Duke Turns Scientists into Salesmen

Duke University’s School of Medicine is preparing to dock the salaries of tenured faculty who fail to bring in enough research grant money—a move that undermines one of academia’s most sacred job protections. Under the policy, basic science professors who fall short of “minimum expectations” for external funding could see their pay reduced to as little as $50,000 a year, Duke Chronicle recently reported.

The plan, part of a larger effort to cut $125 million—or 20 percent—of the school’s budget by 2026, has been in the works since May 2025. An initial draft called for automatic pay reductions every six months, but a June revision “soften[ed] the language,” promising faculty consultation and replacing blunt terms like “decrement” and “non-productive” with “adjustment.” Pre-tenured professors and senior administrators are exempt. Duke officials say the change is necessary as federal research dollars decline. But this is a backdoor way to push out faculty and could set a precedent that erodes tenure nationwide.

Duke’s proposed pay cuts have exposed what many medical schools—and some universities more broadly—have quietly practiced for years: scientific research is valued only if it brings in money. Tufts has followed this approach since 2017, parts of the University of California have tried it informally, and the idea is gaining traction elsewhere.

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This isn’t quite “piece work” in the traditional sense—a fixed return for a fixed output. The actual product of science, new knowledge, is nowhere in the equation. Instead, faculty are rewarded solely for the grant dollars they attract. The model will be familiar to doctors, who are paid for the procedures they perform, not for patient outcomes. Likewise, today’s medical researcher is treated less like a knowledge-maker and more like a salesman. The product is immaterial; all that matters is the revenue it generates.

The reward system at Duke is also a coercive one—what psychologists call an “avoidance schedule.” If a scientist does nothing—perhaps taking a year or two away from lab work to think, which is often necessary before arriving at a promising hypothesis—and does no grant-supported research, he will suffer. It’s like a lab rat that must press a lever every few seconds to avoid a periodic shock. Once the rat is trained, it will press every 15 seconds or so to prevent a shock that would otherwise arrive every 20 seconds. The behavior can continue long after the shock generator is turned off. Once fear is instilled, it drives behavior long after the danger has vanished.

That’s why people take nostrums, follow bizarre diets, and join cults: if they’re not sick, broke, or otherwise in trouble, they assume it must be the pill, the special breakfast, or the ritual keeping disaster at bay. Oversimplified, yes—but it contains a kernel of truth.

The big question, of course, is: what will this business model do for science? In some ways, it can contribute—after all, not every dollar spent will be wasted, and some new knowledge will result. But in other ways, it royally misfires. It favors big, expensive projects over small, inexpensive ones. It favors action over reflection and the short term over the long. Above all, it delegates all decision-making responsibility to a more or less monopolistic body, the National Institutes of Health, whose own criteria are famously flawed. Number of publications, even number of citations—theoretical or methodological conformity—are poor proxies for real scientific advance.

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Oxford biochemist Terence Kealey, first in his landmark 1996 book The Economic Laws of Scientific Research and more recently in an article for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, has pointed out the many flaws of monopoly support (monopsony) of science, not just the direct cost but the opportunity cost, waste of resources that could be put to better use such as support for creative research that does not fit the dominant model. I recently also pointed out the weaknesses of a monopolistic one-size-fits-all system that treats basic and applied science in the same way. Above all, basic science needs variety, variety of approaches, and variety of choices by funding sources. It cannot thrive under a unified system. As Kealey points out, basic science has done better at times and places where it is not dominated by government cash.

A lost source of diversity is the universities themselves. A few decades ago, major universities supported most of their own faculty research. In this way, a variety of approaches could be supported. But soon, government funding grew, and local support began to seem unnecessary. Those funds could now be used for something else, like climbing walls, psychological counselors, and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” administrators, which have all increased in colleges over the past decade.

As research universities and medical schools have become almost totally dependent on external sources, scientists have perforce become salesmen, selling a product that has little relation to the advancement of knowledge. Perhaps a break in the federal monopoly of science funding will free up academic institutions and allow them to follow a new path that is guided by what is best for the growth of knowledge rather than what is better for the bottom line.

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Image: “Entrance to the Medical Center at Duke University” on Wikipedia