What's in a Name?

Since August, I've been working in our university's external grants office. I've seen the effort that both the faculty and our office put into grant proposals. Research is done to prove a need for their project. Seminars are attended to learn how to write a budget. Draft after draft is edited and rewritten. The campus is scoured to hunt down everyone who might have a stake in the project and get their signed approval. All of this is done with the pressure of knowing that there is only so much money and only a chance that this project will even be approved. I've submitted a social science proposal to a hard sciences funder. I know what it is like to worry that they just won't understand why my project should be important to them.

Like every other faculty member who has ever applied for an NSF grant Hillary Anger Elfenbein went through this too. She was also fortunate enough to go through the elation and relief of being funded. What she didn't realize was that Congress was going to see her project title, Accuracy in the cross-cultural understanding of others' emotions, and consider it silly. The merit of her project was brought before the House of Representatives on Wednesday.

So much of academia functions on peer review, but Congress can throw it all out the window and judge these projects by their titles? I understand that taxpayer monies fund NSF and that it is a government grant, but if Congress wants to have some oversight and involvement, their appropriate role would be to evaluate and asses the standards that NSF uses to make their decisions. John Campbell's response that these projects are, "raiding Social Security funds," is what I find silly. The government spends a lot of money on a lot of things, education and research are not the standards I want to cut. The time spent by Congress to review her proposal after it was already approved by NSF and after military officials commended it for the potential uses by soldiers in Iraq , was also funded by tax payers. Does that time, "rise to the standard of requiring expenditures of taxpayer funds in a time of deficits?"