The existence of the Research Board has meant that for decades the U of I has had perhaps the most enlightened policy for funding humanities research of any public institution in the country. Only a few years ago the Board was funding 75% of the requests it received. Recent budget cuts have reduced that rate to 45%. One proposal on the table would gradually reduce the percentage of applications funded to 5%. This campus would thus become the least friendly to humanities research of any flagship state university I know, for humanities departments here do not even have their own budgets for conference travel. The Research Board has enabled our faculty to take on ambitious projects that faculty elsewhere could not even consider. Some academic disciplines have been transformed as a result. The Board should have its full funding restored, not its budget cut further.

Cary Nelson, Professor of English at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, at 7:55 am EDT on March 15, 2007

research funding crucial for both recruitment and retention

I am currently weighing a job offer from another Big Ten school where the research support across campus (including the humanities) is even better than that offered by the Illinois Research Board in its current configuration, thanks to a smart plan to re-invest the proceeds from patents and whatnot and to funnel them back to new research. If U of I drops the research board, it may as well drop its plans for joining the ranks of the very top public institutions in the country.

debra hawhee, associate professor at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, at 11:30 am EDT on March 15, 2007

Big Mistake

While I have not received a penny from this fund after two years of teaching at the U of I, I think it would be a grave mistake for the university to reduce or scrap this most important resource. Funding for humanities research is notoriously difficult to find even as the volume of research required for getting tenure has grown exponentially. Without seed money for research expenses, how will junior faculty meet the implicit expectations of publishing a book and a half-dozen journal articles within five years? We will either spend a lot of time writing proposals for external grants or will actively seek employment elsewhere. The university stands to lose its best faculty, would be unable to recruit the most promising job candidates, and will have to give up all the gains of its previous (quite successful) efforts to bolster the institution’s academic reputation. The outcome would be catastrophic.

Jose Capino, Assistant Professor at University of Illinois, at 11:30 am EDT on March 15, 2007

Research Board Funding

The Research Board plays a crucial role at Illinois for scholars in disciplines that have very limited grants available for research and teaching. As a evaluator of grants for the American Council of Learned Societies, I’ve witnessed first-hand the feeding frenzy among humanists for the very limited fellowships available for even a year’s release from teaching. Seed money grants of under $25,000 of the sort provided by the Research Board are essential, for example, to humanists doing interdisciplinary work in New Media; the funding of a graduate assistant for a year literally can mean the difference between a project being completed and its dragging on for an extended period. Moreover, Research Board funds, as Cary Nelson suggests, are an important means of attracting new faculty and retaining those who receive counter-offers from elsewhere. It is one way in which Illinois can close the widening gap between what it can offer as a public institution and the support at private, peer-institutions that routinely provide humanists with significant budgets for travel and research.

Robert Markley, Professor of English at University of Illinois, at 11:51 am EDT on March 15, 2007

What is especially strange is that these rumors are circulating at the same time that the U of I released its revised strategic plan. That document states that “A university of global stature must recognize and nurture the modes of understanding the Humanities and Arts bring to the sources, the dynamics, and the destinations of powerful dimensions of contemporary life.” It also states that “our strongest departments are equal to any in the nation, and must be sustained at that level. In order to secure our position as one of the nation’s very best comprehensive public research universities...we must invest sigfnicantly in areas in which we already are near the top tier, but fall short of our best peers.”

As others have noted, defunding the research board would destroy whatever chance the university has of meeting these strategic goals. I’m hopeful that it’s just a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand does, and the U of Illinois will see the stake it has it continuing to support research in the humanities.

John Marsh, Assistant Director at Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, at 11:55 am EDT on March 15, 2007

As a junior faculty members, I’ve been extremely grateful for the presence of the Campus Research Board. Our humanities departments don’t have the funds to provide things like research accounts or travel grants, and there aren’t many outside sources of funding in the humanities, either. Attending conferences, travel to research sites and archives, and even basic supplies likes books and photocopying are important for everyone, but they’re essential for faculty working toward tenure. Without the support of the Research Board, many of us simply wouldn’t be able to do it.

