Leverhulme Trust to support British Academy Small Research Grant scheme

The logo of the British Academy
BA staff examine the Leverhulme memorandum of understanding

The British Academy announced yesterday that agreement has been reached on a new collaborative agreement with the Leverhulme Trust about funding for its Small Grants Scheme.  This is very good news for researchers in the humanities and the social sciences, and I’m interrupting my series of gloom-and-doom posts on what to do if your application is unsuccessful to inflict my take on some really good news upon you, oh gentle reader.  And to see if I can set a personal best for the number of links in an opening sentence.  Which I can.

When I first started supporting grant-getting activity back in the halcyon days of 2005ish, the British Academy Small Grants scheme was a small and beautifully formed scheme.  It funded up to £7.5k or so for projects of up to two years, and only covered research expenses – so no funding for investigator time, replacement teaching, or overheads, but would cover travel, subsistence, transcription, data, casual research assistance etc and so on.  It was a light touch application on a simple form, and enjoyed a success rate of around 50% or so.  The criterion for funding was academic merit.  Nothing else mattered.  It funded some brilliant work, and Ken Emond of the British Academy has always spoken very warmly about this scheme, and considered it a real success story.  Gradually people started cottoning on to just how good a scheme it was, and success rates started to drop – but that’s what happens when you’re successful.

Then along came the Comprehensive Spending Review and budgets were cut.  I presume the scheme was scrapped under government pressure, only for our heroes at the BA to eventually win the argument.  At the same time, the ESRC decided that their reviewers weren’t going get out of bed in the morning for less than £200k.  Suddenly bigger projects were the only option and (funded) academic research looked to be all about perpetual paradigm shifts with only outstanding stuff that will change everything to be funded.  And there was no evidence of any thought as to how these major theoretical breakthroughs gained through massive grants might be developed and expanded and exploited and extended through smaller projects.

Although it was great to see the BA SGS scheme survive in any form, the reduced funding made it inevitable that success rates would plummet.  However, the increased funding from the Leverhulme Trust could make a difference.  According to the announcement, the Trust has promised £1.5 million funding over three years.  Let’s assume:

  • that every penny goes to supporting research, and not a penny goes on infrastructure and overheads and that it’s all additional (rather than replacement) funding
  • that £10k will remain the maximum available
  • that the average amount awarded will be £7.5k

So…. £1.5m over three years is 500k per year.  500k divided by £7.5k average project cost is about 67 extra projects.  While we don’t know how many projects will be funded in this year’s reduced scheme, we do  know about last year.  According to the British Academy’s 2010/11 annual report

For the two rounds of competition held during 2010/11 the Academy received 1,561 applications for consideration and 538 awards were made, a success rate of 34.5%.Awards were spread over the whole range of Humanities and Social Sciences, and were made to individuals based in more than 110 institutions, as well as to more than 20 independent scholars.

2010/11 was the last year that the scheme ran in full and at the time, we all thought that the spring 2011 call would the last, so I suspect that the success rate might have been squeezed by a number of ‘now-or-never’ applications.  We won’t know until next month how many awards were made in the Autumn 2011 call, nor what the success rate is, so we won’t know until then whether the Leverhulme cash will restore the scheme to its former glory.  I suspect that it won’t, and that the combined total of the BA’s own funds and the Leverhulme contribution will add up to less than was available for the scheme before the comprehensive spending review struck.

Nevertheless, there will be about 67 more small social science and humanities projects funded than otherwise would have been the case.  So let’s raise a non-alcoholic beverage to the Leverhulme Trust, and in memory of founder William Hesketh Lever and his family’s values of “‘liberalism, nonconformity, and abstinence”.

23rd Jan update:  In response to a question on Twitter from @Funding4Res (aka Marie-Claire from the University of Huddersfield’s Research and Enterprise team), the British Academy have been said that “they’ll be rounds for Small Research Grants in the spring and autumn. Dates will be announced soon.”

Coping with rejection: What to do if your grant application is unsuccessful. Part 1: Understand what it means…. and what it doesn’t mean

You can't have any research funding. In this life, or the next....

