The Grant Proposal Process
So the next round of ARC Discovery grants have been pushed back, perhaps to insert a demand that politically decided national research priorities be inserted into all grants, no doubt once again at the cost of disenfranchising the humanities.
As I said in my first post for this blog, the project I'm currently working on is funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), the peak funding body for academic research in Australia. Other nations of course have similar funds with different characteristics, but it's worth reflecting on the Australian process, particularly given the recent justifiable furore over ministerial intervention in the grant allocation process. If you want to read about that first, skip to the bottom few paragraphs here. Of course these are all my own views here, and any resemblance to anyone living or dead is clearly coincidental etc...
Firstly, as any researcher who has time to pause and reflect will readily admit, it is an enormous privilege to be granted the funding that is required for first rate research, which (at least for historians) requires time and relief from other duties such as teaching. I love teaching of course, but for research that will deliver a serious and sustained piece of work like a monograph I find that I need extended periods working in the archives, drafting and redrafting my thoughts in response to the material.
Given my field of expertise, it also helps considerably if I'm in Germany. I always envy Europe based academics in my field (or Australianists in Australia). When I'm in Australia, I find whenever I need a source, I order it, it takes 4-6 weeks to arrive and when it arrives I've done a million other things and I find it difficult to remember what this belated book was going to offer me. And so it goes with every book for every footnote.
When I'm in Germany, and I've been lucky with my research relationship with WWU Münster (largely thanks to the generosity of Thomas Großbölting there), I find a reference to a secondary source, check the library catalogue and go and pick it up. I have it 10 minutes after I read about it and I can keep the momentum going, mining the footnotes, following the debates back to the source material, and then rewiring these debates once I've digested the issue in light of the material.
So decamping to Germany for both archival and secondary material has been my method for all 3 books (including the current one) so far. For articles, a short smash and grab research trip of a few weeks suffices. But for books, being in situ for extended periods of time is important. That requires time away from teaching and help with the costs involved. Hence the need for grants.
Logically, grants are an input. Put crudely, you put in money, you get back research. As everybody inside universities knows, the university managerial layer try to pretend that grants are outputs. They also pretend that they are infinitely available and that it only requires more effort on the part of the researcher to get one. According to this logic, anyone who doesn't manage to succeed in this task is clearly shirking and workloads are measured accordingly, with consequences threatened for those not 'producing' grant income.
Such perverse managerialism forgets of course that those capable of doing research on small sums of money are doing the taxpayer a favour (and many humanities researchers can actually do that), and that most researchers applying for big dollar ARC grants are doing so for intrinsic reasons (they want to do big research), not for extrinsic ones (fear of punishment). The introduction of a grant expectation to workload calculations adds no incentive to do world class reearch, only workplace stress and anxiety. Forget massages and puppies on campus or RUOK days. Any university serious about the mental health of their researchers will at most build in an expectation to apply for grants, not that these lottery tickets win. In an environment in which only <17% of grants are successful, anything else is simply punishing researchers for something everyone knows they can't control.
I'll use myself as an example. Without overdoing it, it's fair to say that my research track record is not sub par by local standards. Relative to opportunity I've had some decent books and articles come out. Yet it took me 9 years and 11 atttempts (10 Discovery Grant applications and 1 Future Fellowship) before I somehow cracked the code with a Discovery Grant (I'm none the wiser as to why this one got up and the others failed).
Why did it take so long? The first few years it was probably simply because, publication-wise, I didn't have enough runs on the board and this was pre-DECRA. Later, part of it was about being at a small institution (I had several referees say 'this research plan is good, but it should be done somewhere else more important'). The 'research environment' stipulation of the past decade killed a lot of my applications which couldn't boast of having 30 colleagues in the discipline, 15 of them grant holders. Commments on my grant applications showed me that there really was a Group of 8 mafia, not so much in the ARC itself but amongst assessors, who seemed to resent the idea of dollars being, in their view, 'siphoned away' by researchers (doing good work) at smaller, regional universities. One of the great myths of the Australian university system is that researchers at Gof8 universities are somehow inherently better than their colleagues elsewhere. But when applying for grants, these perceptions matter. So I cheered the downplaying of research environment in the past few rounds. I think that helped me.
