Podcast: Dr. Mike Munger on Obtaining Research Funding
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Jeanne Hoffman. Welcome to this Kosmos Online podcast! I’m Jeanne Hoffman. Today my topic is obtaining funding for your research, and my guest is Mike Munger. Dr. Munger is a professor at Duke University in the political science and economics departments in the School of Public Policy as well as the director of the joint UNC/Duke Philosophy, politics and economics program. Welcome once again, Dr. Munger!
Mike Munger. It’s great to talk to you Jeanne!
JH. Great to talk to you too! So on the topic of funding, how important is finding your own funding as an academic?
MM. For junior people, it may not be that important as a first step. So spending a lot of extra time trying to find outside funding, unless it’s just a key part of doing your research, you need to travel, you need to do field work, you can probably do without it. However, in this environment where administrators and senior faculty are looking for ways for getting some degrees of freedom in their budget, getting a little more slack in their budget, being able to demonstrate that you can obtain outside funding is a big plus.
So here at Duke, for example, we require that all of our first year graduate students apply for National Science Foundation graduate research fellowships. We go through a process of showing them where the website is, we go through mock proposals, we read them and make suggestions on the proposals, and actually the National Science Foundation is a little bit angry at us, last year they gave out 16, and 3 of them came from Duke, and it is not necessarily because Duke has the best students, although I’m proud of our students, it’s that require all of them to do it and we provide assistance. Well, think how that looks. For one thing, it means you get 3 years of funding from the National Science Foundation without having to do any TA work, you really get a lot of extra time to do your own work. Plus you get summer funding. But on your curriculum vitae, you have this line that says someone else looked at my work and decided they would fund it, I have experience getting outside funding, I have done work that other people said they would spend money on. Now National Science Foundation is the kind of Holy Grail of outside funding because it comes with funding, not just for your research, but depending on the university where you are, 54, 55 percent overhead. What that means is, if I have research that is going to cost $100,000, my university gets $154,000, $100,000 for me, $54,000 for the dean, and this overhead funding makes the little beady eyes of the dean just smile with glee, because for the social sciences, deans don’t actually have to pay any overhead. We have offices, we have computers, and if we need travel money it’s in the grant. It’s not like physics and chemistry. So the National Science Foundation or any of the organizations that provide overhead, if you can show, if you can demonstrate that you have the facility to obtain that kind of funding, that means that your position is partly going to pay for itself. That’s the sort of thing that deans and senior administrators are very excited about. Now, maybe it’s unfortunate that it’s come to that, the ability to find outside funding, and sometimes outside funding is for research, or maybe it’s for a speaker series, but because of the problems that universities are having, both with research positions and providing programming for students, finding outside funding is more important than ever before, and the sooner you start, the sooner you’re going to get better at it. The first few times you apply, you may not get it. So don’t think of it as a waste of time, think of it as an investment in your future as someone who in a few years is someone who is going to be trying to compete, and it’s very competitive, but you’re going to be trying to compete for that outside funding.
JH. Now let’s say I have a research project that I would like to find funding for. Where should I even start?
MM. Well, your university, depending on if you’re a faculty member, your university is likely to have someone who is in charge with matching up faculty with funding opportunities. Now at Duke, of course, I’m spoiled because we have a lot of people who do that, because that’s one of the things that Duke works very hard on. So if you’re at a university, and you’re a junior person, the university may not offer much support, you’re probably going to have to ask senior colleagues or other junior colleagues about the sort of places they have found funding for their projects.
The thing is, it seems like a waste of time, it may take you several days to make any progress at all about finding a possible funding source. You might make phone calls to private organizations, to foundations, and say this is the sort of thing I’m interested in working on and a lot of times if you get in touch with a program officer, they may say well we don’t fund that, but I’ll tell you what we do fund, we fund this, we fund this other thing. It’s interesting that one of the key variables that explains funding in foundations, or even some of the large things like the National Science Foundation, is have you had a phone conversation with one of the program officers? And it seems like cheating, but it’s not. The program officers would like to get more good proposals that they can fund. So if you call them up and say, here’s what I’m thinking about, they’ll actually tell you, they really will, here’s the sort of thing that you might put more of, or they’ll actually give you comments. So my colleague, Michael Gillespie and I raised a little over $4 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and we actually traveled to Washington twice, this was a challenge grant, it was a matching grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, we sat for hours and talked to the program officers before we even started writing the grant and they knew us, they knew we were serious, and we were able to put things in the proposal that we knew they were looking for.
