With the availability of academic funding drying up, academics are increasingly confronted with the difficult task of navigating funding sources. For the humanities and social sciences, funding is especially difficult to find as the marketability of different disciplines’ research is limited.
In this climate, a commitment to academic integrity is essential to maintaining the high standards of this University.
Researchers must commit themselves to engaging with the complexity of their object of study. While grants and foundations may outline specific research objects, the researcher is bound by the nature of their study to examine the place of objects within the wider context. Studying political extremism, for example, cannot be limited to studying Islamic extremism as this plays into the construction of an Islamic other. Political extremism manifests in multiple forms, across racial lines. As such, the study of extremism must both contextualize the operation of political extremism and engage with the comparative dimensions of political extremism.
This commitment to contextuality and comparative analysis exists for both ethical and intellectual reasons. On the ethical level, enabling a funding source to alter the nature of research constitutes a conflict of interest. At the point at which a funding provider could state within the study of political extremism that study should be restricted to Islamic extremism and ignore the manifestations of white nationalistic extremism, the funding provider has unfairly asked the researcher to alter the nature of their research.
Moreover, allowing grants and foundations to shape the nature of research will alter the type of research being produced. Given the growing power of corporations and wealthy individuals in dictating the structure of political discourse, allowing money to shape the research direction results in the production of knowledge to legitimate an already held opinion or viewpoint of a specific organization. Such an arrangement already exists — looking at you, consulting groups and unscrupulous think tanks like the Heritage Foundation — and therefore should not be expanded to the University.
On an intellectual level, allowing a funding source to significantly alter the nature of study results in lower quality work. The best academic work in the social science and humanities commits to contextuality. Understanding an object of study cannot simply come from analysis of the object as the object is always situated within a complex context, determined by competing political, economic, cultural and social forces.
Committing to radical contextuality may not always involve the stated object of study, but instead may require detours to understand how the object of study has come into its place in the social formation.
Contextuality is the means by which the complexity of a topic is understood. If a funding provider eschews this commitment, then academics, seeking to further the great debates of our time, must look elsewhere.