And of course, some years the proposed project itself was probably not good enough in a cut throat environment. The old story of needing an ARC grant track record to get an ARC grant also played a role too, I suspect. Finally, my national profile is a little higher now than it used to be, partly thanks to my involvement with the Australian Historical Association and some press work I've done. Maybe even a twitter presence helped - who knows?
Just by way of comparison, I've been fortunate enough to be successful for every grant I've ever applied for in Germany. I've had DAAD grants, and been a Humboldt fellow. Germany has a different grants culture of course, one that doesn't penalise the humanities and one that sees investment in research in all fields as a valuable way to attract the best and brightest from around the world. The culture wars culture is not as strong in politics, which has a more serious, issues and evidence based culture than Australia's Punch and Judy show. Their peak, outward looking grants body, the Humboldt Foundation is probably an arm of German cultural imperialism, but is a particularly effective honey trap for researchers globally, attracting them to Germany for a couple of years. During this time they do great research (training up German colleagues at the same time), become sympathetic towards future research exchanges with Germans and often bring their skills and ideas permanently to Germany. It's very different to Australia.
This is certainly the case for humanities grants. In the past few weeks, it came to light that, after the due diligence of the ARC, the minister came in over the top and wiped out a number of DECRA, Discovery and Future Fellowship grants. Others have attested to the real world consequences for researchers of such ministerial whimsy, and I have condemned it as loudly as anyone else. It does irrevocable damage to Australia'a research reputation around the world (I know this because I've been asked about it here), for the sake of 10 minutes of federal level culture warring. The ARC is a flawed machine, but it should be left to do its job (it's certainly ruthless enough - see what I've just written!).
And yet, I have to confess I expected this abuse of ministerial discretion. Remembering the last time the conservative government struck down grants, on the basis of titles and paragraph long summaries, I deliberately made the outward facing part of my grant (the title, project summary and impact statement or whatever) as small a target as possible. It still described my research, but in a way that made it seem as unobjectionable as possible to the casual observer. I remember a conversation I had once with the NSW Green Ian Cohen (the guy who surfed the bow of a US frigate in protest in Sydney harbour) that the more radical the organisation wanted to be, the more conservative their name should be. And in the age of cultural politics, I applied that principle. Because I wanted the money to do my research.
My research proposal was hardly undistilled radical agitprop - it was in all ways scholarly. The last time I wrote overtly through my politics was in my preachy MA on the history of utopian ecological political economy, written while I was running around at anti-Jabiluka protests in the Northern Territory and NSW with no shoes and an asymmetrical haircut. That's not to say my work is apolitical (which is impossible - I am there to be found in what I write), but contemporary politics is not my primary concern in my histories.
So in terms of an ARC grant application for money I wanted to do big research, it made sense to me to be shrewd in how I phrased the outward facing material, in case of political intereference. Again, that I anticipated it is in iteself problematic. My academic freedom had already been curtailed to the extent that I was deliberately tailoring my message to an unknown hostile governmental audience. I deliberately pruned out references to things that a politically invested minister might seek to misrepresent as 'political' or 'frivolous' and therefore use as grounds to deny me funding. And I deliberately highlighted the more obviously uncontroversial and mainstream aspects of the projects. This might have saved me in this particular grant round from a malevolent stroke of the minister's pen.
To finish, this is not advice to others. It is more of a confession. My work, more than that of many who were cruelly struck off the grants list, could be presented to an ill-disposed onlooker in threatless tones of beige. I wanted the grant, so I made myself a small target to those exterior to the real process looking for ways to kick lazy political goals. Inside the grant itself, I offered the real face of the project to the scholars that actually judged it on its contents; cutting edge research on difficult historical matters. Neither description was a falsification, but my audiences were different.
In the end, in terms of my accountability, what will matter will be the calibre of the research done under the grant, and my colleagues will have the final say on that in their reviews. I think I'm onto something. I'm both sorry and angry that others in the same grant round as I was in have been robbed of the opportunity to show the world the wonderful new things that their expertise would have uncovered. I hope it never happens again. But, given the delay in announcing the next round, I fear the worst.