Renee R. Trilling, Assistant Professor at UIUC, at 12:00 pm EDT on March 15, 2007

External grants in the humanities are not only hard to get—they also typically involve leaving campus. The Research Board allows non-travel-related faculty research to flourish on campus: where it becomes part of the conversation between colleagues in and across disciplines, in classrooms, in living rooms. It’s impossible to imagine the stimulating intellectual life of this institution sustaining itself without this dedicated funding for research in the humanities. Why would the University of Illinois choose to cut off at the root so vital a resource?

Lauren Goodlad, Associate Professor at UIUC, at 1:46 pm EDT on March 15, 2007

The draw to job candidates

Looks like all the comments here are from U of I people. This move is lamentable. Here’s a perspective from someone outside of your university. I just accepted a job at a university that has a program similar to the Illinois program (though not as big, at least not as big as the U of I program once was) and it was a big factor in my decision. Why they are even considering getting rid of a program like this is beyond comprehension. The payoff for a relatively small investment is huge. Instead, the university should be finding a way to enhance a program like this!

Job seeker, at 6:50 pm EDT on March 15, 2007

Threats to Rare Resouce for Humanists

We must be able to travel to another country, or library [for example] and conduct research on all kinds of things: documents, landscapes, and materials related to our projects. The experience and insights gained are invaluable to the production of knowledge in the 21st century. Not all things can be googled to be understood.

LeAnne Howe, Associate Professor at UIUC, at 5:05 am EDT on March 16, 2007

A Threat to Public Support for Research and Education

The threat to end or further reduce Research Board funding for faculty scholarship at the University of Illinois would be a severe blow to public higher education, at least in Illinois, though it is a sign of larger trends in the country. I was attracted to Illinois ten years ago precisely for its strong commitment, as a public university, to nurturing the very highest standards of research, scholarship, and teaching. The Research Board has been the foundation of this development of scholarly research and innovation at the University of Illinois – especially in the humanities, arts, and parts of the social sciences, where external research grants are relatively scarce, though this is also an era when many outside foundations and agencies are reducing their funding for research of all sorts. Ending or further reducing such university funding for research would damage our university and, by extension, higher education in this country. It would demoralize many faculty, whose enthusiasm for advancing both scholarship and teaching at Illinois has driven this university forward in recent years. Frankly, many faculty would seek alternative scholarly homes — and find them, for such offers to our faculty are not uncommon. It is sadly ironic that this talk of cutting the Research Board comes at the very moment when the university has released its new strategic plan, which insists on the commitment of the university to “fostering” a “research environment that enables foundational, breakthrough research.” Suggestions by a university official that we might further cut or end Research Board funding make these words appear to be only that—words.

Mark Steinberg, Professor (History) at University of Illinois, at 10:25 am EDT on March 16, 2007

The best public research university?

The University of Illinois seeks to become America’s best public research university.

To get ahead in the ranking demands outstanding scholarly productivity accross all disciplines. Research takes time and costs money, also in the humanities and arts. Disciplines without access to large extramural funding opportunities depend on the Research Board to fulfill their research potential. The research productivity of these disciplines is absolutely crucial to the University’s mission of becoming the best public research university in the U.S.

Thus, Research Board funding must be expanded, not cut. The logic is clear.

Anna Westerstahl Stenport, Assistant Professor at University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, at 12:05 pm EDT on March 16, 2007

Let me add one more thing to the conversation here. The comments above rightly focus on what the loss of Research Board funding might do to humanities scholarship on campus. But, as the story points out, the Research Board also funds science and social science research. As someone in a department with both humanities and social science faculty, I know that my social science colleagues often view Research Board funding as an important springboard for external funding. A relatively small Research Board grant can provide important seed money, allowing scholars to do pilot studies which will allow them to seek more substantive external grants later.

