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This is a time of year (perversely, this year of all years) when many scholars are learning that their work did NOT receive fellowship funding from @NEHgov etc, or that they were NOT elected to positions in various scholarly orgs. So a quick thread, in case any find it helpful:
Almost three years ago to the day, while in a hospital anteroom waiting to be called in with my wife for an ultrasound for our first child, I learned that a fellowship application I'd submitted to @NEHgov (and on which I'd naively been pinning lots of hope) had been rejected.
It was a time in my life when I was feeling rather down about the trajectory of my work and career in #academia more broadly, so the rejection by @NEHgov hit me like a ton of bricks.
Of course, on an intellectual level, I was aware that the number of apps that @NEHgov received compared to the number of fellowships they had funding to allot made it so vanishingly unlikely to win one that it was wrong (even hubristic) to take rejection personally.
Yet it's one thing to know that, another thing to feel it.
Also, one of the virtues of orgs like @NEHgov is that they stand somewhat – if admittedly only somewhat – apart from the attenuating economy of self-dealing, self-satisfaction, transactional reciprocity, and unwarranted prestige that can so mark the university ecosystem.
In my experience, in other words, the whole structure of haves and have-nots that characterizes modern university life grafts less seamlessly onto the recipients and not-recipients of @NEHgov fellowships on a yearly basis than it does in many other scholarly precincts.
BUT that can make rejection by @NEHgov feel like even *more* of a damningly authoritative indictment of the value of one’s work than failure to place a journal article in a given venue or to land a particular (or any) job, even though the latter especially matters much more.
So, for all those reasons and others, the rejection from @NEHgov again hit me hard, and when I received the anonymous reviews of my rejected proposal three days after Christmas, that feeling was not assuaged!
More than one reviewer noted they were thoroughly “unconvinced” about my project’s “significance”, and one also took me very much to task for failing to cite (in a 1-pg prospective bibliography!) a 20-yr-old scholarly book that I still maintain is wholly irrelevant to my project.
So I was bummed, and it took me longer than I care to admit to pull myself out of the funk into which it threw me. Still, later the following spring of 2018, I decided on a kind of whim to resubmit a funding proposal *for the same project* to @NEHgov ...
... And this time I came to be notified later the following December that I had won not one but TWO fellowships for the same project, from the same funding body in @NEHgov, for which I’d been rejected just the year earlier. https://www.montclair.edu/english/2018/12/13/professor-awarded-neh-fellowship/
This time around, one of the anonymous reviewers even kindly wrote that “If we don't fund Miller's project, we should shudder the shop and seek therapy.” And again, this was all for the *exact same project* for which I’d applied and been rejected for funding the year prior.
Then just 9 months after that, I received word from @macfound that I’d been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, and with the same project whose funding had been rejected just two years before prominently cited as part of the rationale for that fellowship, too. https://www.macfound.org/fellows/1045/
I’m not really sure what lessons there are to be drawn from all this. I do know that for most people, each new year only brings yet another round of unjust rejections. And if we really care both about those people and the work that they are doing, we need to do better by them.
Of course, another lesson is that the whole academic system, in the face of ever-reduced circumstances, has become perhaps more capricious than at any point in the modern age, such that one should REALLY not view any uni or funding body’s judgment on one's work as authoritative.
And that applies to the “winners” of this system as much as to the not-winners, it goes without saying!
I was the same scholar the day before I won a @macfound fellowship as I was the day after, which should perhaps occasion a little reflection both from those academics who treated me dismissively before and from those who now find themselves treating me much better.
It’s also the case, though, that the story of wining two fellowships from @NEHgov the year after being rejected on the basis of the same project is not quite the story of academic capriciousness that it can sound. Because ...
... while I applied for funding for the same project, I did NOT submit the same application. I revised it heavily in light of even the most hurtful elements of the anonymous reviews that my rejected app had received, and those reviews did make my new application stronger.
So if you were rejected this year for a fellowship from @NEHgov or whatnot, do take them up on the offer to read the anonymous reviews of your project, if they’ll share them with you, as @NEHgov will. It can help—tho also hurt, so bear that in mind. And what's not helpful ignore!
Yet most important of all, I suppose, it’s all a reminder that your work and life more broadly have value that far outstrips the meager (or even not so meager) forms of external valuation that academia can occasionally bestow on a mercurially chosen few.
Lots of work that is celebrated and funded in academia is mercenary, cramped, and hollow–in some ways, as ever, but in other ways novel. Don’t let a world like that determine how you feel about your own work or yourself (which, very crucially, are not one and the same).
And last but not least, winning and not winning, success and unsuccess, come and go, but other things endure: the work you manage to produce in spite of such adversity, for one thing, but definitely not just that.
This past Tuesday I learned that I hadn’t been elected to a position for which I’d been nominated with @MLAnews. This year I published nothing, following hot on the heels of a banner 2019 for me in which I also published nothing. Yet this was how I spent my Thursday:
From being rejected by @NEHgov while awaiting an ultrasound for my first daughter in December 2017 to dragging my (mostly giggling) second daughter behind me through the snow as December 2020 comes to a close. Now *that* is a win. [FINIS]
