Myshkin2011

so does anyone have any new information regarding funding status for continuing fellows?

seriously, they deserve a big thanks from everybody who gets grants... maybe someone could write a group letter or an editorial or something.

lol! it would suck being in Hawaii -- i'm impressed you haven't lost your sense of humor. i wish they would have sent initial notifications by e-mail, then followed up by post later. if anyone breaks down and asks for a response by e-mail, give us your thoughts on how they calculated funding...

<<sigh>>... endless....

did she say "will be" or "were already sent out...?"

It's getting close to the end of the day. Has anyone heard anything. The wording "notification letters will be sent" that Olympia reported TG using kinda makes me think it would be by post.

i am in olympia's camp for the analysis. i think it's hopeful for anyone whose project was forwarded. actually, i beg to differ, though, about anthropology. it's a diverse field, but many anthropological projects are strongly humanities oriented. for the most part, cultural anthropology's natural allies are history and area studies, i.e., literature departments, not sociology or poli sci or economics.

I know what you mean about narrowing the disciplines not necessarily bringing down the pool to 80, but remember that Poli Sci got 5 extra points this year. If they cut the pool beyond the disciplines, the only way to do it would be to base it on scores. It would be too much work and too random to try to go through all those applications in such a short time. I still think it is more likely that they started by looking through the pool, discussing it, and then coming up with a number that would fund the areas of inqury Mellon wanted to fund. Anyway, you guys let me know what you hear tomorrow. I suspect we'll know soon. quote name='Mooshel' timestamp='1310941251' post='262836'] this all sounds reasonable. but it could have played out in other ways as well. for instance, Mellon may have come up with the 80 fellowships number based on the amount of money they had ready and available to commit to the project. from there they may have asked IIE to review all fellowships that would have been awarded by DOE (and that fit Mellon's discipline criteria) and to choose 80 for funding. So, IIE needs to take the 130 students nominated by DOE and start narrowing the pool. The first cuts, i imagine, would be any application from a disciplines outside of Mellon's funding priority. okay, that is bound to narrow the pool, but i'm not sure you could narrow it enough this way. so, i guess what i'm saying is that there may be competition between eligible applications.

sounds to me like cash-flow problems. you'll get the money, but it will be late. i suppose you might ask your department if they can help with some kind of short-term loan if things get really tight.

let's put ourselves in their shoes. you have two weeks to award 80 fellowships, which sounds about like the right number because 3.16 million (from the press release) divided by 80 comes out to about the average fellowship award of $40,000 (from last year's awards). how did Mellon come up with the number 80? they had someone look through the list of nominated students. poli sci got five extra points this year, so there were a disproportionate number of poli sci people compared to previous years. they cut those. then they probably cut economics and sociology. anthropology and geography would be harder to filter -- maybe they just took the whole bunch. they wound up with about 80 people. then they requested those people's applications. now, in my opinion, you aren't going to go back through and re-vet those applications because they have already been vetted. it would be a waste of time and money to do so, and would seem unfair. you probably requested applications mainly for reporting and administrative purposes. you are just going to give awards to those 80 people. if for some reason you wind up with too many (84 or 85 instead of 80), you will probably try to reduce all the grants by a little or come up with another 100k instead of cutting them, but if necessary you might drop off some of the lowest points scores or take a closer look at a couple projects to see if they really fit the Mellon criteria. but in principle, i think if you're project has been asked for by IIE, i think you are more or less slated to be funded. now. in fact, it's just as likely that after you run the totals on your 80 people, you wind up with a number slightly less than 3.16 million...

Thanks for posting this. I was inspired by you to try writing IIE, out of curiosity more than anything else. I'll let you know how it goes. Well, as you say, at least this response has the benefit of clarity. I imagine they decided to do it this way for expediency, but I wonder if they know how fuzzy the lines are in practice.

My score was 100, including five bonus points. My application was not "selected" for forwarding to IIE. My topic is anthropology/history. Who know. Seems capricious.

Thanks for the info. That makes sense, but suggests to me that there may be budget cuts. If they had just decided "no cuts," then we should probably have heard already. However, I'm still optimistic, partly because of what Lisarog posted. It's still quite possible that the budget was not cut significantly but for administrative reasons it takes a long time to sort out exactly how many grants they can give after such a late budget. They probably have to wait until the report to Congress by the May 15 deadline to make any firm decisions. So the earliest we could hear is the end of next week, but I'm now banking on the end of the month.

that's good news, Lisarog. again, as i understand it, the only thing written into law are significant general cuts ($348 m?) to higher education. there is certainly nothing in the law about specific cuts to Title VI/Fulbright-Hays.

Laobaixing, have you heard that they have identified specific cuts? It's actually unclear from what I've read in articles shared by Lisarog and others how the cuts in higher education will be distributed. No specific cuts to FB Hays were actually mandated by law. See this link, posted by others previously:My linkhttp://www.nhalliance.org/news/white-house-congress-reach-deal-on-fy-2011-funding~print.shtml Here is the relevant text: "The FY 2011 levels for NEH and NHPRC are specified in the text of the legislation. However, in many instances, the only confirmation of a reduction comes from a list posted Tuesday by House Appropriations Committee Chairman Harold Rodgers (R/KY). This is true of the Title VI and Teaching American History programs, which are both sub-accounts within the Department of Education. Federal agencies will have thirty days, following enactment of the bill, to report back to Congress with a plan to implement revised FY11 spending levels, and will generally have broad discretion in allocating funds." As I understand it, that's why it's so important to write letters to Congress and DoE. It might actually help.