LETTER: Politicos could motivate fellowship selection

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by Jane Chance

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Recently I was turned down -- for the sixth year in a row -- for a fellowship leave from Rice's Center for the Study of Cultures.

When I, a former director of the Rice Medieval Studies Program and Workshop, have, for the past year, pressed for reasons why, to enable me to revise the proposal, I have been told that the Advisory Panel must "take into account a host of institutional and contextual factors that shift from year to year," that the Advisory Panel would "be the last to claim our rankings are simply a reflection of the intrinsic merits of the various proposals," that an "element of arbitrariness is unavoidable when it comes to distributing limited resources among people whose interests and talents are often incommensurably different."

And yet Professor Tom Haskell, History, Director of the Center, cannot tell me specifically why my proposal has not been as successful as the three fellowships awarded this year (Susan Macintosh, Anthropology, Alan Grob, English, and David Nirenberg, History), of eight submitted.

Because the Panel, in conjunction with Dean Allen Matusow, does not as a matter of course request letters of recommendation to accompany proposals (as do other fellowship panels and grant agencies throughout the country, indeed the world), their ability to weigh the relative merits of proposals must by definition be limited and subjective.

(None of the members of the panel -- in addition to Professor Haskell, Professor Richard Smith, History, Professor George Marcus, Anthropology, Professor Helena Michie, English and the Study of Women and Gender, along with the Dean of Humanities, Professor Allen Matusow, History -- is a medievalist, for example, which is my field, or specializes in periods earlier than the nineteenth century.)

Despite my rejection by Rice for 1988 for the first volume of the work for which I requested leave -- Medieval Mythography: From Roman North Africa to the School of Chartres, AD 433-1177 , to be published this spring -- I was granted membership at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; for it I have also received a Guggenheim. For the second volume, for which I had requested leave next year, I have just been granted an Honorary Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh-Scotland for two months this summer. I have three books coming out this year, for a grand total of 13 in all.

In response to a recent request for feedback, Tom Haskell states that my proposal was not as "strong" as others, but fails to specify in what way. I wonder if the alleged lack of strength of my proposal, given the refusal of the Center to ask for recommendations from specialists in the field, has anything to do with the political, with the needs of the Rice administration to deny my contributions to the field of medieval studies, and therefore, as a sign of denial, is in support of a kind of retaliation for my having filed a sex discrimination lawsuit against the university.

The decision-making processes at this university, whether for fellowship leave or for endowed chairs or for administrative positions, will never function as vigorous and professionally healthy, that is, equitable and professionally accountable, until they incorporate the appropriate information-gathering resources most other universities and grant agencies require as necessary to obviate the dangers of subjective decision-making.

In a postmodern world, while it is true that all decisions are subjective and all are to some degree political, unless the university takes measures to ensure care in decision-making and procedures, it will increasingly leave itself vulnerable to charges like mine of inequity and, perforce, appear as laughably inadequate and governed by what appears to be an old-boy network.

I am writing to the Thresher to air this issue because, unfortunately for faculty at Rice, there is no other forum I know of available for any kind of freedom of speech to be exercised, without some external direct or indirect control by the corporate authorities that run this university. Thanks to the students for keeping their news medium independent and therefore healthy both financially and journalistically speaking, and for allowing me this opportunity to speak.

Jane Chance

Professor of English

This item appeared in the Opinion section of the March 18, 1994 issue.

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