Cara Finnegan, Associate Professor at Speech Communication, UIUC, at 12:31 pm EDT on March 16, 2007

Prof. Maxwell’s puzzlement aside, I take no joy in watching the humanities and social sciences gutted as this move promises to do. But my worry over student/faculty ratios (and who really cares about them right?) far predates this latest assault on the humanities. It really begins when departments don’t do anything to stop the production of more Ph.D.’s than a field can possibly handle. It starts when departments decide, out of some perverse sense of ‘realpolitik’, to make really short sighted decisions in favor of a few tenure lines against changes to class structure and job description that actively work to undermine the value of those lines, to say nothing of how such a policy encourages the use of graduate student and contingent adjunct labor. It starts when a department does nothing to stem the influx of undergraduate majors that necessitate contingent faculty and graduate student labor. It starts when that labor teaches over half the sections offered by a department and does a damn good job of it but gets dumped like last week’s trash as soon as the fiscal crisis that inept administration and budget cuts, both of which are foreseeable to those who want to look, impact. It starts when the AAUP legitimizes the use of contingent labor in the name of saving tenured labor by saying that five and out is ethical treatment for contingent faculty. But I’m sorry to bore you so.

Forgive me that I don’t put on the sack cloth and ashes because your research money is potentially going to be cut (and seriously, if you really think that they would cut the program altogether rather than just take some money from it, a move for which you will no doubt now be thankful and which is probably what they wanted from the start, I’ve got a bridge you all might be interested in buying) or for seeing this proposed cut as the end of all good things. My concerns are so much more mundane, I know. I’d say I’m worried about potential competition for my job, such as it is. But somehow I don’t think I’d find you nosing around ’second-tier regional state institutions’ and worrying about free pencils.

Anon, at 2:52 pm EDT on March 16, 2007

Part-Time Faculty

Please see the AAUP’s detailed recommended practices for part-time faculty. It is section number 13 in our RECOMMENDED INSTITUTIONAL REGULATIONS, available online at http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubres/policydocs/RIR.htm. We urge regular written performance reviews, notification of next year’s employment during the current year, due process for terminations for cause, and, after a probationary period, expectation of continuing employment.

Cary Nelson, Professor at University of Illinois, at 3:45 pm EDT on March 16, 2007

As a scientist and a humanities scholar, I have a couple of points: The Research Board provides seed money to conduct initial research that can be the basis for larger, federal (and indirect cost generating) grants. By granting me about $15,000 in funding for preliminary research on a history of science topic, the University received over $30,000 in indirect costs from a successful NSF grant. Ten thousand dollars to fund preliminary research on an aquatic ecology topic generated close to $100,000 in federal indirect costs. Eliminating the research board would probably end up reducing the number of grants received by the University. 2nd, its not just humanities scholars who benefit; scientists also recieve enormous benefits from the research board.

Daniel Schneider, Professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, at 5:04 pm EDT on March 16, 2007

My Apologies To Prof. Nelson

it is actually seven years and out that they advise. You can read about it in this august websites own archives More Rights for Adjuncts.

