<i>&gt; and I do know that it&#x27;s come up with a few tenure committees</i><p>If you&#x27;re saying what I think you are, then that&#x27;s exactly what I meant by the sex appeal comment. Regardless of how it&#x27;s talked about, people aren&#x27;t treating it as an alternative; rather, it&#x27;s a particularly sexy supplement (because it&#x27;s new and because it addresses dissimination &#x2F; public awareness &#x2F; education broader impact criteria that their more traditional sources of funding care about). So even though they could have picked up 2k in travel funding from a random pool of university cash or just funded everything out of an existing grant, they do the crowd funding thing instead for the sex appeal factor. But it&#x27;s also possible that&#x27;s not the case, they really need the money, and I&#x27;ve just spent too much time around the wrong types of academics.<p><i>&gt; I realize your hostility is towards the notion of someone being entirely alternatively funded, which we&#x27;ve never claimed to do.</i><p>I don&#x27;t mean to sound hostile. Maybe incredulous. Your earlier posts certainly sounded like you were proposing an alternative :-)<p>Anyhow, good luck.