But to be productive they must overcome many obstacles, including heavy teaching loads, the absence of graduate students and postdocs, difficulty in being competitive in obtaining grant support, and lack of daily contact with colleagues in closely related fields. Additionally, they often must suffer the slings and arrows of their colleagues at major research institutions, some of whom regard a decision to teach at a four-year college as an admission of failure. David DeHeer of Calvin College notes that a primary objective of a liberal arts school is to train students. One of our major goals is to train students, whereas in a large university the major goal is the project. This institution, like other small institutions, would say that we're happy to have faculty engage in research, but there must be some sort of student involvement, or some benefit that comes to the students.
Productive researchers choose to go to four-year institutions for a variety of reasons.
I found I was spending all of my time writing grants. And even when I had grants and research money I still had to spend time trying to keep that money and get more money. And between that and writing publications, teaching was getting in the way. Students were getting in the way. Even the graduate students were starting to get into the way.