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Self-reflection after reading so many tweets from scholars and Principal Investigators mentioning how they spend much of their time fretting about who they're going to disappoint every day. I used to feel like you, so first of all, I want to express solidarity. I got enough...
... funding to start my lab 4 years ago. For a pretty long period of time, the livelihoods of 15 people were my responsibility. I lost weight, sleep, self-confidence and I woke up every morning not fretting about who I was going to disappoint, but where was I going to get...
... my next grant. As the grant funds ended, so did my ability to pay salaries, etc. I am lucky that I don't have to apply for grants all the time, and that much of my work has been either funded by my institution (yay CIDE, thank you!) or even self-funded (ethnography has perks)
This is one of the things I absolutely hate about grant-funded academia: there is no way for a principal investigator to provide stable, gainful employment with benefits because guess what, many of those positions need to be paid as contractors (who don't get benefits).
The only way you can do this is continue applying for grants and hoping that you'll be able to fund PhD students, MA/MSc students, undergraduate students. Frankly, sometimes I wish I had chosen a different line of work where grants were not absolutely necessary to do research.
I have many other thoughts, but they're convoluted and I'm not sure they're ready to be shared. But there's a lot to change in academia, but even more so, in society. Neoliberal reforms have led to precarization of scholarship, where governments cut funding for universities...
... as though if disinvesting in science and basic research is a smart public policy move. Sigh. Anyhow, trying to stay positive, in a sea of negativity, is really hard. I'm bombarded with negative tweetage from the UK, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, etc. It's overwhelming.
