It’s grant rejection time again for far too many Australian researchers. Many will have to jump straight on the application treadmill again, only to find out in 12 months’ time that it too was unsuccessful.
The problems with the ARC (and NHMRC) grant mills are numerous and well documented. I won’t go through them all again, but have a look at these blog posts by ARC Tracker, Shane Huntington and Jasmine Janes as examples.
Like many researchers, I’ve just received yet another ARC rejection – every one of my ARC applications, on top of all my other non-ARC rejections. The imposter syndrome gets worse each time, even though I’m fully aware how miniscule the chances of success are. Over my 13 year career of applying for research grants, I now have an overall personal grant success rate of less than 5% and I need to rethink my future.
Like many researchers, I spend months of wasted effort crafting an excellent proposal for valuable needed research that ticks all the boxes, strategically wordsmith to say ‘all the right things’, receive (mostly) very positive reviews, only to find out the expert panel chucked it in the bin on a whim. This paper on NHMRC applications estimates that researchers spend around 40% of their research workload allocation on one single grant application that is most likely going to be unsuccessful. Unsustainable.
As rejectees announce their rejections, the well-meaning commiserations and comments from others are kind and thoughtful – but also depressing. Yes, we know it’s a lottery. Yes, we know success is all about government strategy and industry priorities, not actual research quality. Yes, we know that too many excellent researchers miss out on grant funding every year. Yes, we know we shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves – it’s not us, it’s them.
But we cannot let this explain away the anguish and stress that researchers are forced to cope with for the better part of each year.
It’s easy to point out how we can fix the situation. More grants, more funding, shorter applications, more equitable review processes… It’s not so easy to actually fix it.
In the meantime, we CAN do something about the mental health impacts on researchers. This isn’t talked about enough, perhaps because we don’t want to discount the successes, or because mental health is still an awkward topic in academia. But we can celebrate the successes while also acknowledging the inherent biases and disparities in the system that need to change.
All grant rejections bite, but in my experience the ARCs, and especially DECRAs, are the nastiest, mostly because of the disproportionate effort required for the outcome and impacts. I lost both my DECRA attempts, and they broke me more than any other grant application I’ve applied for. Now racking up the DP rejections, I am quickly losing energy to keep applying.
It’s not the rejection itself, it’s the process and narratives around the applications that hurt the most – the damaging prestige narrative, the pressure to get a DECRA so you can win a permanent academic job, the pressure to get DPs so you can get a reprieve from the teaching overload or get promotion etc., the competitiveness it creates among colleagues and friends applying in the same round, and the obvious professional retaliation you experience when you don’t win any funding.
I’m not aware of any data quantifying these wellbeing effects, but the big ARC/NHMRC grant rounds take up more time AND expect researchers to put more on the line, personally and professionally, than most other grant applications.
The mental and emotional toll is obscenely disproportionate to the outcomes. The time taken to write or revise, the personal and career sacrifices, the inequity and unfairness that we see in other applications and successes, the gaslighting ‘superstar’ narrative.
The narrative around ARC grants has led us to believe that only the ‘most excellent’ ‘superstar’ applicants get the grants…but we know that’s not true. We’re all superstars, we’re all excellent researchers. If you can produce an ARC application in full, you are a superstar, regardless of whether you win it. By promoting the damaging prestige narrative we’re implicit in gaslighting the next generation of researchers to believe they’re not good enough.
Academic institutions have a duty of care to researchers. We’re forced to apply for these grants to get jobs, get promoted, get permanency, provide jobs and scholarships for other academics and students, be taken seriously, pay for our time to do actual research… We’re forced to keep running on the treadmill until we get lucky.
Here are a few things (there are probably more) I think institutions can do better to support an equitable and less stressful experience for researchers:
Lose the damaging prestige narrative. Be honest about it being a dystopian lottery and celebrate and promote the staff that lose along with the staff that win.
Be more transparent and fair about the internal support promised to each applicant.
Provide more post-outcome support for rejectees. Check in with them to see how they’re going, provide extra support for them to reapply in future rounds.
Provide in-house academic counselling support, especially for EMCRs. Someone similar to a career advisor, who can help find options to get out of a research or career rut, change research directions, develop career strategies, or find new pathways for collaboration and research if your current path isn’t working out for you.
Create a constructive public discourse around the effects of constant rejection on academic mental health and wellbeing. Normalise talking about constructive ways to help excellent researchers keep being excellent, regardless of funding successes.
© Manu Saunders 2023