"If it’s a blessing to live in interesting times, we’re all living charmed lives. And that may go double for those of us working in research in higher education settings. With continued reductions in state funding and a cultural wave of anti-science and anti-expertise thinking, who would blame us for wishing we could take our ball and go home? But, of course, we can’t. We have obligations to our students, our faculty, and to society at large to pursue the tripartite mission of higher education: transmitting knowledge, creating knowledge, and mobilizing that knowledge for the good of all of us.  For those of us who work in the areas of research development and research administration, these challenges play out on the ground, in our daily activities, and in the need to work smarter even as we work harder. This article is meant to support those efforts by weeding through some aspects of the situation we find ourselves in and addressing at least a couple of ways to think about moving forward."