10 ms·

There has been a real shift in the culture of academia over the last 10-15 years that coincides with what I'm starting to call "the rise of the Twitter Prof". T

There has been a real shift in the culture of academia over the last 10-15 years that coincides with what I'm starting to call "the rise of the Twitter Prof". The twitter thing is both literal and also a stand-in for similar junk like TED talks. IMO, the US needs to clean house. We should restructure our research funding so that it goes to motivated and curious people instead of politically connected PIs. This means totally disconnecting NSF/NIH/DARPA funding from the university apparatus. Treat academic affiliation -- and the associated albatross of "overhead" -- as a hindrance to grant applications as opposed to a requirement. Imagine how much better the caliber of our research will be if we pay grad students $100K instead of paying them $35K and their university $65K. We could 10x our research spend by giving money to the right people instead of giving it to people who can stomach and afford giving 2/3rds of their funding to sad excuses for institutions that American universities have become. At the very least, tax payers need to stop bailing out student loan debt while simultaneously funding multiple annual week-long conferences in Hawaii and Europe for professors who scoff at their teaching assignments.

yodsanklai 4y ago
> if we pay grad students $100K instead of paying them $35K That would make a big difference I think. Especially in fields where private sector pay much more. That being said, research remains attractive for the brightest minds and there's no shortage of great candidates yet.
mattkrause 4y ago
DARPA is already very willing to fund work outside of academia. Every meeting I’ve been to has included consortia led by a big company like HRL Labs or Teledyne as well as smaller companies, sometimes even 1-2 person shops, that work in the particular field. The overhead rates at those big companies are massive though.
batterylow 4y ago
Somewhat related to this is Kardashian Index [1] [1] the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashian_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashian_Index
octoberfranklin 4y ago
This is sort of what NGI Zero is doing, mostly via NLNet: https://nlnet.nl/project/current.html https://nlnet.nl/project/current.html https://www.ngi.eu/ngi-projects/ngi-zero/ https://www.ngi.eu/ngi-projects/ngi-zero/ They're an insignificantly-tiny fraction of EU research funds, but I'm shocked how often I come across an outstanding project (nix, chips4makers, betrusted, libresoc, searx, OTR, osmocom, qubes, sourcehut, wireguard) that they funded. Whatever awesomeness the NSF had in the 1970s-1980s died somewhere in the mid-1990s, and appears to have been reincarnated with these guys.
anu7df 4y ago
Yes, the university taking 60-70% is almost highway robbery, but it is hard to completely disassociate from them. For one, the university can through economies of scale reduce the cost of setting up and running experimental facilities. Moreover, one usually finds motivated researchers in academic settings (I am anticipating dissent here, since that could be because of the funding flowing only through Universities). However talented and motivated researchers usually find other work situations which while to fully aligning to their erstwhile research interests, pay for a good life. Those who really have the passion that exceeds the mundane normalisation of drive ( also called life per some definition) usually seek refuge in the academic setting. So, yes if we can set up labs like the old Bell labs or find a way to replicate the tenure model of universities, taking funding away from the univ mechanism and giving it to individual unaffiliated researchers won't be practical. But even if that can be achieved, you have just replaced universities with a slightly different structure. Better option is to trim the fat and realign priorities at universities, which is also easier said than done. Cushy administrator jobs, student housing mansions with 5 star facilities, large stadium colosseum all should go.. But systemic reasons, societal perception, need to justify legacy admission all factor in here as strong headwinds.
- j7ake 4y ago
  Does anybody really know where the overhead money of top places end up ? Some institutions (eg famous ones) have near 100% overhead. Overhead sounds reasonable for example to maintain IT and core facilities, but I have a suspicion that a lot of it is wasted in a black hole of unknown function generically labelled “admin”
  - kmmlng 4y ago
    I'm not in the US, but from what it sounds like, the situation isn't much different where I live. A surprising amount of overhead goes to employees in accounting who perform some black magic so that everyone on staff is payed by some combination of projects. Whether someone actually works on said projects is irrelevant of course.
  - godelski 4y ago
    Most of the overhead goes towards admins. But it is also important to remember that many universities have multi-billion dollar endowments. It's been explained to me that "I don't know what endowments are for" when I've pointed out that my (not top 10) university could indefinitely pay for all US student tuition (and 90% of foreign) on the interest of our endowment at a 5% yearly growth. So I'm still not sure what endowments are for considering that there are 15 schools with endowments that are over 1m/student. So yeah, I still have no idea what endowments are for. https://www.collegeraptor.com/college-rankings/details/EndowmentPerStudent https://www.collegeraptor.com/college-rankings/details/Endow...