Anon, at 5:35 pm EDT on March 16, 2007

My thanks to Prof. Maxwell for his backhanded compliment as it rather makes my point. All the things that I pointed to as the sources of my concern with the humanities tend to reduce the quality of life for academic labor in favor of a commercial logic. Or maybe you see the problems wrapped up in class size, PhD overproduction, and contingent academic labor as some perverse affirmation of humanity. I don’t know. But if you don’t see how the degradation of the quality of life for academic labor in one area is of a piece with the deprioritization of the humanities in the other, well that’s just sad. What right have you to complain that the university, in taking away this source of funding, is degrading your chances of pursuing your interests by making you compete with many others for the little that would be left, of developing professionally and developing your profession, of according you and your field the respect they deserve by making them a funding priority, when the same things happen _every day and as a matter of policy_ in the various departments/faculties/disciplines/professions that constitute the humanities? How can you honestly expect that you could pursue an exploitative and commercial logic at the local level and deny it on the larger level of the university? You want a connection: Defunding the IRB manifests the same commercial logic as dehumanizing academic labor. Your division between “fair, cogent, and vital points” and its purported “emotional, resentment-stoked” connection is illustrative here. It echoes the divide between Zukoski’s statements that defunding the Board is a consequence of changing priorities in the face of fiscal inflexibility and Vernon Burton’s declaration that it is a “emotional attachment” most faculty have “to the Research Board and the funding opportunities.” Could it be that the structural connection is the very lack of a connection between emotional priorities and budgetary ones? Perhaps you enact the desired structural connection in your very denial. Or would the division tend to obscure it? Hmmm...

You want the humanities to matter? You want people to care when the humanities are attacked? Than act like a human and treat others like one. When they aren’t, when you aren’t, demand to be and don’t settle for anything less. Learn to say no despite the consequences and not for its own sake but because it is the right thing to do. Or is it not the intellectual’s job to speak truth to power? If not, you’ve no one to blame for your misfortune but yourselves.

As to my previous post about the AAUP policy, I meant to provide a hyperlink to the Inside Higher Ed article about it. But I seem unable to create one in commenting. If you search the site for “More Rights for Adjuncts,” which is the article’s title, you should be able to find it. I tried clicking on Prof. Nelson’s link and got an error message that “The page could not be found.”

Anon, at 2:15 pm EDT on March 17, 2007

We have never, and will never, question the humanity of Prof. Maxwell or any one who has written here or elsewhere. Ever. We are sorry that that has been their perception. Rather the point has been that certain actions and policies, endorsed by silence or otherwise, betray the commitment to humanity we think vital to our identity as scholars. Nothing, not one thing, that the Research Board could ever hope to support is of any point or purpose without it. It is a tragic and terrible thing even to contemplate defunding the IRB. It really is. But nothing we or it can do can matter if people’s lives do not come first.

Anon, at 7:45 pm EDT on March 18, 2007

There was a meeting of the virtual-reality sort. Thanks for asking. We prefer to think of ourselves as the sort of collective identity so prevalent in these post-modern times. But we try not to take what is a really convenience too seriously. We are members of a class but do not purport to speak for it, only ourselves. If you choose to impute such to us, so be it. We recognize it as a consequence of our identity. We normally don’t speak in the plural, preferring instead the conceit of the singular. But we thought the point we last made important enough to warrant the emphasis it provides. Having done so, we think it too facile to go back.

We regret the anonymity. But we do not have the protective cover of tenure as does virtually everyone who has written in response, and which is truly a large part of the point in our argument. Without it, we fear the consequences that the tendency to personalize these arguments implies. If this makes us cowardly or timid in your eyes, we don’t really care. We like to eat as much as we want to protect our own, an argument we hope you can appreciate. In any event, we think what is said matters more than who says it.

