Funded scholarship

There is an increasing emphasis in academe on funded scholarship. Surely, we have been witnessing this within our own disciplines as well as within the structures of our universities. Upper administrations across campuses are interested in fostering funded scholarship as universities face budget cuts and are driven toward fund generating models. How then do we position liberal arts scholarship in this overall university climate that is increasingly dependent on funded research? First, there is indeed an overall need to explore meaningful funding opportunities for scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. Second, and this I believe is a vital point, there is an increasing need for educating funders about what a humanities and social science approach contributes to our knowledge of the world and the value added by these contributions. Some of the most fundamental grand challenges that are facing the world today are challenges that need humanistic and social scientific solutions, not scientific and technical ones. For example, the problem of nuclear weapons proliferation across the globe needs humanities and social science approaches that propose alternative paradigms for understanding and interpreting the world. Such forms of engagement have vital policy implications for the expenditure of federal and state resources, and the ways in which international relations are articulated. Third, scholarship in the liberal arts takes various forms, and some of this work happens effectively without the need for funding. In these instances, university leaders are charged with thinking creatively about the wide-spread implementation of funding as a criterion for evaluating scholarly work. Over the last several decades, the humanities and social sciences have continued to produce valuable work not all of which is funded. This knowledge is vital to the ways in which universities go about evaluating and promoting scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.