So let me emphasize, it seems like cheating, it’s not. Program officers like to get calls from you, and even if they might not fund the project that you have in mind now, maybe they’ll fund something in the future, so don’t be afraid to call them up and say this is the sort of research I’m looking at, I wonder if this is the sort of thing you guys support.
JH. And what sort of advice would you give an academic in shifting from academic writing to grant writing? Because they’re very different forms of writing.
MM. Here’s the big mistake…I actually give a lecture called “How Not to Fail in Giving Funding” because the unfortunate thing is most proposals are so bad is that all you have to do is avoid the giant FAIL mistakes and you’ll have a pretty decent chance of getting funding. This is the image people have in mind of the people who are going to read your grant proposal: its 10 in the morning, I get up to get a fresh cup of tea, the sun is streaming in my office window, and I sit down with your proposal and I spend an hour and a half reading it. OK, that never happens. Here’s the image you should have: its 5:30 in the morning, I’m on an exercise bicycle, I have a stack of 20 of these things, this is the only time I’m going to get to exercise all day, because from 7 until 7 I’m going to be in a room arguing about these proposals, and I pick up your proposal and I hate you. I want to find a reason why this proposal should not be funded. So it’s not clear, you don’t state the problem very clearly, you don’t tell me why you need the money, you don’t tell me what you’re going to do with it, 3 minutes, I’m done. You’ve got 3 minutes to show me sitting on that exercise bicycle, in the dark, cursing live, that there’s some reason I should fund your proposal, and the easiest way to do that is to make it easy for me. You need to tell me if it’s any sort of empirical research what is your dependent variable? What is the data that you’re going to get?
What theory are you working on? What are the alternative hypotheses that might explain the thing that you’re looking for? Now in other fields, those questions might be different. But before you send in a grant proposal ask yourself, what questions would I want answered before I funded a grant proposal?
And so that, I think, is the key answer to your question. How do I make the shift? A lot of times there are committees that you could be on as a graduate student or a junior faculty member where you get to evaluate grant proposals. Try to get on one of those committees. It seems like a waste of time, but it’s a tremendous advantage. I myself when I was pretty young was appointed to the National Science Foundation panel in Political Science that looked at these proposals, and we would look at 60 or 70 of these things and fund 3. But of the 60 or 70, 50 we can throw right out the window because we read them, and here’s what they asked for: please give me money so I can think about this problem. Nobody will give you money to think about the problem. What they will give you money for is proposals that are clear. In definitive, here is what I’m going to do. Here’s the data, here’s the theory I’m going to use.
Here’s the dependent variable, here’s the theory I’m trying to explain, here are the deliverables. So something like 10 or 20 percent of proposals have any chance of getting funded. It’s not that these people didn’t work on the other ones, it’s that they wrote it as an academic paper, instead of a means to an end. So if you can find a way to get on committees that evaluate these proposals, your ability to write proposals will get better immediately.
JH. Now aside from writing proposals for grants, what other funding options do I have?
MM. Well, a lot of universities have seed money, or travel money internally, and the funny thing is, they have these, but they don’t necessarily advertise them. So ask questions. Furthermore, the National Science Foundation, and you said aside from grants, but maybe this is just aside from grant opportunities you usually think about, the National Science Foundation has an economics and political science directorate but they also have interdisciplinary groups that are on polar sciences, they’re always looking for proposals from polar sciences. Well, all you would have to do is submit a proposal to that, and meet the interdisciplinary requirements. So think creatively about the questions that you’re talking about, and ask questions about other funding sources rather than just assuming that the first answer that you get, what funding sources are available, and the person gives you three, well that’s not the right answer. There are another two or three, and it may take you a day or two to find them. But spending a day or two and finding a place that is likely to fund what you want is worth the time, because you’re going to spend weeks writing this proposal.
