Humanities research competitions can be inhumane. At universities like mine they involve balancing overwhelming teaching loads and scant access to databases with the knowledge that there is very little chance of receiving external funding.
I’ve been especially aware of that fact recently — ever since the University of Puerto Rico was put under austerity measures in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Our humanities faculty members have been encouraged to secure external support for projects previously funded by the institution, and as a result I’ve sent many more funding proposals than ever before.
This semester, I applied to the American Council of Learned Societies for a Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship, one of the few grants available for recently tenured faculty. To my knowledge, no scholar at a university like mine — where 98 percent of students are Latinx and around 75 percent receive Pell Grants — has ever received it. But I applied anyway.
Sending applications with the knowledge that they will be rejected is an exercise in several emotions. Putting these proposals together is a delight, for the most part. But sending them, the very act of clicking submit, is not.
I felt disenfranchised for the first time about my latest ACLS proposal in August when I read, as I do each summer, the affiliations and abstracts of the previous grantees who were chosen over me. There were 10 in 2019, two from Princeton.
My gut response: “Should I be doing this? Am I wasting peoples’ (and my own) time? Letter-writers, faculty colleagues, and several administrators went through multiple narratives, CVs, work plans, and bibliographies — and offered pages of feedback. For what?”
It seems too clear sometimes that I am involved in a ritual of rejection.
Matthew Goldfeder, a former director of ACLS fellowship programs, said once, “It is not surprising that excellent humanities scholars have appointments at top research universities, and that we have fellows from those institutions most years.”
To me it is surprising. I know that excellence in humanities fields exists at universities that rarely if ever appear among ACLS grantees. But the problem isn’t so simple. No one will come out and say that the University of Puerto Rico (or our echelon) is second-rate. We are encouraged to apply. And I want to apply. I know our ideas are excellent. I know that what we do in the humanities on my campus cannot be done elsewhere. I know that our faculty members are brilliant, and that we are peers — peers in fact, not just in principle — of those at Princeton and the others.
I also know that our institution and our community need external funding more than those who receive it, but that’s another matter.
Institutional data from the National Endowment for the Humanities are not unlike those of ACLS competitions: Affluent private universities dominate the list. Faculty-fellowship success rates are around 7 percent at NEH and 10 percent at ACLS. Those numbers are much higher for applicants from some colleges — and much lower for applicants from others. Why is that the case? Is there such disparity in quality between top and bottom — between, say, Princeton and the University of Puerto Rico?
It seems reasonable to think the selection of grantees — in humanistic fields, certainly — should result in a representative sample, as no one group (linguistic, ethnic, cultural, racial, socioeconomic) can claim authority on the analysis of the human condition.
However, it would appear that either 1) the peer-review process puts too much importance on cultural status (affiliation) in the evaluation process; or 2) those at top-ranked universities are indeed exceptional.
Maybe a combination of lower teaching loads, smaller classes, larger salaries, and institutional support (sabbaticals, money for equipment, research/teaching assistants, course releases, conference/archival travel funds) allows those faculty members to develop ideas and proposals in ways that cannot occur at my university. But that explanation overlooks the presence at institutions like mine of qualities that are untenable at top-ranked universities. The myth that top-ranked departments are a better environment for faculty members to thrive belies the fact that success in many humanistic fields often derives from experiences that are simply not available at top-ranked institutions.
Sending grant applications with the knowledge that they will be rejected is an exercise in futility.
My university has linguistic and cultural depths that make it exceptional in comparison with top-ranked universities. The intellectual environment in the humanities is particularly lively: As Spanish and English co-exist, conversations in all fields weave in and out of several languages, philosophies, worldviews, and intellectual registers. Even undergraduates have proficiency in three or more traditional languages (Spanish, English, and a “foreign” tongue), including the several variants of Spanish and English used on the island.
Second-class status also provides a degree of exemption from the lines of inquiry and thought that are tacitly (but rigidly and robustly) endorsed and protected in competitions. The margins offer insights that are imperceptible and, to a degree, inaccessible from the center. These are the spaces from which pioneering advances have emerged in engineering, biology, and the humanities (among other fields) throughout history.
The intellectual dimensions that these circumstances provide are difficult to measure on paper, or to comprehend from the outside. Perhaps for that reason my university scores so inappropriately low in all standard measures, rankings, categorizations, and other forms of institutional scaling — including NEH and ACLS funding.
But each person’s experience on campus is augmented by the social and cultural latitude that this environment offers. The preparation that our graduates have transcends knowledge available at top-ranked universities, and our faculty members are endowed with sensibilities developed in conditions that cannot occur elsewhere. But recognition of these as qualities or competencies cannot (or, at any rate, does not) occur, because of the nature of the competitions, be they for grants, admissions, hiring, or scholarly prizes. Those affiliated with top-ranked universities win them.
A major problem with competition is that it relies on the flawed process of peer review. Many studies demonstrate that humans cannot adjudicate among supposedly equal candidates and instead rely on proxy values, like affiliation. Students at Princeton assessed an imaginary female as “smarter when she was wealthier,” and faculty members, when considering imaginary scholars from favorable backgrounds, “emphasized … strengths and overlooked their weaknesses.” A desirable affiliation “primed [arbiters] to see academic progress” that was unsubstantiated. Affiliation was a proxy for excellence that influenced every dimension of the assessments, to the point that referees “saw exactly that pattern of achievement, … ignoring missteps.”
Conditions like these inform the decisions taken by humanities grant committees.
In her book How Professors Think (Harvard University Press, 2010), Michèle Lamont provides example after example of the shortcomings of peer review. A referee at a national competition, for example, said about letters of support: “I make judgments based on my knowledge of how distinguished the writer [of the letter] is, but I pay very little attention to what the writer actually says.”
Some biases shown in the book relate explicitly to affiliation: “When I see where she is [Penn] and she’s a professor,” a reviewer comments, “I assume that this must be a very good person.” Precisely what is assumed about the University of Puerto Rico faculty is unstated but not unclear. Is there an assumption? Yes. “If she had been at some tiny little hole-in-the-wall, … it’s not likely [to have been funded].” Another reviewer said that “people from Harvard get no advice of any kind,” while others “have to submit draft after draft and they get all these comments.”
These biases also condemn where scholars trained: “An unfortunate fact of life that other things being equal,” a referee comments, “someone who went to Stanford … would probably be better, … and it’s kind of silly to try to amend that.”
Clicking submit is an exercise in depression because almost everything in peer review works against proposals like mine. These practices may not be predatory or malevolent, but they place clear limits on scholars doing excellent work at so-called second-rate universities.
Many recognize this is counterintuitive: “There is no correspondence between the quality of work and where one lands a tenure-track job,” observes John Duvall, editor of MFS: Modern Fiction Studies. He perceives a direct link between blind review and the affiliations that appear in MFS. Before PMLA adopted blind readings, some believed that “certain names atop an article virtually guaranteed acceptance.”
Blind reviews are prevalent in other skilled professions. Many symphonies hold trials with the musician out of view, and companies like GapJumpers arrange assessments that judge “performance rather than keywords on a résumé.” The presence of women jumps 50 percent when orchestras conduct blind recitals; almost 60 percent of those selected in GapJumpers’s blind auditions come from underrepresented backgrounds. One academic researcher noted that committees using blind reviews “tend to be surprised that the top-performing submissions they pick to advance very often come from applicants without an elite education, training, or experience.”
Humanities grant committees are not exceptions to these tendencies. While there is no truly blind assessment, would NEH, ACLS, and other humanities organizations benefit from blind competitions?
If they tried it, then clicking submit from my desk in Mayagüez might be less depressing.
