Federal Funding of Social Work Research: High Hopes or Sour Grapes?

While federal funding may provide important support for academic research, we need to be wary of it becoming the “standard” for success in academia and beyond. We need to do so for several reasons: 1) Setting federal funding as a key benchmark or evaluative criteria of faculty research serves to narrow rather than widen the scope of social work research activities. 2) Federal research funding is largely determined by the priorities set by Presidential administrations. Given the changing nature of political administrations and their priorities and fact that social work not only addresses complex social problems but often socially and politically controversial ones, we need to raise questions and be careful about the potential for academic social work research becoming dependent on funding sources that may not be congruent with the priorities of the profession. 3)The encouragement of federal research projects serves in many respects as a threat to faculty autonomy and academic freedom. It does this in several ways, by discouraging new faculty from pursuing their ideas freely but instead within the scope of what will receive federal support and by discouraging doctoral students from pursuing certain lines of research because either it will be more difficult to receive funding for their research or because they lack mentors in the department. 4) The trend toward federally supported research threatens to turn research into an avenue of departmental fundraising. The faculty research as department fundraising model is problematic on the grounds it may lead to confusion of values, goals, and objectives and in the process serve as a corrupting force in research. 5) Social work academia, overall, is not well positioned to successfully obtain federal funding on a wide-scale basis and indeed one might argue that moving in mass toward viewing federal funded research as a standard benchmark is irrational How should academic social work think about the implications and effects of the governmental funding of research? Given the tiny probability of grant success outside the top 20 or so schools, is the NIH as a source of funding even broadly relevant to social work research? Placed in the historical context of government funding of academic research, this critical analysis identifies the complexities and implications of schools of social work pursuing federal grants for research. Schools of social work with particular organizational characteristics are better able to compete for federal grants incurring lower opportunity costs than others. The low probability of grant success for most schools, the organizational adaptations needed for success, and the narrow epistemology of many funding programs calls into question whether federal funding of research should be considered the sine qua non for academic social work. This Roundtable will discuss the implications of these broader policy and organizational issues for schools of social work seeking to develop or enhance their funded research programs.