Grants for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts

The Graham Foundation makes project-based grants to individuals and produces public programs to foster the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society. Architecture and related spatial practices engage a wide range of cultural, social, political, technological, environmental, and aesthetic issues. The foundation is interested in projects that investigate the contemporary condition, expand historical perspectives, or explore the future of architecture and the designed environment. The foundation supports innovative, thought-provoking investigations in architecture; architectural history, theory, and criticism; design; engineering; landscape architecture; urban planning; urban studies; visual arts; and related fields of inquiry. The foundation's interest also extends to work being done in the fine arts, humanities, and sciences that expands the boundaries of thinking about architecture and space. 

Award limit: $20,000
Deadline: September 15, 2013

Read full solicitation.

Education Research Grants

Education Research Grants from the National Center for Education Research (NCER) will consider only applications that address one of the following topics: cognition and student learning; early learning programs and policies; education technology; effective teachers and effective teaching; English learners; improving education systems: policies, organization, management, and leadership; mathematics and science education; postsecondary and adult education; reading and writing; social and behavioral context for academic learning. 

Deadline: September 4, 2013
Award limit: $100,000

Read full solicitation here.

Not Safe For Funding: The NSF and the Economics of Science

Last month, Representative Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, introduced a divisive new bill, the High Quality Research Act, that would change the criteria by which the National Science Foundation evaluates research projects and awards funding. (The N.S.F., with a budget of seven billion dollars, funds roughly twenty per cent of federally supported basic research in American universities.) Currently, proposals are evaluated through a traditional peer-review process, in which scientists and experts with knowledge of the relevant fields evaluate the projects’ “intellectual merits” and “broader impacts.” Peer review is a central tenet of modern academic science, and, according to critics, the new bill threatens to supersede it with politics.

John Holdren, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said last week that “adding Congress as reviewers is a mistake.” Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson warned more forcefully that Representative Smith was “sending a chilling message to the entire scientific community that peer review may always be trumped by political review.” But in a statement, Representative Smith said the draft bill “improves on [the peer-review process] by adding a layer of accountability.” The bill’s new three-point criteria for funding require that a project be “in the interests of the United States to advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare, and to secure the national defense”; solve “problems that are of the utmost importance to society at large”; and not be “duplicative of other research projects being funded by the Foundation or other Federal science agencies.”

Read the full The New Yorker article