I still imagine scholarship as the solitary vice of the lonely researcher. Much as I did as a graduate student, I spend long days in the stacks, dragging books and journals back to the carrels. I have come to appreciate how important it is to disseminate my conclusions, however, and I am always eager to talk about my work with others. But I find it difficult to imagine a collaborative approach to research, personally, and I am not sure I will ever find myself part of a research team.
Like my elementary school teachers said, I guess I do not play well with others. But this approach clearly works for some people.
In an attempt to encourage more collaborative research, granting agencies emphasize funding opportunities for groups of scholars working together. That is fine, other than the fact that, in many cases, these groups draw on the same funds set aside for individual researchers. So, imagine that $1,000,000 exists with an agency, and this money could, potentially, fund a couple of dozen projects for three years. What happens if a team of eight scholars spoons $250,000 out of the pot off the top, though? Perhaps this is fair, especially if eight people can write a proposal eight times better (or even twice as good, say) as an individual researcher. But, in my experience, there is no reason why the group would have a better idea, and when it comes to assessing a budget it is harder to spot duplications in such a request.
A more serious objection might be that while individual researchers are often prohibited from holding multiple grants from the same agency, there is often no restriction on participating in multiple teams. While someone could get funding from ten different projects, is there really time to work on them, simultaneously?
But, for me, the real problem is assessing the past achievement, or "track record," of a research team and comparing it with the dossier of the individual researcher. How can you score the average of eight resumes, especially when many of the works listed therein are co-authored? How can you be sure not to overvalue any single publication? Moreover, what do you do when some of the team members have underperformed? Do the stars inflate the scores of their weaker colleagues?
I am not advocating two solitudes, by any means, but some thought must be put to preserving fairness in a granting system that could, easily, shift to discriminate further against that lonely figure in the library carrels.
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