So this is a diverse group, academically speaking, and my job is to draft the proposal and budget from all of the tidbits that the other PIs are theoretically sending me. I've never written a proposal that's supposed to be a team effort, so this is all kind of new to me.
Predictably, we have the classic conflict between the natural and social scientists. The natural scientists can't imagine that the social scientists might actually need resources and money to perform their studies. The social scientists keep referring to the scientists as "autistic" and suggesting that the scientists are out of touch with how the world actually works. Having spent the past few months meeting individually with natural and social scientists, none of these slanderous comments come as a surprise to me. In fact, they're sort of memes that people in each discipline spout without actually thinking about what they're saying or who they're saying it about.
I also probably could have predicted that getting people to contribute text to this proposal was going to be involve a delicate combination of nagging and groveling. With the proposal due in a couple of weeks, I'm in this strange position of not knowing whether I should be writing furiously and fudging my way through topics I'm not even close to an expert in, or whether I should continue to wait for text from the people who actually know what they want to see in the proposal.
What I wasn't quite prepared for, though, was the number of times one PI would--in confidence--tell me of his or her issues with another PI. It started to weigh on me that so many of our PIs have issues with each other, so I made a chart to see how bad the problem really was:
Each PI (with the exception of me) is listed as a potential badmouther on the left. The PIs that they have badmouthed are on top. Red is a badmouthing, green is a goodmouthing. There are four people (B, D, F, and H) who haven't said anything about anyone, so we can't really say much about them.
B has been badmouthed by three different people, and I'd make that four if I was represented here. In some of the badmouthing cases, the complaints are somewhat personal--"I don't like her style" kind of stuff. In other cases it's more extreme--"I don't trust him to do good work." And if I had a dime for every time I'd heard something to the effect of "He's a very difficult person to work with," well, I'd stop that ice cream truck every day and buy myself a Chipwich.
As with many aspects of my job, I find these dynamics kind of fascinating. What does it take to bring someone to the point of saying "I vowed I would never work with him again?" Are there any natural scientists who actually understand what a sociologist does? Are there any who would deign to ask?
But it's also kind of sad. The Initiative I'm coordinating, and the proposal I'm drafting, are intended to be truly multidisciplinary. The PIs recognize--or say they recognize--the fact that they need to present their proposals as collaborative and multidisciplinary in order to stand a chance of getting funded in this harsh, harsh world. But they haven't made the leap to actually being collaborative or even wanting to be collaborative.
So what we end up with is a line dividing the social and natural scientists. And we end up with lines drawn between individual PIs from the same discipline who are supposed to be working together but don't actually want to.
The chance of getting funded on this one is probably about 10%. But if we do, it'll be an interesting five years.