jltsiren 4y ago
Specialization is the greatest source of efficiency. Almost every organization has more people in support roles than in line positions. If not directly, then indirectly. If the "overhead" is not high enough, the people who are supposed to do line work have to waste their time as incompetent janitors and secretaries. That's a very common situation in universities, which employ many administrators for regulatory reasons but often don't have the money to hire enough support personnel. If you want to pay grad students $100k, then the grant must be $165k. Or maybe $180k to allow the grad student to focus more on their research. Maybe the sum can be a bit less, if you manage to reduce the regulations and reporting requirements. But then you have to accept that a larger fraction of grant recipients will misuse the money or spend it on research many taxpayers would consider frivolous.
- logisticseh 4y ago
  In CS this is just false. Nearly all of the CS research we fund could be done in inexpensive office space with no administrators. The one exception is DARPA-funded robotics research, and even then it's only a subset. In wet lab disciplines the story is more complicated. But there are many possible configurations that are more efficient than the current university-as-gatekeeper system.
  - jltsiren 4y ago
    You can do many kinds of research with minimal overhead, as long as everyone is self-employed and your funding comes with minimal restrictions and reporting requirements. I did that for a couple of years as a CS postdoc on a private grant. I believe my overhead rate was 15-20%, which was mostly health and other insurances. To reach that, I did accounting and taxes on my own. I also had a loose affiliation with a university, so I didn't have to pay for office space or computing. If you start using paid services, hire employees, and accept more restrictive grants, your overhead rate can easily climb above 50%.
cscheid 4y ago
(former tenured prof here) This is exactly right. Just like it's better to think of McDonald's as a real estate company with a food business on the side, these days it's better to think of big state schools as mechanisms for ingesting federal research dollars, with an education business on the side. (Never mind that state schools shouldn't be education businesses _at all_, they should be _public services_)
- eli_gottlieb 4y ago
  >(Never mind that state schools shouldn't be education businesses _at all_, they should be _public services_) But the education public services were long-since defunded so that states could cut their local taxes and "attract business".
- gumby 4y ago
  As an example, MIT spends about 16% of its revenue on undergraduates; undergrad tuition is about 14% of revenue.* Remarkably those percentages were about the same when I was an undergraduate there 40 years ago. Basically MIT is an enormous government research lab with a small school bolted on the side. This was a deliberate structure thanks to James Conant and Karl Taylor Compton working for the government in WWII. * honestly I’m astonished they are willing to run that minor (and by a lot of faculty reviled) operation at a small loss.
  - sgron 4y ago
    Do you have a source for that cost attribution? Based on my time there (slightly more recent than yours), that breakdown feels roughly correct. However, I've been trying to find similar information and have found it difficult even for public universities.
    - gumby 4y ago
      The institution publishes its budget. 10 seconds of DDG search found this page: https://vpf.mit.edu/about-vpf/publications https://vpf.mit.edu/about-vpf/publications Looks like tuition is becoming less important over the Covid period and grad+ug is down to 9% of revenue. They have a nice presentation with various charts and such which is where I get this info myself. I don’t know if it’s online. I forget how I got it when I was in school but now the people who come visit from the development office bring it with them because they know I’m interested.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
IMO, we need to regulate online advertising. By allowing advertisers to fund websites and apps, we allow them to be used as platforms for mass hype and dissemination of "junk" (bait). The "Twitter prof" is the academic who has learnt to master the advertiser-funded hype machine. The internet should be an advertising-free internetwork as it once was. Everyone reading this comment and enjoying this forum is using a non-commercial website. There is no advertiser funding. When we fail regulate so-called "tech" companies, we watch the value of the internetwork continually degraded to nothing more than a means to advertise and disseminate "junk".
- oefrha 4y ago
  This is a commercial website and the advertiser funding it is called Y Combinator. It advertises its own VC business and posts launch ads / job ads for its funded companies here. The rise of the Twitter Prof has nothing to do with Twitter’s funding model.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  > Everyone reading this comment and enjoying this forum is using a non-commercial website. There is no advertiser funding. HN has advertisements and is part of a .com (Ycombinator).
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
