Death by a thousand cuts: Short-sighted attacks on the academic mission

In recent years, the increasing financial pressures on academic institutions have led to a gradual diminution of departmental and institutional funding of important supporting aspects of the academic mission. We specifically note that funding for travel to academic meetings, payment of article processing charges, and the support of lunches and team building activities have all been curtailed. Such an approach threatens to undermine the academic mission and decrease the downstream benefits such as departmental and institutional prestige, participation in cooperative group endeavors, and external/federal funding. In an era where clinical volumes and the difficulty of cases are constantly increasing, and recruiting and retaining academic faculty is an uphill battle against markedly high salaries and more flexible scheduling available in private practice, academic institutions are only hurting themselves by making ultimately trivial cuts in the funding of the academic mission. Academic institutions need to fund the academic mission - to do otherwise is to ultimately surrender that mission and scuttle the emerging careers of talented junior faculty.