The past two decades have seen an increasing emphasis on the importance of university faculty obtaining external funding to support their research efforts. Social work faculty have not been exempt from this pressure, especially within the network of programs housed in so-called research universities. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching currently designates 96 universities as Research Universities--Very High (RU/VH), meaning they annually award at least 20 doctoral degrees a year. These RU/VH institutions particularly value faculty obtaining federal research grants, although the pressure to do so is percolating throughout academe. Of the 203 Council on Social Work Education-accredited MSW programs, 47 are located in RU/VH universities.
Federal research grants are among the most highly sought sources of external funding, for several reasons. One is prestige, in that the competition for such grants is very keen, with a rigorous peer-review process used to exclude all but the highest quality research proposals from being funded. A second reason is that certain forms of important research can only be undertaken with substantial funding. A third factor (perhaps paramount) is that universities are allowed to attach a percentage of the research expenses to the total amount of the grant, expenses called "administrative overhead" or "indirect costs." My own university charges a 47% overhead rate for federally funded research conducted on campus. What this means is that if a research project is budgeted at $100,000 a year, the grant will receive its $100,000 to conduct the research, and the university will receive an additional $47,000 for indirect costs. (Indirect cost recovery rates do vary across funding sources and funding mechanisms.) This overhead is used to help provide the physical plant, personnel, and other resources needed to keep the university up and running. A portion of it is usually divided between the college and department from which the grant originated, and perhaps a small amount is awarded to the principal investigator (PI) of the grant itself, to provide supplemental research funds. In 2009, my university received over $142 million in federal contracts or grants. Thus, the grant overhead income received by research-oriented universities can be a major source of institutional revenue.
In this era of shrinking resources and cutbacks in state and private funding, university administrators increasingly encourage faculty to seek lucrative federal grants. Although hard data are difficult to obtain, it seems as if the profession of social work has been only modestly successful in this regard. The Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR) now publishes a directory of social work grants funded annually by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (see https://htmldbprod.bc.edu/ pls/htmldb/f?p=545:1:2378998554668479::NO:1). A histogram of these social work grants awarded from 1987 to 2009 looks rather like a normal curve, peaking in 2002 with 53 awards and declining yearly to 28 in 2009, about the same number as in 1996 (30 awards). It is by no means an accelerating curve, sloping ever upward. Despite the pressures from within the discipline and those imposed by upper level university administrators, the writing, receipt, and execution of federally funded research grants is not an unalloyed benefit to social work faculty and other personnel involved in preparing grants, and some consequences may be positively harmful. In the following sections I present some possibly deleterious consequences of seeking federal grant funding, which are worthy of consideration by social work faculty contemplating preparing grant applications and by deans and directors who may considering ways to try and motivate their faculty to submit grants.
WRITING GRANTS WASTES RESOURCES
The most obvious waste of resources is in that a majority of federal research grant applications will not be funded. According to Shamir (2010), although the numbers of applications for NIH career development grants increased significantly from 1997 (1,029 applications) to 2007 (3,340 applications), the percentage funded declined from 51% to 31%. In 2009, only 24% of applications for RO1 awards (large research grants) issued by NIH were funded. This contrasts with 34% in 1999. Mid-range awards, funded through the R21 mechanism, were only 14% likely to be funded in 2009, compared with a success rate of 32% in 1999 (see http://report.nih.gov/NIHDatabook/default. aspx?catid=2). In 2009, NIH received over 43,000 grant applications, compared with about 25,000 in 1999. These are grim statistics, particularly for new social work faculty members lacking a track record of success in obtaining federal research grants, yet these new faculty members are under the greatest pressure to obtain grants (via the leverage of the promotion and tenure process).
When too many proposals are submitted, everyone loses. The cost in time, energy and resources--not to mention intangibles like the quality of life and drain on emotional and physical recourses of academic scientists--exceeds the value of the output. (Carlson, 2010, p.A25)
Writing an unfunded proposal represents an enormous squandering of time, energy, talent, and scholarly capital. The amount of person-hours it takes to prepare a quality proposal is difficult to estimate, but it is undoubtedly substantial, numbering perhaps in the hundreds. If the grant is unfunded, this preparation time represents a huge opportunity-cost for the faculty involved, time that might have been more productively devoted to actually writing scholarly articles for publication. One need not generate research grants to have a productive career as an empirical researcher. For example, there are many large-scale publically accessible survey studies of national scope that cry out for attention via secondary data analysis. Clinical data-mining using existing social work agency records represents another fertile opportunity for low-cost yet valuable research, as does conducting single-system research designs and program evaluations using pre- and quasi-experimental group designs.
Here is how one scholar recently characterized the grant application process:
It's time we looked at this system--and its costs: unpaid, anxiety-filled hours upon hours for a single successful grant; scholarship shaped, or misshaped, according to the demands of market-like forces.... All to uphold a distributive system that fosters antagonistic competition and increasing inequality.... Every hour spent working on or worrying about grants is an hour that could be better spent on research (or family life, or civic engagement, or sleep). But every hour not spent on a grant gives a competitive edge to other applicants. (Feinberg, 2010, A23)
FEDERAL RESEARCH GRANT PRIORITIES CAN DISTORT SCIENCE
Having the federal government determine research priorities and preferentially fund grant proposals that are responsive to these priorities may distort the free exchange and natural competition of ideas emerging from social and behavioral scientists themselves. In 1990, the U.S. Congress designated the 1990s as the Decade of the Brain and directed NIH to preferentially fund neuroscience research, to the disadvantage of support for psychosocial research. Twenty years later, it is difficult to ascertain what particular breakthroughs were obtained as a result of this initiative (see http://www.dana.org/news/ cerebrum/detail.aspx?id=25802). Although impressive neuroscience research gains were achieved during this time, many would likely have transpired without this federal initiative. There have been no recent substantive brain-based etiological breakthroughs related to mental disorders, and the development of more effective psychotropic medications has greatly slowed. One cannot help but speculate that this focus on brain-related research resulted in lessened funding for psychosocial research, research which in some cases has found that selected cognitive--behavioral therapies produce positive effects equal to or in some cases superior to those obtained via psychotropic medications, for selected mental health and substance abuse disorders. One consequence of federal research priorities is that
Author: Bruce A. Thyer
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