  "Advertiser-funded" as used here means the income from advertising is necessary for the continued existence of the website. Companies advertising open position on HN do not pay for the ads. HN does not rely on imcome from ads to run the website. (Now, one could argue that HN is owned by YC, YC makes money from "tech" companies and "tech" companies generally use online ads or ad services as their "business model". Fair enough. In response, I would point out that HN does not need surveillance, data collection or ads in order to survive. HN's "content" comes from from submitters and commenters. These individuals are unpaid. Unlike sites run by "tech" companies, the users generating the "content" are not paid from online advertising revenue.)
jseliger 4y ago
It's not just in academia: I've worked on lots of scientific and technical grants for industry: https://seliger.com/2017/03/28/write-scientific-technical-grant-proposals/ https://seliger.com/2017/03/28/write-scientific-technical-gr..., and the RFPs often indicate a need to claim all sorts of things. Cure cancer! Lead to the complete end of fossil fuel reliance! Revolutionize computing! At the same time, few applicants, or applications, seem to be punished for grandiose, but not completely impossible, claims. Grant making follows the golden rule: https://seliger.com/2007/12/06/studio-executives-starlets-and-funding/ https://seliger.com/2007/12/06/studio-executives-starlets-an...: he who has the gold, makes the rules.
godelski 4y ago
> At the very least, tax payers need to stop bailing out student loan debt while simultaneously funding multiple annual week-long conferences in Hawaii and Europe for professors who scoff at their teaching assignments. I think this is missing the forest for the trees. These aren't the reason schools cost so much and in turn why student debt is so high. Meeting with other scholars internationally has been happening for over a hundred years. European schools often travel to America a lot because conferences are often here, and their costs aren't what American universities are. Despite having similar levels of research output. The high cost is for other reasons. This also isn't why professors ignore their teaching requirements (find time to do both research, which is the higher priority, and teach. You sure can't in 40hrs) As to the rest of the comment, I am in a lot more agreement with. I don't even think grad student pay needs to even be that high, it would just be nice enough if I didn't need to rely on internships for my cost of living. If I had enough money to pay off my undergrad loans instead of letting them rack up tens of thousands of dollars more. But one thing I would highly argue, is that research is investing in your own country. Academia is a common place for innovation to be derived from. It is no surprise given you put a bunch of smart people together that are passionate about learning that they make new things. Especially considering how research is literal innovation. I think there's a large argument to be made about how this is a national security issue, and can be justification for diverting military budget for non-weapons based research. War is about economics after all. Really it is about a lot of things besides the actual fighting parts. Innovation has been a key element in America's (and many others) success. It is weird to think that we wouldn't place this as one of our highest strategic assets.
- logisticseh 4y ago
  >> At the very least, tax payers need to stop bailing out student loan debt while simultaneously funding multiple annual week-long conferences in Hawaii and Europe for professors who scoff at their teaching assignments. > I think this is missing the forest for the trees. Not at all. People have a sense of right and wrong, and this fact offends them far more than the nebulous task of assess the effectiveness of research. I have a PhD and spent a lot of time within and interfacing with academia. I think even the average science-skeptic congressperson massively over-estimates both the short-term and long-term value of the sort of research that happens in most of academia. But we're probably not going to agree on that. So, see, we can go back and forth all day about the relative merits of academic research. And there's always cover because most congressional people -- let alone voters -- don't know enough to have a really informed opinion. If I go to a congressional staffer and complain about the NSF or NIH, not much is going to change unless the candidate already agrees with me and is passionate about the issue. They know voters don't care. But I can go to a congressional staffer and ask: why does your candidate support bailing out student loan debt while simultaneously funding multiple annual week-long conferences in Hawaii and Europe for professors who scoff at their teaching assignments? And THAT question is going to be viewed very differently, because it's something that could anger voters who don't have the time and attention to vote on the basis of whatever useless crud the NSF is funding this year.
seydor 4y ago
This is happening in europe too, perhaps more, given that EU agencies dont care much about the long-term impact of work beyond the reporting requrements. PR-savvy people are guaranteed a stream of funding by virtue of their prior funding. I think the whole idea of small-grant-based funding in academia has outgrown its usefulness. Just pay people directly and let them work on whatever they like.
verisimi 4y ago
Is higher education anything more than a parasitical industry that takes whatever money is given to it from government, military and corporations, in order to return whatever studies are requested?
t_mann 4y ago
I'm not an expert on the German research landscape, but I think it works a bit like that there, that the big shots work at Max Planck, Helmholtz,... institutes. Would be funny if the US followed Germany there, since the current academic/research setup in the US was basically imported from Germany in the early 20th century.