As I said in my first post for this blog, the project I'm currently working on is funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), the peak funding body for academic research in Australia. Other nations of course have similar funds with different characteristics, but it's worth reflecting on the Australian process, particularly given the recent justifiable furore over ministerial intervention in the grant allocation process. If you want to read about that first, skip to the bottom few paragraphs here. Of course these are all my own views here, and any resemblance to anyone living or dead is clearly coincidental etc...
Firstly, as any researcher who has time to pause and reflect will readily admit, it is an enormous privilege to be granted the funding that is required for first rate research, which (at least for historians) requires time and relief from other duties such as teaching. I love teaching of course, but for research that will deliver a serious and sustained piece of work like a monograph I find that I need extended periods working in the archives, drafting and redrafting my thoughts in response to the material.
Given my field of expertise, it also helps considerably if I'm in Germany. I always envy Europe based academics in my field (or Australianists in Australia). When I'm in Australia, I find whenever I need a source, I order it, it takes 4-6 weeks to arrive and when it arrives I've done a million other things and I find it difficult to remember what this belated book was going to offer me. And so it goes with every book for every footnote.
When I'm in Germany, and I've been lucky with my research relationship with WWU Münster (largely thanks to the generosity of Thomas Großbölting there), I find a reference to a secondary source, check the library catalogue and go and pick it up. I have it 10 minutes after I read about it and I can keep the momentum going, mining the footnotes, following the debates back to the source material, and then rewiring these debates once I've digested the issue in light of the material.
So decamping to Germany for both archival and secondary material has been my method for all 3 books (including the current one) so far. For articles, a short smash and grab research trip of a few weeks suffices. But for books, being in situ for extended periods of time is important. That requires time away from teaching and help with the costs involved. Hence the need for grants.
Logically, grants are an input. Put crudely, you put in money, you get back research. As everybody inside universities knows, the university managerial layer try to pretend that grants are outputs. They also pretend that they are infinitely available and that it only requires more effort on the part of the researcher to get one. According to this logic, anyone who doesn't manage to succeed in this task is clearly shirking and workloads are measured accordingly, with consequences threatened for those not 'producing' grant income.
Such perverse managerialism forgets of course that those capable of doing research on small sums of money are doing the taxpayer a favour (and many humanities researchers can actually do that), and that most researchers applying for big dollar ARC grants are doing so for intrinsic reasons (they want to do big research), not for extrinsic ones (fear of punishment). The introduction of a grant expectation to workload calculations adds no incentive to do world class reearch, only workplace stress and anxiety. Forget massages and puppies on campus or RUOK days. Any university serious about the mental health of their researchers will at most build in an expectation to apply for grants, not that these lottery tickets win. In an environment in which only <17% of grants are successful, anything else is simply punishing researchers for something everyone knows they can't control.
I'll use myself as an example. Without overdoing it, it's fair to say that my research track record is not sub par by local standards. Relative to opportunity I've had some decent books and articles come out. Yet it took me 9 years and 11 atttempts (10 Discovery Grant applications and 1 Future Fellowship) before I somehow cracked the code with a Discovery Grant (I'm none the wiser as to why this one got up and the others failed).
Why did it take so long? The first few years it was probably simply because, publication-wise, I didn't have enough runs on the board and this was pre-DECRA. Later, part of it was about being at a small institution (I had several referees say 'this research plan is good, but it should be done somewhere else more important'). The 'research environment' stipulation of the past decade killed a lot of my applications which couldn't boast of having 30 colleagues in the discipline, 15 of them grant holders. Commments on my grant applications showed me that there really was a Group of 8 mafia, not so much in the ARC itself but amongst assessors, who seemed to resent the idea of dollars being, in their view, 'siphoned away' by researchers (doing good work) at smaller, regional universities. One of the great myths of the Australian university system is that researchers at Gof8 universities are somehow inherently better than their colleagues elsewhere. But when applying for grants, these perceptions matter. So I cheered the downplaying of research environment in the past few rounds. I think that helped me.
