Clark Glymour has an opinion piece urging philosophers to reach out beyond their disciplinary circles and encouraging the pursuit of big-dollar grants. Adam Briggle and Robert Frodeman say much the same thing. (Glymour emphasizes philosophy of science and Briggle & Frodeman applied ethics.) I agree that philosophers as a group should reach out more than they do. But I think the increasing emphasis on grant-getting in academia is a disease to be fought, not a trend to be encouraged.
Academic research scientists spend a lot of time applying for grant money. This is time that they are not spending doing scientific research. I've often heard that applying for an NSF grant takes about as much time as writing a journal article. Now, most scientists need money to do their research and there should be mechanisms to fund worthy projects, so maybe for them passionate summers of grant application are a worthy investment. But do philosophers need to be doing that? I doubt philosophy is best served by encouraging philosophers to spend more time thinking up ways to request money.
Furthermore, for both scientists and philosophers I think a better model would be a hybrid in which it is possible to apply for grants but in which, also, productive researchers could be awarded research money without having to apply for it. Look, V.S. Ramachandran is going to do something interesting with his research money no matter what, right? Philip Kitcher too. Let them spend their time doing what they do best and monitor the funds post facto. Let us all have a certain small amount of money to attend (and sometimes organize) conferences, without our having to manufacture elaborate bureaucratic pleas in advance. The same total funding could go out, with much less time wasted, if grant writing were only for exceptional cases and exceptional expenses.
A very different type of reason to resist the increasing academic focus on grant-getting is this: Grant-driven bureaucracy decreases the power of researchers to set their own research agenda and increases the power of the grant agencies to set the agenda. Maybe that's part of what Glymour and Briggle & Frodeman want, since they seem to distrust philosophers' ability to choose worthy topics of research for themselves. But philosophy in particular has often been advanced by people working outside the mainstream, on projects that might not have been seen as valuable by the well-established old-school researchers and administrators that tend to serve on grant committees. In ancient Greece, the sophists were the ones getting grants, while Socrates was fightin the powa.
If you want to apply for grants, terrific! I have no problem with that. Get some good money to do your good work. Organize an interesting conference; fly across the world to thumb through the archives; get some time away from teaching to write your book. Absolutely! But let's not try to push the discipline as a whole more into the grant-getting game than it already is.
Friday, December 23, 2011
Against Increasing the Power of Grant Agencies in Philosophy
Posted by Eric Schwitzgebel at 2:17 PM
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22 comments:
But the Sophists had the correct meta-ethical views, while Socrates was wrong!
Too bad no one funded them to engrave their views in copper.
As a philosopher entirely employed on grant money, I have to disagree. If I wasn't funded, I could probably get a teaching job. But since the number of teaching jobs is independent of what I do, that would mean one less philosopher employed. Worse still, that philosopher could.be me. Do granting agencies affect the topics of my research? Absolutely. But don't forget that effective tenure and the ability to control course content does not exist outside the US, and is being eroded within it. So it is not as if the options are be influenced by granting agencies and be free to pursue anything one wants. Further, though writing grants is time consuming, it's not *that* time consuming. It's a lot less time than preparing a course from scratch, for instance. Else I wouldnt be pursuing the research path at a...
Never mind that extramural grants are a a net loss for the University, especially a public institution such as UC: negotiated indirect cost recovery rates always fall short of 100%, even more so in the case of public universities (federal funding agencies assume that states will contribute to the public good brought about by publicly funded research — good luck with that!).
Aldo,
In Australia universities make a profit from external grants since they receive funding in recognition of grant success. So perhaps Glymour's remarks don't apply in the context in which he intended them to, but do elsewhere (that would be just one more expression of his startling ignorance).
Neil, it partly depends on what the relevant counterfactual is. Are we assuming that the same amount of money is pouring into the discipline as a whole, only via salaries (or even grants that needn't be applied for)? If so, you or someone like you would still be being funding, just in a different way.
