Agree re medical schools are more hierarchical, where MDs are more appreciated.I didn't want the OP to give the impression that other institutions of higher learning are all as they have depicted them. The above struck me as naive. It may be true for the OP and their institution(s), but I think they seem to be describing a primarily undergraduate institution with few graduate students. In Tier 1 degree-granting universities the science departments will have graduate students and the faculty will be funding their research from grants after they have burned through their startup funds. The science faculty will have research labs which they are running like a small business: They are selling research projects to NIH, NSF, American Cancer Society, other foundations and publishing peer-reviewd articles in well-known international publications such as Nature, Science, and Cell. Those papers are the "product." So maybe NIH pays the bills including overhead because these faculty are essentially leasing office and lab space from the university. The faculty have to pay for not only their salaries, but the salaries of their students, post-doc, and other staff. They also pay for the unitilies (water, electricity, HVAC, etc), their parking spaces, a portion of the groundskeeping, the staff to administer their grants and make sure they are obeying the law, the university business office, the campus safety people, etc. And in a strange twist, the science faculty help support the English professors because they have no products to sell or no one wants to pay them for what they are trying to sell.[...]
The real difference between a science discipline and medical school is external grants expectations. Science departments do not require faculty to have grants (e.g., research grants from federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health), but many are grant-active to support graduate students and research activities. This particular medical school expects tenured faculty to maintain 50% salary support from extramural sources. They do describe what to expect when the funding drops below the expected level: one would need to increase efforts in other areas such as teaching and service.
While the OP may be teaching classes (they didn't actually say did they?), teaching doesn't bring in the big bucks needed to keep a university going.
As for the question of careers going forward, I might just mention that at the med school, if one doesn't have a MD, even if they have tenure, I think then they will not be as appreciated as the faculty who have MDs. And speaking of tenure, many people think that gives one a job for life. That is true, but if a tenured faculty member is not bringing in money to support themselves and all the people that work for them, then things change: They lose lab space, administrative assistants, office space, have to teach more courses, and get stuck doing tasks assigned to them instead of working for themselves.
Both spouses are at an R1 institution, each with multiple NIH grants. But the administrators do not seem to care. They are after donation and tuition money. There could be institutional differences though.
Statistics: Posted by renner — Sun Jun 30, 2024 9:32 pm