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Just chatting with @nebogeo and decided that universities are basically just landlords now - renting out space for academics to work in exchange for overheads on their grants, but then also trying to rent the academics out to students (who pay fees) and businesses (who they hope will pay consultancy rates).
@amberfirefly @nebogeo the only slight differences are that they also provide a community and that universities pay a salary, so they rent you out to more students if your grants don't cover everything. So especially in the UK they provide a form of stability, something I never had from a UK landlord ;)
@sweneg @nebogeo I mean past postdoc in the UK if you're consistently not paying your own salary through the grants you get it, you're quite likely to lose your job. Certainly at the unis I've worked at we had financial targets, which if not met, we'd be out the door. And I saw it happen, also in one case to every single female researcher within a whole university - they were all suddenly 'made redundant' by the medium of a brown envelope in their mail box. Not sure I'd call that stability...
@amberfirefly @nebogeo sorry to hear that, the places I worked at, for lecturers and senior lecturers did not do that as long as we're were not on a research only pathway. If you had zero grant income consistently you were made to teach lots, but none of those people were made redundant. Additionally, there is also currently similar to the US the trend to have teaching only faculty or balanced pathways where workload shifts with grant income.
@amberfirefly @nebogeo this aligns very much to my experiences working with unis from 2007 - 2012. They tended to be quite inept at it back then, and were often like weird little business cults performing rituals. It was nonetheless obvious most people were going to end up very stressed, and only the really mercenary and commercially minded faculty were doing well in those conditions
@nach @nebogeo yeah absolutely - I think of them very much like cults as well, and/or pyramid schemes - especially the persistence of the myths that any other job is boring/bad, or that people have failed if they choose to leave. I left that world in 2015 thankfully but we work adjacent to the sector now and it seems to only be getting worse. The mental and physical health fallout for people is just so off the scale.
@amberfirefly @nebogeo yeah it's absolutely insane, from every angle. My last work in that area was looking through a uni's facilities to see which could be commercialised for the videogames industry. There were loads of facilities, some unique, that could have been. But *every* case study I did based on another uni or a studio that had hired one resulted in the answer "Don't, it's likely to be a disaster". Client wasn't pleased; they hadn't hired me to figure out the truth for them 