We also have attended far too many meetings, walked too many picket lines, and learned far more about the situation than we would like. We could, quite frankly, stand a good break from the whole thing. Let us just say this. We think you too aware of the numbers in the AAUP’s Contingent Faculty Index that depict full-time tenured and tenure track faculty as a sizable minority in higher education. We won’t belabor that or what it reveals about where job growth will be. So let’s talk about the U of I. According to information from your own Division of Management Information, the percentage of instructional units delivered by the contingent labor category ‘Other’ for the UIUC campus has grown by almost ten percentage points over the last nine years (12.8% in 1997-98 to 22.2% in 2005-6). At the level of your department’s college, LAS, that number is almost eight percentage points over the same time period (10.9% to 18.3%). For your department, the numbers have indeed declined from their high point in 2000-01. But they still are higher than they were nine years ago (19.4% in 1997-98 to 21.2% in 2005-06). Grad Assistants, while not teaching as much as they did nine years ago, are in fact teaching more than just four years ago. In 2001-02, they taught 33.7% of the IU’s offered by the department. In 2005-06, that number is 43.9%. What then will be the profession that the 161 graduate students in your department (a 30% increase from the 121 of 1997-98) enter into? Will research even matter to them as they struggle to keep a place in a job market vastly over-saturated with Ph.D.’s? Maybe if they are lucky enough to land a job as an academic professional, whose numbers have doubled on your campus, in your college, and in your department in the last ten years. But without the protections of tenure, what sort of research would they be willing to risk? The fact of the matter is that research is increasingly irrelevant to an educational marketplace where labor is cheap, plentiful and utterly disposable. And as long as those conditions obtain, it will increasingly continue to be so. There is little incentive and less logic in the fiscal calculus, which Zukoski and other administrators of his ilk at all levels embrace, for it to be otherwise. We appreciate your efforts. We truly do. But we simply do not agree, in the face of the facts, that this is the most important battle we can fight in defense of what we love.

Anon, at 5:46 am EDT on March 21, 2007

“Threats to Rare Resource for Humanisits”

Professor Zukoski’s remark about other insitutions without this rare and valued resource nevertheless having strong humanities programs involves an unknown. They don’t have our arrangement with the research board, but they may well have other arrangements, such as the $5000/annum Stanford program noted in the Inside Higher Ed article or, simply, department level funding, however nominal, that can at least cover the cost of travel to conferences. There is a danger that observers will think of the research board as a kind of supplement to other institutional or departmental support. In the case of the History department, one of the strongest in the US, we have neither. Very small department research grants were lost many years ago in an earlier round of budget cutting and the only university funding program for travel to conferences, our Scholars Travel Fund, is under the Research Board.

There are, in fact, a very small number of humanists with large research grants, folks hired in as or elevated to endowed chairs of some sort, but there is a huge gap between their situation and that of the typical professor in the humanities. So some humanists will have resources for travel and research assistance, even if the board is cut or drastically reduced. Most will not.

The reasons for continuing the research board have been briefly noted. It not only allows faculty to travel for research and to attend one or sometimes even two conferences per year, but it also provides seed money to get projects going, research support to hire assistants, small amounts for duplicating unique archival materials and graphics, and, in rare cases, publication subventions for books that might not otherwise see the light of day, or see it without valuable graphics. It does more, though. It provides funding and valuable research experience to our graduate students and it supplies some encouragement to often outstanding scholars who have nowhere else to turn.

As other have mentioned, the board, along with our wonderful library, is always mentioned in the course of recruitment. It may well be that the board gives Illinois a slight advantage over other institutions with regard to research funding, but when we have geography and a number of other factors working against our efforts, I am certain that the edge is a good thing for the institution overall.

Jim Barrett, Professor of History at University of Illinois at Urbana, at 7:25 pm EDT on March 21, 2007

Zukoski

It 2005, Zukoski participated in a panel hosted by the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities entitled “The Corporate Humanities.”

First, he recited his vision for “research” at Illinois: exclusive enthusiasm for the sciences and engineering, not so much for their own sake, but for their “translation” into products, processes, patents, and so on for the non-academic world. Soft money, grants, “partnerships” with business, etc.

Then, he admitted quite openly that he was generally unaware of what scholars in the humanities do and why they do it. Whatever it is, it certainly doesn’t seem to jibe with his vision.

The argument isn’t whether or not the Research Board is important to the humanities at Illinois — it obviously is — but whether the humanities are a priority for the interests and priorities that Zukoski represents.

But as for the fact that he doesn’t know much about what he doesn’t care about — why, there’s plenty of blame to go around for that.

Undergrad, Watchful undergrad at UIUC, at 6:05 am EDT on March 28, 2007