No one is holding a gun to her head at Calvin. The pressures are entirely different from those at Harvard, for example. She's not expected to secure big grants or publish a pile of papers. A couple of articles should suffice, and small grants will do. At small colleges, more than one consideration comes into play when you come up for tenure.
Research is just one ingredient, although it is part of the recipe.
We're able to. She has 13 articles to her credit and just spent two weeks in a tunnel in Berkeley collecting data on aerosol particles for No. 14. You're not relegated to a desk writing grants and papers and dealing with the bureaucracy of running a big lab. She worked in one of those big labs during her graduate-school days. In five years, she saw her professor conduct only one experiment.