And of course, some years the proposed project itself was probably not good enough in a cut throat environment. The old story of needing an ARC grant track record to get an ARC grant also played a role too, I suspect. Finally, my national profile is a little higher now than it used to be, partly thanks to my involvement with the Australian Historical Association and some press work I've done. Maybe even a twitter presence helped - who knows?
Just by way of comparison, I've been fortunate enough to be successful for every grant I've ever applied for in Germany. I've had DAAD grants, and been a Humboldt fellow. Germany has a different grants culture of course, one that doesn't penalise the humanities and one that sees investment in research in all fields as a valuable way to attract the best and brightest from around the world. The culture wars culture is not as strong in politics, which has a more serious, issues and evidence based culture than Australia's Punch and Judy show. Their peak, outward looking grants body, the Humboldt Foundation is probably an arm of German cultural imperialism, but is a particularly effective honey trap for researchers globally, attracting them to Germany for a couple of years. During this time they do great research (training up German colleagues at the same time), become sympathetic towards future research exchanges with Germans and often bring their skills and ideas permanently to Germany. It's very different to Australia.
This is certainly the case for humanities grants. In the past few weeks, it came to light that, after the due diligence of the ARC, the minister came in over the top and wiped out a number of DECRA, Discovery and Future Fellowship grants. Others have attested to the real world consequences for researchers of such ministerial whimsy, and I have condemned it as loudly as anyone else. It does irrevocable damage to Australia'a research reputation around the world (I know this because I've been asked about it here), for the sake of 10 minutes of federal level culture warring. The ARC is a flawed machine, but it should be left to do its job (it's certainly ruthless enough - see what I've just written!).
And yet, I have to confess I expected this abuse of ministerial discretion. Remembering the last time the conservative government struck down grants, on the basis of titles and paragraph long summaries, I deliberately made the outward facing part of my grant (the title, project summary and impact statement or whatever) as small a target as possible. It still described my research, but in a way that made it seem as unobjectionable as possible to the casual observer. I remember a conversation I had once with the NSW Green Ian Cohen (the guy who surfed the bow of a US frigate in protest in Sydney harbour) that the more radical the organisation wanted to be, the more conservative their name should be. And in the age of cultural politics, I applied that principle. Because I wanted the money to do my research.
My research proposal was hardly undistilled radical agitprop - it was in all ways scholarly. The last time I wrote overtly through my politics was in my preachy MA on the history of utopian ecological political economy, written while I was running around at anti-Jabiluka protests in the Northern Territory and NSW with no shoes and an asymmetrical haircut. That's not to say my work is apolitical (which is impossible - I am there to be found in what I write), but contemporary politics is not my primary concern in my histories.
So in terms of an ARC grant application for money I wanted to do big research, it made sense to me to be shrewd in how I phrased the outward facing material, in case of political intereference. Again, that I anticipated it is in iteself problematic. My academic freedom had already been curtailed to the extent that I was deliberately tailoring my message to an unknown hostile governmental audience. I deliberately pruned out references to things that a politically invested minister might seek to misrepresent as 'political' or 'frivolous' and therefore use as grounds to deny me funding. And I deliberately highlighted the more obviously uncontroversial and mainstream aspects of the projects. This might have saved me in this particular grant round from a malevolent stroke of the minister's pen.
To finish, this is not advice to others. It is more of a confession. My work, more than that of many who were cruelly struck off the grants list, could be presented to an ill-disposed onlooker in threatless tones of beige. I wanted the grant, so I made myself a small target to those exterior to the real process looking for ways to kick lazy political goals. Inside the grant itself, I offered the real face of the project to the scholars that actually judged it on its contents; cutting edge research on difficult historical matters. Neither description was a falsification, but my audiences were different.
In the end, in terms of my accountability, what will matter will be the calibre of the research done under the grant, and my colleagues will have the final say on that in their reviews. I think I'm onto something. I'm both sorry and angry that others in the same grant round as I was in have been robbed of the opportunity to show the world the wonderful new things that their expertise would have uncovered. I hope it never happens again. But, given the delay in announcing the next round, I fear the worst.
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