Well the nearest world in which I didn't have funding is one in which the competitive grant I won went to someone else. And since the great majority of these things go to the sciences, the chances that a philosopher would be employed rather than me are miniscule. But of course that's not the relevant counterfactual, since your claim is that these programs should not be seen as sources of positions at all. So let's look at the world in which no full-time salaries come to philosophers through this mechanism. Then all positions are a function of teaching needs. Since I can't imagine a situation in which more teachers are needed due to the absence of people like me or of the Australian Research Council, it see s that in this world there are fewer philosophers employed. Since there is a small amount of cross-subsidization, moreover, the number might be reduced by more than the number of people who are directly funded. I just can't see how a scenario in which the money that employs me would find its way in philosophy via some other route.
How about a world in which the humanistic research is somewhat more intrinsically valued than it in fact is?
I'm inclined to see some tension -- though not an irresolvable one -- between visions of philosophy's role in academia that emphasize the intrinsic value of the humanities and visions in which grant-getting plays a major role.
Let me emphasize: I have no quarrel at all with individuals applying for grants. I apply for grants sometimes too. My quarrel is with those who want to push the discipline as a whole more in that direction.
If I were trying to get to that world, I wouldn't start from here.
So beyond a short startup period, a huge percentage of research-institution scientists' overall funding comes from grants. That is, many in the natural sciences are *completely dependent* on receiving grants for large portions of their salary and research. And furthermore, the host institution typically negotiates large percentages to fund overhead costs with NIH over and above these amounts PIs actually see (to keep the lights on, etc). Was this the extreme Professor Glymour was encouraging for philosophy to adopt regarding grants in his article?
Nevertheless, clearly there are lots of negatives here (as can be seen if one looks at the current state of funding across the sciences today) but one should mention that that system does come with at least some positives. Besides being used as a straightforward measurement of productivity (for better or worse), one of it's main benefits is accountability: one must propose research projects to be judged against peers for one's very livelihood (so you have to be a continually GOOD researcher or you're out of a job), tenure anchors are eliminated, it becomes very difficult to forestall retirement without contribution, and so on. Relatedly, it also brings in dollars and prestige to the university of which you are a community member. Not to say that I advocate this model, or that it's practical for philosophy particularly. Still, very interesting to imagine how the discipline might benefit from some of these positives!
I'm with Eric on this one. A world in which philosophers were mostly accountable to grantors would be a world in which less good philosophy was done.
I can think of three sets of reasons to think this. First off, once we have a place to work and a reasonable salary the main resource we need is time to work. Writing grants takes time and the money we might get by writing grant proposals might or might not compensate for the lost time. It might if it buys time away from other responsibilities, but there is a limit to what one can do with that. (For most of us. Niel's situation is obviously different.)
Secondly, torquing one's research to fit with monetary demand for philosophical research is unlikely to lead to better work. I think it is obvious that certain sorts of research are more apt to get funding than other sorts. Some of that has to do with the agendas of those who wish to spend money on philosophy grants. (Think of your own examples here.) And it is really important that such agendas don't determine what philosophers as a group work on. But even where grantors don't have agendas, I think most academic philosophers do better work by following their own sense of what is worth working on. Such work is likely to be a better fit with their talents and to benefit from their commitment to it.
Thirdly, it is much harder to evaluate the quality of work in prospect than after it is done. We already have quite a bit of accountability for our work insofar as we try and publish it in good places, hopefully after refereeing by competent colleagues. (I know, journal refereeing could be better, but do you really think a referee a proposal for work yet to be completed is better situated to judge the quality of the work than someone who can read the completed work?) Insofar as we have incentives to publish in good places, it is very hard for me to see that we get additional accountability of the right sort by judging our work on the basis of its ability to attract dollars from grantors.
Given that most of us pay for our keep in virtue of the time we spend teaching, I'm baffled as to why anyone would want to encourage administrators to look at grant funding as a good overall measure for quality work in the humanities. Which is not at all to say that individual philosophers cannot do a good job by getting grants to fund their work. It just should not be the measure of good philosophy. So, thanks Eric for raising the right issues about the Glymour manifesto.