yodsanklai 4y ago

> if we pay grad students $100K instead of paying them $35K That would make a big difference I think. Especially in fields where private sector pay much more. That being said, research remains attractive for the brightest minds and there's no shortage of great candidates yet.

mattkrause 4y ago

DARPA is already very willing to fund work outside of academia. Every meeting I’ve been to has included consortia led by a big company like HRL Labs or Teledyne as well as smaller companies, sometimes even 1-2 person shops, that work in the particular field. The overhead rates at those big companies are massive though.

batterylow 4y ago

Somewhat related to this is Kardashian Index [1] [1] the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashian_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashian_Index

octoberfranklin 4y ago

This is sort of what NGI Zero is doing, mostly via NLNet: https://nlnet.nl/project/current.html https://nlnet.nl/project/current.html https://www.ngi.eu/ngi-projects/ngi-zero/ https://www.ngi.eu/ngi-projects/ngi-zero/ They're an insignificantly-tiny fraction of EU research funds, but I'm shocked how often I come across an outstanding project (nix, chips4makers, betrusted, libresoc, searx, OTR, osmocom, qubes, sourcehut, wireguard) that they funded. Whatever awesomeness the NSF had in the 1970s-1980s died somewhere in the mid-1990s, and appears to have been reincarnated with these guys.

anu7df 4y ago

Yes, the university taking 60-70% is almost highway robbery, but it is hard to completely disassociate from them. For one, the university can through economies of scale reduce the cost of setting up and running experimental facilities. Moreover, one usually finds motivated researchers in academic settings (I am anticipating dissent here, since that could be because of the funding flowing only through Universities). However talented and motivated researchers usually find other work situations which while to fully aligning to their erstwhile research interests, pay for a good life. Those who really have the passion that exceeds the mundane normalisation of drive ( also called life per some definition) usually seek refuge in the academic setting. So, yes if we can set up labs like the old Bell labs or find a way to replicate the tenure model of universities, taking funding away from the univ mechanism and giving it to individual unaffiliated researchers won't be practical. But even if that can be achieved, you have just replaced universities with a slightly different structure. Better option is to trim the fat and realign priorities at universities, which is also easier said than done. Cushy administrator jobs, student housing mansions with 5 star facilities, large stadium colosseum all should go.. But systemic reasons, societal perception, need to justify legacy admission all factor in here as strong headwinds.

j7ake 4y ago
Does anybody really know where the overhead money of top places end up ? Some institutions (eg famous ones) have near 100% overhead. Overhead sounds reasonable for example to maintain IT and core facilities, but I have a suspicion that a lot of it is wasted in a black hole of unknown function generically labelled “admin”
- kmmlng 4y ago
  I'm not in the US, but from what it sounds like, the situation isn't much different where I live. A surprising amount of overhead goes to employees in accounting who perform some black magic so that everyone on staff is payed by some combination of projects. Whether someone actually works on said projects is irrelevant of course.
- godelski 4y ago
  Most of the overhead goes towards admins. But it is also important to remember that many universities have multi-billion dollar endowments. It's been explained to me that "I don't know what endowments are for" when I've pointed out that my (not top 10) university could indefinitely pay for all US student tuition (and 90% of foreign) on the interest of our endowment at a 5% yearly growth. So I'm still not sure what endowments are for considering that there are 15 schools with endowments that are over 1m/student. So yeah, I still have no idea what endowments are for. https://www.collegeraptor.com/college-rankings/details/EndowmentPerStudent https://www.collegeraptor.com/college-rankings/details/Endow...

