Universities: The Fine Art of Grantsmanship

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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.