Some application and assessment processes are for limited goods, and some are for unlimited goods, and it’s important to understand the difference.  PhD vivas and driving tests are assessments for unlimited goods – there’s no limit on how many PhDs or driving licenses can be issued.  In principle, everyone could have one if they met the requirements.  You’re not going to fail your driving test because there are better drivers than you.  Other processes are for limited goods – there is (usually) only one job vacancy that you’re all competing for, only so many papers that a top journal accept, and only so much grant money available.

You’d think this was a fairly obvious point to make.  But talking to researchers who have been unsuccessful with a particular application, there’s sometimes more than a hint of hurt in their voices as they discuss it, and talk in terms of their research being rejected, or not being judged good enough.  They end up taking it rather personally.  And given the amount of time and effort that must researchers put into their applications, that’s not surprising.

It reminds me of an unsuccessful job applicant whose opening gambit at a feedback meeting was to ask me why I didn’t think that she was good enough to do the job.  Well, my answer was that I was very confident that she could do the job, it’s just that there was someone more qualified and only one post to fill.  In this case, the unsuccessful applicant was simply unlucky – an exceptional applicant was offered the job, and nothing she could have said or done (short of assassination) would have made much difference.  While I couldn’t give the applicant the job she wanted or make the disappointment go away, I could at least pass on the panel’s unanimous verdict on her appointability.  My impression was that this restored some lost confidence, and did something to salve the hurt and disappointment.  You did the best that you could.  With better luck you’ll get the next one.

Of course, with grant applications, the chances are that you won’t get to speak to the chair of the panel who will explain the decision.  You’ll either get a letter with the decision and something about how oversubscribed the scheme was and how hard the decisions were, which might or might not be true.  Your application might have missed out by a fraction, or been one of the first into the discard pile.

Some funders, like the ESRC, will pass on anonymised referees’ comments, but oddly, this isn’t always constructive and can even damage confidence in the quality of the peer review process.  In my experience, every batch of referees’ comments will contain at least one weird, wrong-headed, careless, or downright bizarre comment, and sometimes several.  Perhaps a claim about the current state of knowledge that’s just plain wrong, a misunderstanding that can only come from not reading the application properly, and/or criticising it on the spurious grounds of not being the project that they would have done.  These apples are fine as far as they go, but they should really taste of oranges.  I like oranges.

Don’t get me wrong – most referees’ reports that I see are careful, conscientious, and insightful, but it’s those misconceived criticisms that unsuccessful applicants will remember.  Even ahead of the valid ones.  And sometimes they will conclude that its those wrong criticisms that are the reason for not getting funded.  Everything else was positive, so that one negative review must be the reason, yes?  Well, maybe not.  It’s also possible that that bizarre comment was discounted by the panel too, and the reason that your project wasn’t funded was simply that the money ran out before they reached your project.  But we don’t know.  I really, really, really want to believe that that’s the case when referees write that a project is “too expensive” without explaining how or why.  I hope the panel read our carefully constructed budget and our detailed justification for resources and treat that comment with the fECing contempt that it deserves.

Fortunately, the ESRC have announced changes to procedures which allow not only a right of reply to referees, but also to communicate the final grade awarded.  This should give a much stronger indication of whether it was a near miss or miles off.  Of course, the news that an application was miles off the required standard may come gifted wrapped with sanctions.   So it’s not all good news.

But this is where we should be heading with feedback.  Funders shouldn’t be shy about saying that the application was a no-hoper, and they should be giving as much detail as possible.  Not so long ago, I was copied into a lovely rejection letter, if there’s any such thing.  It passed on comments, included some platitudes, but also told the applicant what the overall ranking was (very close, but no cigar) and how many applications there were (many more than the team expected).  Now at least one of the comments was surprising, but we know the application was taken seriously and given a thorough review.  And that’s something….

So… in conclusion….  just because your project wasn’t funded doesn’t (necessarily) mean that it wasn’t fundable.  And don’t take it personally.  It’s not personal.  Just the business of research funding.

New year’s wishes….

