The Fine Art of Grantsmanship

On most U.S. campuses these days, grantsmanship--the fine art of picking off research funds--is almost as important to professorial prestige as the ability to teach or carry out the research once a grant is landed. The competition is keen and the potential prizes are well worth the effort: the Federal Government and private foundations annually present the nation's universities with a $5 billion bonanza in research money.

To be sure, tough screening and accounting procedures help make certain that the bonanza is not a boondoggle; both the givers and the receivers of grants rightly insist that money invested in research has paid off a hundredfold in scholarly discoveries. Nonetheless, some educators are beginning to wonder about the impact of all that easy-come money on the universities. Salary, prestige and promotion depend upon a scholar's ability to probe and publish--which in turn often depends upon his ability to unearth research grants. "You need the federal loot to do the research to do the book to get the loot," says Stephen Trachtenberg, an assistant to U.S. Education Commissioner Harold Howe. "Research aid comes too easily to the researchers," adds Engineering Science Professor Samuel Silver of Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory. "We've come to expect it as our due."

The Golden Touch. The first step in mastering grantsmanship is picking a field that the grant givers consider hot. "I've developed the golden touch," admits a former Justice Department consultant now on the University of Mississippi faculty. "I can get $100,000 with half an hour on the phone to Washington--I can get rich fighting poverty." Studies of water and air pollution are also big this year, as is any application of computers to human affairs (at Stanford alone there are seven major projects in computer-assisted teaching). There is always plenty of money available from almost any foundation for cardiac disease and cancer research. Although the social sciences get less than 3% of federal research money, psychological studies are beginning to get more help.

Too often, "scholars go where the money is," says University of Chicago Sociologist Philip Mauser. What this means, explains Theodore Sizer, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is that "researchers are not asking the right questions--they are taking the questions that are easier to research." Scholars often frame their grant proposals broadly enough to blanket their real research interests. The sociologist interested in youth gangs, for example, is more likely to get money for a study of slum neighborhoods. Conversely, a biologist who merely wanted to find out whether a high-protein fish flour was unsafe for human consumption landed a grant by emphasizing that he wanted to know if the flour would induce cancer.

Awards for Writing. Writing a proposal is also an art. Some grants, argues Lewis Yablonsky, a sociology professor at California's San Fernando Valley State College, are really awards for excellence in writing. It is "a form of seduction--you must titillate them to give the money," says Barry Winograd, a grad student at Cal's Santa Barbara campus. He advises that "somewhat vague phrasing" pays off, along with a tactful reference to omissions in previous research.

Seductive writing sometimes seems to sell projects whose utility is not easily apparent. The Government gave one school $50,000 to film the mating dance of the Amazon butterfly, while other researchers received a grant to study the rectal temperature of hibernating bears. A team of engineers at the University of Minnesota got $250,000 from the Government to devise an ideal "experimental city." The only trouble with this otherwise worthy project: no full-time social scientist was involved in the study.

No Time to Contemplate. Scholars tend to consider their research a product to be sold to the highest bidder--although trying out the same project on different grant givers must be done with some care. "If a foundation thinks that you've got a 10% chance of getting the funds from someone else, they're not going to give you the money," explains one Harvard Ph.D. candidate. For some professors, the pursuit of project money is almost a full-time career in itself. "There is a kind of hustle here, like in the business world," contends John Hodges, a British-born Harvard graduate student in the history of science, "and sometimes intellectual contemplation is fitted in between phone calls to Washington." Harvard Graduate Student Steve Barney claims that grants are used "as a bonus for the faculty--like an expense account in business," cites travel grants to libraries, despite the availability of microfilmed copies.

Effective grantsmanship feeds on itself. "When you are doing good research, you attract talented people," says Ohio Researcher John B. Galipault. "You become known as a swinger, and good graduate students want to work for you--then you have to keep them challenged." Once a school has the manpower and equipment, the next grant comes easier. "The rich are getting richer and the poor are going nowhere," says Berkeley's Silver.

If there is any victim in grantsmanship, it is not the Government or the foundations but the undergraduate student. To the professor tied up in the pursuit of research funds, teaching may seem like an unpleasant interruption in his real career. One U.C.L.A. physicist, for example, contends that "a professor who gets three or four men through to their Ph.D. via research is achieving far more than he can by lecturing to a hundred freshmen all year." The nation's 1.5 million freshmen are not likely to agree--until they, too, some day need a grant.

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