Not true for most departments outside of engineering and some of the sciences, and not true for most math departments. Most faculty members in other departments get little to no grant funding. Math departments always have a small number of faculty members chasing grants, but the rest of them do not. Yet they still are evaluated based on research.
In my experience, the level of back stabbing in math departments is a lot lower precisely because of the lack of pressure to acquire grant money.
So, in effect, yes: If Congress wants to fund research, then they should fund research institutes.
I just don't like student tuition or state tax money funding STEM field research.
There are research institutions: JPL, Brookhaven, Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, SLAC, Fermi Lab, NIH in Bethesda, ....
> So, the money to the university, for people directly paying full tuition often a LOT of money, is only a little for that teaching but much more for the research.
It's the other way around. The faculty are paid to do research from grants they bring in, they are evaluated based on their research, and the university requires them to teach on the side.
> E.g., I never had a math or physics prof who had a good grasp of the theory and applications of Stokes theorem, classic potential theory, multipole coordinates, or both the theory AND applications of Fourier theory. None of my undergrad physics profs knew either general relativity or quantum mechanics at all well.
How odd. I went to a state university, and I'd say that pretty much all my physics professors had a good grasp of all of this besides general relativity, and several understood all of this at a really deep level and used it in applications.