Universities are striving to make their grant applications as high in quality as possible, avoid wasting time and energy, and run a supportive yet critical internal review process. Here are a few tips on how not to do it.
Administration and organisation
Do everything anonymously and electronically. Do not allow applicants and reviewers to meet, as this may lead to frank and constructive discussion. Allowing applicants to respond to reviewers’ questions or ask for clarification risks giving them a stake in the process, and may lead to them feeling that they have been treated fairly. You want cold, hard feedback, handed down from on high without any distracting explanation.
Give reviewers as much time as possible. There are no drawbacks to allowing reviewers to use up four of the eight weeks between call and deadline. Applicants will just have to write faster.
Be as secretive as possible about reviewers’ identities, their claims to expertise, the criteria for approval to submit, what is required of applicants and the expected state of readiness of applications. These details aren’t important.
Don’t bother with internal outline stages or preliminary reviews. There’s little to be gained in considering ideas at the earliest stage and influencing their development. It’s just as easy to shoot down a near-complete application.
And on no account involve research officers, managers or developers. There are clearly other reasons for employing them than their grant-getting skills.
Reviewers
Give your methodological and ideological prejudices full rein. This is a unique opportunity for you to shape the research agenda: the applicant may be interested in apples, but if you like oranges, insist on oranges. Make sure the application cites your work.
Always ask for “more information on X”, without concerning yourself with word limits or what might make way for more X.
Your successful 1991 application for £750 from the Society of Extremely Specific Studies is still the talk of common rooms across the land. When reviewing applications, make sure you generalise widely and wildly from that triumph to all other funders and disciplines.
Be unfailingly supportive, empathetic and nice. They’ve worked so hard on the application, and who’s to say what stands a chance? Keep your reservations about the aims, feasibility, methods, originality, make-up of the research team and ethical implications to yourself.
Be unfailingly hostile, snide and cynical. Look for things to complain about, in the strongest possible terms, and make it personal. The funding panel will show these worms no mercy; neither should you. You’re only letting your colleagues down if you don’t model your reviewing style on Dragons’ Den.
Details count, so don’t be afraid to concentrate on missing commas or the optimistic price quoted for New York hotel rooms. Take care of these, and the big picture will take care of itself.
Applicants
Start from a position of scepticism and paranoia. All the reviewers have it in for your discipline, your field and you.
Remember: you are the expert in your field. No-one else in your institution or indeed the world is fit to review you. If the reviewers have misunderstood in ways that might damage your chances of success, it’s because they’re idiots. Take no notice.
Focus on those elements of the feedback that irritate you the most, rather than on those most serious for your chances of eventual success.
Having an internal review process means you can dispense with informal discussions with senior colleagues and your institution’s research development staff. No need to go through it all more often than you have to.
Rather than engage with the process, opine loudly that the ‘internal peer review’ agenda is symptomatic of a neo-liberal attack on academic freedom, the commodification of research, the creeping marketisation of higher education, and the malign growth of managerialism and administrative power in universities.
Everyone
Forget that greater self-regulation by each institution will ultimately increase success rates and reduce wasted time and effort. Forget that what you’re trying to do is difficult—administratively, managerially and politically—and let your procedures slide into misuse at the first sign of teething troubles.
Adam Golberg is a research manager at the University of Nottingham and blogs at www.socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk. He writes here in a personal capacity.
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