I just wrote a minigrant for $858 to cover flight and hotel costs for a speaker. After creating a budget, I composed a few hundred words to justify the choice of speaker and the validity of the event, explaining to an audience outside of my field and possibly outside of academia why one invites speakers from other institutions to share their expertise. My speaker is a full professor and department chair at a major research institution. The individual is a noted scholar in my field. The person’s appropriateness as a speaker is not in the slightest doubt.
In the past, the $858 would have come out of a departmental speaker budget. I would not have to spend the afternoon explaining why the event was being held and who the person was or creating documentation to prove I really had looked up and compared flight costs. But that was how I spent a lot of time on a day that would otherwise have been dedicated to research and teaching.
I have been a professor for many years, and before that I was a graduate student with a teaching role. I have written many small internal grants. Initially, it was only one every couple of years, for special activities like summer research travel. Now almost every routine activity—such as travel to a conference, inviting a speaker, or ensuring that the library has the books students need for standard courses—requires a minigrant. The five-year curriculum vita I recently prepared listed ten of these grants in a category I now call “Selected Internal Funding.” A complete list would have crowded the document, since funding requests for everyday operations are needed more and more often as departmental budgets shrink.
I have never been turned down for a funding request. I surmise that the institution funds all legitimate proposals. Again, these grants are for amounts that once would have been in a budget controlled by department chairs or deans. These chairs or deans would have authorized expenditures as part of program development, and they would have been able to decide what activities to prioritize because they would have had more than a glancing familiarity with the field. The funding would not have been just for me or my projects but for us and ours.
When I mention the time and energy that goes into writing and administering each minigrant, some faculty colleagues say they have given up writing them entirely and apply only for major external grants. I am also a good writer of these, but major grants, at least in the fields I work in, do not fund everyday operations—and by major grants I mean grants from national research organizations like the National Endowment for the Humanities or the American Council of Learned Societies. I do not mean fundraising. Like many of us, I also lobby civic organizations to support campus projects, but such fundraising covers different kinds of activities than do research grants submitted to the Guggenheim Foundation.
The minigrants address needs not covered by other mechanisms. That is why I continue to apply. I have had wealthier colleagues who, to save time for research, dispensed with the minigrants and supported university activities with personal funds. One took a consulting gig rather than write a minigrant, pointing out that it would take him five hours to write and then administer a minigrant for $750 but that he could raise $750 in three hours of consulting. Some have endowed professorships that afford them regular funding for research travel, materials, and symposia—funding that in the past would have been more widely available. Now we compete for those professorships, and those who do not get them then compete for minigrants.
My university’s research office has suggested that applying for minigrants helps us to reflect and articulate our research programs to ourselves. It doesn’t. Writing a book proposal or a major external grant can do that, just as updating and reformatting a vita can help rethink a career trajectory. But explaining basic things like why we go to conferences or, as I did for one minigrant, why professors read books, does not help me clarify my ideas. It might help explain what I am doing to an uninformed auditor. But far from helping me think about my work, this kind of writing has a negative effect on my scholarly life.
I have also been told that competition for minigrants in lieu of allocation of regular departmental funding reduces the problem of “siloing,” or the lack of communication about research among discrete units. The opposite is true. The atmosphere of scarcity reduces our field of vision, decimates departments, and leaves researchers scrambling. Some administrators think of interdisciplinarity as a way to maximize the use of resources and reduce costs, but anyone who has done interdisciplinary work knows that if we are serious about it, we must strengthen, not weaken, the disciplines.
The formulas for the minigrants typically imitate those of major grants in the sciences, as does the idea that everything done should be grant-funded. But in the sciences, people spend as much as half of their work time applying for the funds they need to do their jobs. Rather than address that impractical situation, universities now replicate it at every level. The exercise seems particularly absurd when we are asked by our university to defend our jobs or to explain that conducting research is part of our contract with our employers.
