[quote=“coherent_light, post:147, topic:84477”]
Those who submit proposals don’t happen to be doing all of the science/whatever which requires the grant.[/quote]
It is nevertheless a significant investment of time and effort in order to obtain a chance at future funding; sometimes writing grant proposals occupies a larger share of a senior scientist’s time than any other activity. It is also very common for labs seeking federal funding to first do the work out of pocket for years (cf startup funds), and the funding is often a de facto recognition of work already done rather than future work.
Look, I get that you don’t like the idea of such competitions in your field, and I see how from your point of view it is tantamount to asking for unpaid work from the competition losers. Maybe you can try to see things from our point of view.
The reality is that when we pay (say) $100k for an outside firm to do a logo, first we have to go to the undergraduates and apologize for charging them $10/apiece for this. We also have to talk to all the in-house talent - the campus design department, the arts faculty, the undergraduates and graduates who would have liked the opportunity - and explain why they aren’t good enough to be considered for it. (OK,we don’t actually go to either group, these issues are raised afterwards by the groups involved; my school’s excellent arts faculty were rightly furious that they’d been denied this opportunity.) Then when we’re all unpleasantly surprised by the final product - which happens quite a lot - we get hammered by demands from the campus community, angry alumni emails and sarcastic newspaper articles, and decide not to go with it after all. At that point we then grovel before the legislators for wasting so much money, and they punish us by cutting funding for other, frankly more important academic functions, while the administrator who commissioned the rebranding project in the first place has already left to go do damage at another school.
A university logo is a piece of public art that is the public face of a campus; it is simply not reasonable to expect them to commit to it without having a decent idea of what it will look like, especially when any decision has to satisfy an immense community of students, faculty, alumni, and possibly the general local population. Maybe it is also unreasonable to expect to see a design before they pay for it, in which case they might have to consider going without. (I’m not sure rebranding has ever been demonstrably useful for a public university; the obvious example, Arcadia University, is not public.) If however there is a community of talented people who for reasons of their own are willing to submit some sketches in advance before being hired, that is a win for everyone who participates, especially if getting chosen comes with reasonable remuneration. Universities are full of people who as a matter of course work for less than market value, or for the chance of future payoff, or for love of the institution. It is our normal culture. Nobody off campus is forced to share this culture.
