then, knowing where it leads, they submit proposals for funding work they have already done! Can you imagine Archimedes lobbying Jupiter to fund his research? And can you imagine him adapting to our circumstances and after having discovered the buoyancy force, jumping out of his bath and running naked to Olympus mountain to submit a proposal for research on "throwing precious metals in water" with application to "ships that can sink at will" and exploitation plans for 2,000 years, hence?

Adjustability is the art of survival, but it is also the force of peaceful destruction: flowers that adjust, flourish even on concrete, breathing through the pores of the cement at the beginning, through the cracks they create later! Let us hope that one day the cracks we open now, will become gaping holes, so that even the most blinking politicians, advocates of the market forces in research, will be able to see through them.

Maria Perrou

PS In the mean time, I would love to hear how it is for you!