jltsiren 4y ago

Specialization is the greatest source of efficiency. Almost every organization has more people in support roles than in line positions. If not directly, then indirectly. If the "overhead" is not high enough, the people who are supposed to do line work have to waste their time as incompetent janitors and secretaries. That's a very common situation in universities, which employ many administrators for regulatory reasons but often don't have the money to hire enough support personnel. If you want to pay grad students $100k, then the grant must be $165k. Or maybe $180k to allow the grad student to focus more on their research. Maybe the sum can be a bit less, if you manage to reduce the regulations and reporting requirements. But then you have to accept that a larger fraction of grant recipients will misuse the money or spend it on research many taxpayers would consider frivolous.

logisticseh 4y ago
In CS this is just false. Nearly all of the CS research we fund could be done in inexpensive office space with no administrators. The one exception is DARPA-funded robotics research, and even then it's only a subset. In wet lab disciplines the story is more complicated. But there are many possible configurations that are more efficient than the current university-as-gatekeeper system.
- jltsiren 4y ago
  You can do many kinds of research with minimal overhead, as long as everyone is self-employed and your funding comes with minimal restrictions and reporting requirements. I did that for a couple of years as a CS postdoc on a private grant. I believe my overhead rate was 15-20%, which was mostly health and other insurances. To reach that, I did accounting and taxes on my own. I also had a loose affiliation with a university, so I didn't have to pay for office space or computing. If you start using paid services, hire employees, and accept more restrictive grants, your overhead rate can easily climb above 50%.

cscheid 4y ago

(former tenured prof here) This is exactly right. Just like it's better to think of McDonald's as a real estate company with a food business on the side, these days it's better to think of big state schools as mechanisms for ingesting federal research dollars, with an education business on the side. (Never mind that state schools shouldn't be education businesses _at all_, they should be _public services_)

eli_gottlieb 4y ago
>(Never mind that state schools shouldn't be education businesses _at all_, they should be _public services_) But the education public services were long-since defunded so that states could cut their local taxes and "attract business".
gumby 4y ago
As an example, MIT spends about 16% of its revenue on undergraduates; undergrad tuition is about 14% of revenue.* Remarkably those percentages were about the same when I was an undergraduate there 40 years ago. Basically MIT is an enormous government research lab with a small school bolted on the side. This was a deliberate structure thanks to James Conant and Karl Taylor Compton working for the government in WWII. * honestly I’m astonished they are willing to run that minor (and by a lot of faculty reviled) operation at a small loss.
- sgron 4y ago
  Do you have a source for that cost attribution? Based on my time there (slightly more recent than yours), that breakdown feels roughly correct. However, I've been trying to find similar information and have found it difficult even for public universities.
  - gumby 4y ago
    The institution publishes its budget. 10 seconds of DDG search found this page: https://vpf.mit.edu/about-vpf/publications https://vpf.mit.edu/about-vpf/publications Looks like tuition is becoming less important over the Covid period and grad+ug is down to 9% of revenue. They have a nice presentation with various charts and such which is where I get this info myself. I don’t know if it’s online. I forget how I got it when I was in school but now the people who come visit from the development office bring it with them because they know I’m interested.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

IMO, we need to regulate online advertising. By allowing advertisers to fund websites and apps, we allow them to be used as platforms for mass hype and dissemination of "junk" (bait). The "Twitter prof" is the academic who has learnt to master the advertiser-funded hype machine. The internet should be an advertising-free internetwork as it once was. Everyone reading this comment and enjoying this forum is using a non-commercial website. There is no advertiser funding. When we fail regulate so-called "tech" companies, we watch the value of the internetwork continually degraded to nothing more than a means to advertise and disseminate "junk".

oefrha 4y ago
This is a commercial website and the advertiser funding it is called Y Combinator. It advertises its own VC business and posts launch ads / job ads for its funded companies here. The rise of the Twitter Prof has nothing to do with Twitter’s funding model.
zozbot234 4y ago
> Everyone reading this comment and enjoying this forum is using a non-commercial website. There is no advertiser funding. HN has advertisements and is part of a .com (Ycombinator).
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
"Advertiser-funded" as used here means the income from advertising is necessary for the continued existence of the website. Companies advertising open position on HN do not pay for the ads. HN does not rely on imcome from ads to run the website. (Now, one could argue that HN is owned by YC, YC makes money from "tech" companies and "tech" companies generally use online ads or ad services as their "business model". Fair enough. In response, I would point out that HN does not need surveillance, data collection or ads in order to survive. HN's "content" comes from from submitters and commenters. These individuals are unpaid. Unlike sites run by "tech" companies, the users generating the "content" are not paid from online advertising revenue.)