I agree with both Eric's and Mark's points.
I find it ironic that as far as I know and contra one of Professor Glymour's tacit assumptions, some of the biggest grants in philosophy in the last few of years were awarded by the Templeton Foundation to projects such as Mele's Free Will project and Hawthorne's Religious Epistemology project, which do not seem to be exactly the kinds of projects Glymour had in mind.
WB and Mark remind us that scientists are already often entirely employed on grant money, and point to the dangers involved: time wasted on getting the grants, the influence of agencies over priorities, and so on. I work in a neuroscience institute in which everyone is on soft money - we must all raise our salaries. Obviously I'm grateful for the job, but I do worry that my work might become as hidebound, ideology driven, conservative and downright dull as my neuroscientist colleagues. I strive to maintain the dynamism and excitement of philosophy instead.
In case you missed it, that was irony.
Perhaps I should expand on those remarks. I do not mean to denigrate contemporary philosophy: the best is very, very good. There is more high quality philosophy in the world today than ever before. But there can't be any out that contemporary science, exemplified by neuroscience, should be regarded as a paradigm of a successful epistemic enterprise. You're on a loser if you argue that we need to avoid becoming more like *that*.
I also can't help noticing that most of the defenders of the status quo have tenure. I do not. I thank you for your concern for my soul, but I would rather continue to be receive the tainted money.
Neil,
There was no attempt to denigrate those who got grants in anything I said (or that anyone else said that I could see). I'm sure your soul is fine. What I did say was that there were dangers in orienting the field as a whole towards grant generation as a measure of quality.
Just to be clear Neil, this is not intended as an argument against individuals applying for grants. It is not meant to be critical of people who receive grant money. I think it's terrific when philosophers win grant money to support their projects! It is intended as an argument against moving the field as a whole more toward grant getting, that is, against shifting the funding structure of philosophy so that people increasingly (as in the sciences) *have* to win grants.
I think we do have a substantive disagreement about whether the best future for philosophy would be one in which (per me) $X comes at least as much as now via salaries and research budgets for which one needn't apply or in which (per you, if I understand correctly) $X comes less through salaries and unapplied-for research budgets than now and comes more via granting agencies. There's also the separate question of whether $X would really be the same in the two cases.
I do understand that no one is targeting me. I do think that the worry that we might become more like science is a bizarre one.
This is the first thing that came to mind when I read this:
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1431
(hope the link works)
There's more than a grain of truth in that one, Michael. Those who worry about grants and research priorities should also see this one:
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1436
i thought glymour was mentioning grants as one way, but not the only way, and certainly not a necessary way, to gauge whether philosophical work is engaging other disciplines.
one could argue that philosophy should not engage with other disciplines. one could argue that grant awards alone are a poor indicator, holding up templeton awards as an example. (but, i am not sure anyone would view templeton award as having anything like the same status as a nsf or erc award, anyway.)
so, who exactly is in favor of "increasing the power of grant agencies in philosophy"? this discussion seems to be aimed at a straw man.
I agree that grants weren't Glymour's point of emphasis. I also agree that Glymour was not saying that grant-getting was the only way by which to evaluate philosophy departments. However, I do think that he was suggesting, among other things, that philosophy departments should move more in the direction of pursuing grants. That would have -- wouldn't it? -- the effect of increasing the power of grant agencies in philosophy; hence the title.
@es: i suspect we agree far more than disagree; but, since that is boring...
@mvr: what if we moved to a world where decisions for grants in philosophy were decided by panels of philosophers? responding to a point of neil's, for whatever reason (a brutally competitive job market, an obsession with silly rankings) there is a timidity and conservatism in a lot (but not all!) philosophical research.
if you grant this observation, then what is the harm of funding agencies working to spur developments in the various specialties? a functioning marketplace should have many different ways to be rewarded, and it is more likely for a thousand flowers to bloom if there are a host of competing interests and incentives. one might even view europe and australia as test cases for this sort of approach.
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