All universities have policies. They cover all sorts of things germane to science ranging from regulating direct charges to grants all the way to scientific misconduct. I spend a fair amount of my time as a university administrator, thinking about these policies. Concretely, it seems that there is a fair amount of my time that is spent on university committees working on the language of these documents so that they both comply with relevant laws and protect the interests of George Mason.
At the same time, it seems as if there certainly was a time when there were less of these policies. When my father was a professor, the laboratory he ran was subject to much less regulation. And yet, it managed to produce good science, avoid breaking the law and even educate students. My concern, as an administrator, is that we may be, by creating policies to cover everything, creating too great a bureaucratic burden for working scientists. A good colleague of mine, thinks just the opposite: well written policies actually protect the PI, but laying out the “red lines” and removing the ambiguities inherent in both doing sponsored research and managing people.
At one level, the policy explosion simply reflects the way our society has changed writ large: there are many more laws…and many lawyers.
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 