jseliger 4y ago

It's not just in academia: I've worked on lots of scientific and technical grants for industry: https://seliger.com/2017/03/28/write-scientific-technical-grant-proposals/ https://seliger.com/2017/03/28/write-scientific-technical-gr..., and the RFPs often indicate a need to claim all sorts of things. Cure cancer! Lead to the complete end of fossil fuel reliance! Revolutionize computing! At the same time, few applicants, or applications, seem to be punished for grandiose, but not completely impossible, claims. Grant making follows the golden rule: https://seliger.com/2007/12/06/studio-executives-starlets-and-funding/ https://seliger.com/2007/12/06/studio-executives-starlets-an...: he who has the gold, makes the rules.

godelski 4y ago

> At the very least, tax payers need to stop bailing out student loan debt while simultaneously funding multiple annual week-long conferences in Hawaii and Europe for professors who scoff at their teaching assignments. I think this is missing the forest for the trees. These aren't the reason schools cost so much and in turn why student debt is so high. Meeting with other scholars internationally has been happening for over a hundred years. European schools often travel to America a lot because conferences are often here, and their costs aren't what American universities are. Despite having similar levels of research output. The high cost is for other reasons. This also isn't why professors ignore their teaching requirements (find time to do both research, which is the higher priority, and teach. You sure can't in 40hrs) As to the rest of the comment, I am in a lot more agreement with. I don't even think grad student pay needs to even be that high, it would just be nice enough if I didn't need to rely on internships for my cost of living. If I had enough money to pay off my undergrad loans instead of letting them rack up tens of thousands of dollars more. But one thing I would highly argue, is that research is investing in your own country. Academia is a common place for innovation to be derived from. It is no surprise given you put a bunch of smart people together that are passionate about learning that they make new things. Especially considering how research is literal innovation. I think there's a large argument to be made about how this is a national security issue, and can be justification for diverting military budget for non-weapons based research. War is about economics after all. Really it is about a lot of things besides the actual fighting parts. Innovation has been a key element in America's (and many others) success. It is weird to think that we wouldn't place this as one of our highest strategic assets.

logisticseh 4y ago
>> At the very least, tax payers need to stop bailing out student loan debt while simultaneously funding multiple annual week-long conferences in Hawaii and Europe for professors who scoff at their teaching assignments. > I think this is missing the forest for the trees. Not at all. People have a sense of right and wrong, and this fact offends them far more than the nebulous task of assess the effectiveness of research. I have a PhD and spent a lot of time within and interfacing with academia. I think even the average science-skeptic congressperson massively over-estimates both the short-term and long-term value of the sort of research that happens in most of academia. But we're probably not going to agree on that. So, see, we can go back and forth all day about the relative merits of academic research. And there's always cover because most congressional people -- let alone voters -- don't know enough to have a really informed opinion. If I go to a congressional staffer and complain about the NSF or NIH, not much is going to change unless the candidate already agrees with me and is passionate about the issue. They know voters don't care. But I can go to a congressional staffer and ask: why does your candidate support bailing out student loan debt while simultaneously funding multiple annual week-long conferences in Hawaii and Europe for professors who scoff at their teaching assignments? And THAT question is going to be viewed very differently, because it's something that could anger voters who don't have the time and attention to vote on the basis of whatever useless crud the NSF is funding this year.

seydor 4y ago

This is happening in europe too, perhaps more, given that EU agencies dont care much about the long-term impact of work beyond the reporting requrements. PR-savvy people are guaranteed a stream of funding by virtue of their prior funding. I think the whole idea of small-grant-based funding in academia has outgrown its usefulness. Just pay people directly and let them work on whatever they like.

verisimi 4y ago

Is higher education anything more than a parasitical industry that takes whatever money is given to it from government, military and corporations, in order to return whatever studies are requested?

t_mann 4y ago

I'm not an expert on the German research landscape, but I think it works a bit like that there, that the big shots work at Max Planck, Helmholtz,... institutes. Would be funny if the US followed Germany there, since the current academic/research setup in the US was basically imported from Germany in the early 20th century.