The grant you are reviewing includes funding for a 1 year postdoc? Should that be a factor in your review?

I recently helped review a grant for a UK based charity. Once decisions were made, I of course recieved a copy of each review for this particular grant. One of the reviewers pointed out something very imortant, but that I had never seen addrressed before. They called out the applicant PI for attempting to fund a 1 year postdoc on the grant.

*Applause*

Academics, collectively, do a great deal of complaining about long-term job stability, or lack thereof. But we can’t ignore the fact that we are the ones writing the grants and the budgets. Is the pursuit of short term funding for posts just an attempt to make ends meet, or is it an example of faculty already on permanant contract thoughtlessly pulling the ladder up behind them? Given the pressure on academics to conduct research and teaching on the cheap (usually in order to fund another ProDean for such and such), perhaps it is time for the research funders to weigh in. Charities and government agencies have certainly helped drive more open access publishing – perhaps they can do the same for turning back the mercenary mentality that has overtaken HEIs. At the very least, I will start to flagging these issues in my own reviews, and hope others will as well.