The new calendar year is traditionally a time for reflection and for resolutions, but in a fit of hubris I’ve put together a list of resolutions I’d like to see for the sector, research funders, and university culture in general.  In short, for everyone but me.  But to show willing, I’ll join in too.

No more of the following, please….

1.  “Impactful”

Just…. no.  I don’t think of myself a linguistic purist or a grammar-fascist, though I am a pedant for professional purposes.  I recognise that language changes and evolves over time, and I welcome changes that bring new colour and new descriptive power to our language.  While I accept that the ‘impact agenda’ is here to stay for the foreseeable future, the ‘impactful’ agenda need not be.  The technical case against this monstrosity of a word is outlined at Grammarist, but surely the aesthetic case is conclusive in itself.  I warn anyone using this word in my presence that I reserve the right to tell them precisely how annoyful they’re being.

2.  The ‘Einstein fallacy’

This is a mistaken and misguided delusion that a small but significant proportion of academics appear to be suffering from.  It runs a bit like this:
1) Einstein was a genius
2) Einstein was famously absent-minded and shambolic in his personal organisation
3) Conclusion:  If I am or pretend to be absent-minded and shambolic , either:
(3a) I will be a genius; or
(3b) People will think I am a genius; or
(3c) Both.

I accept that some academics are genuinely bad at administration and organisation. In some cases it’s a lack of practice/experience, in others a lack of confidence, and I accept  that this is just not where their interests and talent lies.  Fair enough.  But please stop being deliberately bad at it to try to impress people.  Oh, you can only act like a prima donna if you have the singing skills to back it up…

3)  Lack of predictability in funding calls

Yes, I’m looking at you, ESRC.  Before the comprehensive spending review and all of the changes that followed from that, we had a fairly predictable annual cycle of calls, very few of which had very early autumn deadlines.  Now we’re into a new cycle which may or may not be predictable, and a lot of them seem to be very early in the academic year.  Sure, let’s have one off calls on particular topics, but let’s have a predictable annual cycle for everything else with as much advance notice as possible.  It’ll help hugely with ‘demand management’ because it’ll be much easier to postpone applications that aren’t ready if we know there will be another call.  For example, I was aware of a couple of very strong seminar series ideas which needed further work and discussion within the relevant research and research-user communities.  My advice was to start that work now using the existence of the current call as impetuous, and to submit next year.  But we’ve taken a gamble, as we don’t know if there will be another call in the future, and you can’t tell me because apparently a decision has yet to be made.

4)  Lazy “please forward as appropriate” emails

Stuff sent to me from outside the Business School with the expectation that I’ll just send it on to everyone.  No.  Email overload is a real problem, and I write most of my emails with the expectation that I have ten seconds at most either to get the message across, or to earn an attention extension.  I mean, you’re not even reading this properly are you?  You’re probably skim reading this in case there’s a nugget of wit amongst the whinging.  Every email I sent creates work for others, and every duff, dodgy, or irrelevant email I send reduces my e-credit rating.  I know for a fact that at least some former colleagues deleted everything I sent without reading it – there’s no other explanation I can think of for missing two emails with the header including the magic words “sabbatical leave”.

So… will I be spending my e-credit telling my colleagues about your non-business school related event which will be of interested to no-one?  No, no, and most assuredly no.  I will forward it “as appropriate”, if by “appropriate” you mean my deleted items folder.

Sometimes, though, a handful of people might be interested.  Or quite a lot of people might be interested, but it’s not worth an individual email.  Maybe I’ll put it on the portal, or include it in one of my occasional news and updates emails.  Maybe.

If you’d like me to do that, though, how about sending me the message in a form I can forward easily and without embarrassment?  With a meaningful subject line, a succinct and accurate summary in the opening two sentences?  So that I don’t have to do it for you before I feel I can send it on.  There’s a lovely internet abbreviation – TL:DR – which stands for Too Long: Didn’t Read.  I think its existence tells us something.

5)  People who are lucky enough to have interesting, rewarding and enjoyable jobs with an excellent employer and talented and supportive colleagues, who always manage to find some petty irritants to complain about, rather than counting their blessings.