What is happening here? Every time there is a new, allegedly competitive, centralized internal funding opportunity, it is presented as new funding intended to help us, yet simultaneously, money disappears from regular departmental budgets and the regular library budget. A central committee reviews all the proposals, individual units across campus lose autonomy, and the university says it has reduced “siloing.” In some cases, the more centralized funding process can be fairer since there are always people involved who do not know the applicants. But overall, the change seems to be about a reduction in shared governance.
Every minigrant application, in other words, is a symptom of a department without sufficient budget or, as is the case for many of my applications, a library without materials. When departments do not have budgets for research and libraries do not have them for materials, and faculty members instead apply for funding to a committee in academic affairs or elsewhere, that committee has taken over functions that multiple academic departments, librarians, senate committees, and others would have shared in the past. This is a concentration of power in a rather faceless group.
At the same time, the minigrants support my research and teaching in a way departmental funding would likely not. My wide-ranging department has other academic interests, priorities that college leadership supports. So, my collaborators are individuals in other units. By entering a university-wide competition we can fund research and other academic activities for ourselves and our students. I feel fortunate. I know the minigrant programs exist in part to support faculty members with my precise situation, and I know that administrators have worked hard to make this funding available to people like me. But it is still an unwieldy way to do business.
This situation in which I must rely on minigrants is the result of another cost-cutting practice, the consolidation of units, which places more and more scholars in departments focused on projects far from their own and where fields with PhD programs use most of the funding allocated to a unit that also has programs granting only the BA. Yet at many institutions the role of the department chair has been reduced to that of a supervisor rather than an intellectual leader. To give an extreme example, if your chair has a background in higher education management rather than a research program in your discipline, a committee of research faculty in other disciplines may be better qualified to evaluate your symposium proposal than is that chair or director.
Universities now offer minigrants in lieu of regular funding in the same way they use adjunct and other contingent faculty positions to replace tenure-track lines. Endowed professorships also serve this function. These phenomena—the proliferation of professorships for some research faculty and minigrants for all, in the context of an adjunctification so widespread that newer faculty aspire not to tenure-track jobs but to multiyear instructorships—must be understood together.
It still seems clear that universities should restore departmental budgets for routine scholarly activities that are central to university education, for undergraduate students as much as for everyone else. I would like to say that this would increase the use of decentralized academic expertise, which would in turn increase the efficiency of the overall system, and that it would reduce the excessive administrative labor of the many, many scholars in my position.
Ostensibly, such a restoration of funding would mean a significant redistribution of power. Yet to propose such a remedy presupposes departments that are still robust and whole, as well as the existence of strong interdisciplinary programs. I am concerned that in the current panorama of program reduction, the withdrawal of opportunities for minigrants would only further marginalize those of us not in the few fields the university can still afford to support fully. Indeed, such restoration might imply rethinking the structure of whole schools and colleges, because it is tenure-track hires we need to recover, not just activities funding. The dismantling of the entire academic world in which departments had adequate funding for regular scholarly activity has been going on for decades, and we have been in emergency-response mode for so long.
Even so, stable, decentralized funding for routine scholarly activities would be a meaningful step toward the restoration of programs. It would be so because more stable funding would restore much faculty research and teaching time. Beyond that, it would signify an institutional commitment to the programs. Support for special projects of individual researchers is wonderful. But it should not have to function as a substitute for longer-term commitments to programs and disciplines.
Disclaimer: I have received minigrants in several categories from all of the institutions where I have taught and from several civic organizations and professional associations. Details on the conditions and administration of each minigrant have differed. In the interest of conciseness, I do not distinguish among them here. I am grateful for every one.
Leslie Bary teaches Spanish and Latin American studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and writes on modern Spanish American and Luso-Brazilian literature. Her translation of Peruvian surrealist César Moro’s The Equestrian Turtle and Other Poems (Cardboard House Press) and her article “From Angola with Love: Activism, Academics, and the Abolitionist Future” (Stanford Humanities Center) appeared in 2025.