When Excellence Stops Producing Knowledge: A Practitioner's Observation on Research Funding

TL;DR

The paper identifies a structural misalignment in competitive research funding where excellence increasingly signals the ability to obtain funding rather than actual knowledge production. It argues that reform efforts across basic research and large consortia intensify this misalignment by tying success to representability, and highlights three accelerating trends—professional grant-writing, AI-assisted proposals, and evaluator shortages—that reinforce a self-reinforcing loop favoring proxies over epistemic value. This dynamic threatens exploratory and foundational research, as decisions are made on representations of uncertain futures rather than on demonstrated epistemic contribution. The author proposes reforms that loosen the coupling between funding and representability, such as tolerating uncertainty, extending horizons, protecting core funding, and experimenting with allocation mechanisms, while also offering grounds for optimism through slow-science approaches and alternative funding models.

Abstract

After almost four decades of participating in competitive research funding -- as applicant, coordinator, evaluator, and panel member -- I have come to see a structural paradox: many participants recognize that the current system is approaching its functional limits, yet most reform measures intensify rather than alleviate the underlying dynamics. This paper documents how excellence has become decoupled from knowledge production through an increasing coupling to representability under evaluation. The discussion focuses on two domains in which this is particularly visible: competitive basic research funding and large EU consortium projects. Three accelerating trends are examined: the professionalization of proposal writing through specialized consultants, the rise of AI-assisted applications, and an evaluator shortage that forces panels to rely on reviewers increasingly distant from the actual research domains. These observations are offered not as external critique but as an insider account, in the hope that naming a widely experienced but rarely articulated pattern may enable more constructive orientation. Keywords: Research funding, Excellence, Evaluation, Goodhart's Law, Professionalization, AI-assisted proposals, Peer review crisis