JH. Now once I get funded, you talked about overhead before and how some grants automatically give overhead. If I write a grant for $100,000 let’s say, is the money all mine after I give it, or do I have to turn it over to the department?
MM. There are several different kinds of grants. One is a grant from a government organization and that can only go to educational units. So that’s going to go to the department or university, and you’re going to have to work with development and accounting people to get access to it. Another kind is ones that come from nonprofit organizations and those often are obliged by tax law only to make grants to other nonprofit organizations. So again, it’s going to go to your department or university. A big mistake would be for you to try to go around the development people or the accounting people in your department and talk to the foundation or other granting agency directly. If you’re a tenure track professor, arrange a meeting with the development office. Arrange a meeting with the person in your department who is in charge of grant funding and talk to them about the process. So many faculty get blindsided by the fact that there are extra forms or extra hoops they have to jump through. Furthermore, the deadline that you’re supposed to get things in by to a granting agency, well I think it’s due on January 15th, I’ll finish it on January 14th and submit it, then when I try and do it I found out the university has a 4 day period where I have to get it to them before they can check the budget and make sure that it’s in. well that means I miss it! The university hurries and does it in 2 days, they call the agency and say can we be a day late, and they say no! You spent all this time working on it. So before you get started, meet with the development people, meet with the accounting people in your department, say what’s the process? What’s the timeline? What do I have to have to whom and what forms will I have to fill out? Where I can I find them online?
JH. Now if you have to go through the department, is there any chance that you could write a grant for money, receive the grant, and then none of the money actually goes towards the research?
MM. No, the important thing is to have written the grant specifically, and have written the budget in such a way that you get control over it. So I have never had a problem with that, and I don’t know many people that have had problems with it. Well, I’m going to make one distinction that’s largely…well, there are other types, but there’s two main types of research funding. One is operating, and the other is endowment. Endowment funding goes to the university development office and is invested in an endowment, and then you get a code where you can spend the income from that endowment. And endowments are permanence, and in time it’s quite likely that what the money is spent on is going to be changed by the university administration. So a lot of funders now have become quite a bit more wary about endowment funding and what they’re going to give is operating funding. Operating funding is easy to keep control over. Endowment funding is pretty hard to keep control over. But what a lot of people would like is endowment funding because they’re autonomous then, they can spend it on what they want, whereas with operating funding, you have to spend it on what it’s budgeted for. Still I would advise you to shoot for operating funding because endowment funding is difficult to get and easy to lose control over, whereas with operating funding there is the threat, that if the university spends it in a way other than what you wanted, you just tell the funder and they say OK, we’re just not sending you a check next year, so you have the university in a position where they really can’t take the money away. So using operating means you’re more constrained, but the university is much more constrained.
JH. Do you have any other advice for those seeking funding for research?
MM. Try to get research funding far in advance and for a project that you’d like to be working on in the fairly distant future. The problem is, you can’t get money just to think. So a lot of funders recognize that what you actually do may differ a little bit from what you proposed. So you should think of the proposal as a kind of conjecture. That is, if I were going to do this, here’s how I would do it. And then what the proposal is, is evidence that you’re capable of conceiving and carrying out a complicated research project and the fact that after you get the money maybe you do it slightly differently is not so important.
So people resist writing specific proposals because they might change their mind, maybe they’ll want to do something different. That’s actually less of a problem than you think. What you’re trying to accomplish in the proposal is to establish that you’re capable of doing the research, and if you end up doing something else, OK they’ll trust you.
JH. Thank you once again for joining us!
MM. Thanks so much!
JH. And to download a copy of IHS’s Funding for Grants bibliography, or for more advice, or for more podcasts, visit kosmosonline.org, connecting the network of liberty advancing academics, and this is Jeanne Hoffman, signing off.