One of the perverse incentives in higher education administration is that you build careers by building centers, not rescuing or maintaining existing resources. Newness is a signal of added value, competence, donor-friendliness. Maintenance? Not so much.
Yup, then you need faculty to run them, so you further drain the departments
“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” Kurt Vonnegut Ask me how hard it is to find funding to support long-term preservation in a data archive. Go ahead, ask.
My building has this nice installation in the main atrium that's basically a vertical field of glass leaves. It looks very pretty but also it's covered with dust because the donation that paid for it didn't include money to clean it. That dust has been here longer than I have.
Not just academia. It's everywhere. My favorite example: our local Parks & Rec Dept has a miniscule budget for maintenance, but can get grants to build stuff. So a pool that could have been saved for $2m is being replaced by a $50m mega center. That will, in turn, crumble for lack of maintenance.
oh do I feel this, as someone running a field station that is 130 years old, and so not at all new or shiny but still important!
💯 It's also especially advantageous if you build up this constellation of centers — each of which attracts massive foundation and individual donor funding — at well-resourced institutions who really don't need the help.
I also blame donors (and Development units that establish donor relations) for being like absent minded golden retrievers who can’t focus on anything for more than 2 seconds before the squirrel distracts them.
I feel like I scream this into the void at least once a week.