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Funding frustrations: Discipline and academic culture
Different fields of study can affect the ease or difficulty of acquiring funds, but it’s not a simple game of STEM vs humanities. There are far more factors at play.
By Rohan Mehra
"I find academic funding in Japan increasingly seeks short-term results, which is limiting. On top of that, it’s becoming even more bureaucratic too."
Regardless of context, doesn’t it always feel like money is a little tight? This is especially true in the world of research, where salaries can often depend more on present and future funding of specific projects than on fixed continuous means. Unsurprisingly, one of the difficulties researchers face in getting funds in the first place will be due to the nature of their research. Is their research likely to spawn the next AI infused, easily monetisable mobile app? It might be an exaggeration to say they’ll be handed a blank cheque. But they’d probably have an easier time attracting funding than if their research was something a bit less solid and more esoteric, right?
“Do non-science subjects, the arts, and humanities, have a harder time competing for funding? I don’t think so, not between each other anyway. I think the size of research grants are just smaller in comparison to the domains of science and engineering,” says Professor Seiji Kumagai from the University of Kyoto in Japan. “For my own projects, rather than rely solely on limited, or limiting, research grants, I also find ways to obtain funding from sources outside the university or typical funding bodies. These include appealing directly to some area of society or even to businesses.”
Professor Kumagai started out studying Buddhist philosophy and has since joined the Kyoto University Institute for the Future of Human Society. There, he is now program director for an ambitious “Moonshot” project under Japan’s Cabinet Office that builds on his earlier studies and incorporates research on mental health and informatics with the aim of improving peace of mind and vitality throughout society.
“In general, humanities researchers apply for small grants, but our project is large, ambitious, and interdisciplinary. So we must demonstrate greater societal impact commensurate with our budget,” says Kumagai. “However, it’s also a long-term undertaking. I find academic funding in Japan increasingly seeks short-term results, which is limiting. On top of that, it’s becoming even more bureaucratic too.”
"My main concern is that Argentina is defunding projects, particularly in social sciences to the detriment of the ‘hard’ sciences. This has necessarily pushed affected researchers to seek funding from foreign organisations, but this is not easy and is not without compromise.”
The words ‘bureaucracy’ and ‘funding’ are undoubtedly synonymous in most peoples’ minds. And while this is probably true to some degree, it does seem to vary between institutions and regions in ways that parallel cultural differences between those institutions and regions too.
“In Japan, grant applications can be quite narrow in focus and work better for the sciences. I applied for funding from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, but could not find a suitable category to use, as they follow conventional disciplines, and my research is interdisciplinary,” says Assistant Professor Gloria Yu Yang from Kyushu University, also in Japan, though much of her research career was spent in the US.
“However, my co-PI and I were introduced to the US based Getty Foundation who do not get many applications from Japan. In fact, ours is one of the few recipients in East Asia. In the US, it helps to be confident and innovative; it’s a virtue to think big and outside the box. In Japan, projects seemingly too broad in scope are regarded with suspicion.”
Professor Yang is an art and architecture historian of modern Japan. She and Anton Schweizer lead a project, “Shared Coasts”, exploring historic exchanges of people, objects and ideas in East Asian coastal regions. The team are in a privileged position to have admin staff dedicated to assisting with, and navigating through, the external and domestic administrative and accounting issues around funding. More often than not, researchers are on their own, which penalises the less experienced.
“I feel funding success in Japan relies heavily on researchers’ notoriety. I studied in the US and was not a member of the academic circles in Japan when I came, which made things harder for me. And in general, humanities are way more difficult than sciences,” says Professor Yang.
“I see a tendency in Japan of evaluating humanities research with instruments derived from the sciences: quantitative indexing, counting citations, and so forth. Yet, domestic funding is the go-to source for most academics as the number of received grants is used as a parameter for university rankings. Most universities push their faculty to apply. This, in a sense, conditions academics to stick within this old-school system. It also overshadows other, often international, sources of funding, such as Getty, who we are unusually lucky to work with.”
This issue of domestic funding, with all the strings attached, dominating, and impeding access to international sources of funding, is in stark contrast to countries such as Argentina, where researchers are finding the opposite situation to be true.
“Javier Milei's new government has frozen funding for 2024, so universities are in a state of emergency. In a context of accelerated inflation they only have budgets to cover the most essential expenses for the next one or two months!” says Professor Gisela Pereyra Doval, an international relations researcher from The National University of Rosario in Santa Fe. “If the budget isn’t fixed, they may go into moratorium and even close down. My main concern is that Argentina is defunding projects, particularly in social sciences to the detriment of the ‘hard’ sciences. This has necessarily pushed affected researchers to seek funding from foreign organisations, but this is not easy and is not without compromise.”
Professor Doval and colleagues are having to quickly explore alternative funding strategies. This could involve stretching their research goals to fit with simpler funding paths. Though her research focus is on Argentine and Brazilian foreign policy and right-wing ideologies, she thinks her group may have to branch out to include projects relating to furthering democracy. There are simply more international foundations that fund democracy related research projects.
“Argentina's national situation breaks my heart. A country without quality higher education, science and technology, is a country that will stagnate developmentally, and will always be a step behind,” says Professor Doval. “I’m lucky it became easier to acquire funding the more my career advanced, and I worked very hard to get to this point in my life. Even though I’ve published in well-known journals and been invited to speak at international institutions, if our academic funding system collapses, everything I have worked for will feel meaningless.”
The issue of research funding will necessarily vary according to local conditions. Many researchers in non-scientific disciplines feel that while funding opportunities do exist, the process of getting to them is often geared toward those from the sciences, a frequent limitation of academic cultures within institutions or national bodies. But in any case, funding will be far harder in regions with volatile political conditions, given then amount of funding that comes from governments. We will explore the impact of ideology and politics on funding in detail next month.