As I mentioned before, I’m on the committee that distributes research grants to faculty members. This year I have observed a disturbing trend. The number of research projects in the Humanities has dropped off a cliff. We received almost 3 times (!) fewer research projects in the Humanities this year than we had back in 2012. (I wasn’t on the committee in the Fall of 2013, for obvious reasons.)
There is one field of knowledge, however, where the number of research projects has soared. This is the field that has the greatest number of projects than any other. Can you guess what this field is?
Clarissa's Blog 
\\ There is one field of knowledge, however, where the number of research projects has soared.
Is this field in Humanities? Wild guess – Economy? Multiculturalism studies? 🙂
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I don’t know if it’s Humanities. It isn’t part of our college of Arts & Sciences.
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Something connected to politics? Regarding potential threats from Russia, China, etc.
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You think SO well of us. Thank you for that.
But sadly, no.
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Some sort of engineering?
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I wish. At least, engineering is a real discipline.
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Some sort of educational research?
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Things are not that bad (yet). But they are still kind of sad.
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Psychology / sociology?
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I was going to guess digital humanities. But note, here a reviewing committee told me the number of humanities applications had plummeted as well. This is at state level. I wonder what is going on.
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So, this field isn’t in the college of Arts and Sciences, but Clarissa isn’t sure if it should be counted as humanities. So it is probably at least related to humanities or social science, if there’s some ambiguity in the classification.
Social work? Law? Film?
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And we have our winner! 🙂 It’s the school of social work. I am very sad to say that it feels like only the light-weight fields are booming.
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Ok, Business/Management?
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Oops, too late! Just saw the previous comment. 🙂
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Even business is less obnoxious than social work. I have seen these proposals in the past and they are all “Let’s conduct surveys and make wide-reaching conclusions on the basic of the surveys.” Conducting opinion polls should be left to Cosmo end Vogue! They are not scholarship! This upsets me!
OK, back to my own grant proposal now. I started writing it as a response to the sad numbers I heard at this committee.
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My guess is either math or physics. Or genetics.
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In all fairness, biomedical science proposals do constitute the second largest group of proposals.
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I’d say women studies, but I doubt you would complain about too much women studies…
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// I’d say women studies, but I doubt you would complain about too much women studies…
It depends. Had they been about the liberatory potential of burqa. 🙂
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Social sciences!
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Social Work. Because that’s the same at my university too. I did a couple of guest lectures at BSW classes here, and my impression is that it’s Diet Women’s Studies, and that the graduates are groomed to think that the only thing that matters in their work is how good their intentions are.
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“my impression is that it’s Diet Women’s Studies”
Brilliant!
“and that the graduates are groomed to think that the only thing that matters in their work is how good their intentions are”.
That’s pretty much the prevailing ethos in the west today If you believe in the right things (multiculturalism, femininism* etc) and have good intentions, then it doesn’t really matter how things work out in the real world. It seems remarkably similar in structure (if not form) to western marxists in the 20th century.
*I thought it was my own little neologism for the feministing, shakesville brand of feminism but it turns out it’s already taken, grrrrrrr
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My guess, without looking at any of the other comments: military stuff.
As the old song goes
The sun that bids us live is waking
behind the cloud that bids us die
and in the murk fresh minds are making
nwe plans to blow us all sky-high.
Now I’ll go and peep at what others have said.
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