'Chill Wind of a Funding Winter'

Adam Tickell, vice-principal for research, enterprise and communications at Royal Holloway, has painted a gloomy picture of the future funding of research in the latest edition of Research Fortnight.
'After an extraordinary Edwardian summer, funding for university research faces a long, cold winter'. Or World War I, if you take his analogy to its logical conculsion. In the bloody stalemate that's to follow he suggested that the Research Councils should re-trench and set upper limits on how much they fund academic salaries relating to grants.
'I cannot see that it is legitimate to expect the councils to pay 80% of these (high) salaries,' he said. 'Unless some changes are made, the falling success rates may lead to major questions about the credibility of the research funding regime that will be of no benefit to anyone in the sector.'
'No benefit to anyone.' Let's hope it doesn't all end with the Treaty of Versailles.