Introduction

The lifeblood of scholarly research in the humanities is the competitively awarded fellowship. Frequently used in conjunction with college and university leave programs, fellowships offer partial salary replacement and relief from teaching. In addition, they are measures of national recognition for the scholars who receive them because they are awarded through notoriously competitive processes of peer review.

Fellowships are the main source of research support for scholars in the humanities and the humanistic areas of the social sciences. Scholars in these disciplines do not, for the most part, depend upon project-based research grants to their institutions as do their colleagues in the sciences. As a result, scholars in the humanities do not ordinarily have extramural support for such basic expenses as travel to professional meetings and archives, secretarial assistance, equipment purchase, and so on. Neither do they generate significant indirect cost payments to their institutions.

This is to to say that there is no such support available. The Research Division of the National Endowment for the Humanities, among other agencies, provides support to major projects, but such grants are not the principal mode of funding research and writing in the humanities as they are in the sciences, and the amount of money available for such projects is, as Figure 1 shows, minuscule in any case. Instead, the individual fellowship is the centerpiece of research funding in the humanities.

The significance of fellowships for the humanities is thus very great since their availability speaks so directly to the health of humanistic scholarship generally. To understand them is to understand precisely the situation of the research enterprise in the humanities. The general perception of these fellowships has long been that they distribute as much or more honor as money and that although they are difficult to obtain, the financial support they offer is inadequate to the need.¹ This view of the matter has become especially common in recent years as persistent inflation has appeared to erode the capacity both of fellowship granting institutions and of colleges and universities to provide appropriate support for the research efforts of the best scholars. Despite the perception, however, no systematic data have been available to calibrate it against actual institutional and financial realities.

For example, although those who sponsor national fellowship competitions have long been certain that their own capacity to support humanities scholars had diminished, others have argued that the rise of humanities research centers on campuses and elsewhere has made up the difference and that more, rather than fewer, scholars are being supported more generously than had been the case when the national competitions were the only available source of support. As we shall see, this generalization is demonstrably incorrect. For the moment, however, the point to be emphasized is that there has been a good deal of conventional wisdom about fellowships and research in the humanities, most of it anecdotal and with no basis in evidence.

As one of the major funders of post-doctorate fellowships in the humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) was anxious in the winter of 1990–1991 to understand as fully as possible the national context of its own award programs. The Council was then in the process of considering a number of significant policy changes with respect to its fellowship programs and wanted to make informed decisions. It was immediately apparent that the national situation was both complex and difficult to outline precisely because no one had been collecting the appropriate data. The present report is the result of an effort to collect as much information as possible in order to gauge with some precision the character of fellowship programs in the humanities.

There are two major sources of fellowship funds in this country. First, there are the national competitions, including those of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Humanities Center (NHC), and the American Council of Learned Societies. Then there are the fellowships of the residential humanities centers, of which there are two main sub-categories, those on college and university campuses and those that are housed independently (such as the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Institute for Advanced Study) or are part of the program of major research institutions (such as the Newberry Library or the American Antiquarian Society).

Funds for the national fellowship programs come from many sources. The national programs rely upon their own endowments or, in the case of NEH, an annual appropriation from the Congress. ACLS and NHC have also supplemented their own resources with foundation grants, which are increasingly difficult to obtain for this purpose, and with support from NEH’s Research Division.² The Guggenheim Foundation has a larger endowment than ACLS or NHC and is attempting to increase it with a major fundraising campaign.

The humanities centers also have a variety of sources of support. The centers, whether campus-based or independent, receive at least some assistance, financial or in kind, from the host institution; sometimes that support is quite substantial. In addition, many of them have been able to secure foundation funding, either for endowments or on a term basis. The Rockefeller Foundation, which at one time ran its own program of fellowship support for individuals, has turned in recent years to offering very substantial support to a number of centers with programs in areas of special interest to the Foundation.³ The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which has been the main private funder of the humanities for many years, has also provided significant assistance to ACLS and NHC and a few of the independent centers. Other foundations and some individuals have made smaller, but nonetheless significant contributions to humanities fellowship funding.

This report then represents a compilation of data from all the national competitions and as many of the individual centers as could be identified and responded to our request for information.⁴

Because we had no special funds to support this effort our inquiries were limited to acquiring very basic information for absolutely every fellowship granting program. Nonetheless, we believe that the conclusions of this report illuminate the general situation of humanistic research and reveal much about the shifting nature of funding for such research. The data reported and analyzed here were collected directly from the fellowship granting institutions by ACLS in 1991 and provide information on fellowship awards made between the 1983–84 academic year and the 1990–91 academic year.⁵

The report begins with a discussion of national trends, including data from all fellowship sources. It then turns to a comparison between the national competitions and the humanities centers, which is followed by a discussion of the differences between the campus-based and independent centers. Attention then turns to an examination of the national programs and the differences among them. The report concludes with a summary of its major findings. The data discussed in the text are presented in a variety of graphic formats (see List of Figures).

The National Picture

Since 1983 the number of fellowship seekers in the humanities has risen significantly. In that year more than 5,000 applications were received by the various fellowship granting agencies.⁶ By 1991, the number of applicants was more than 8,000 (see Figure 2). Simultaneously, the number of available fellowship awards also increased from approximately 700 in 1983 to just under 1,100 in 1991 (see Figure 3).⁷ The increase in numbers of awards kept pace with the rising number of applicants, however. As a result, Figure 4 indicates that the ratio of applications to awards, which measures the difficulty that an individual scholar will face in acquiring fellowship support, declined slightly from about 7.75 to 1 in 1983 to just over 7.5 to 1 in 1991.

In dollars, Figure 5 shows that the amount of available fellowship support also increased from less than $12 million in 1983 to just under $18 million in 1991. For individual scholars these data have little meaning, however. The average stipend in 1983 was about $16,000. By 1991, it had barely increased at all (see Figure 6). These are not exactly princely sums, especially when one considers that they must be combined with other sources (usually leave or sabbatical salary or other fellowships) in order to permit a scholar to spend full time on his or her research and writing for a year and that, as noted above, they do not provide any additional assistance with the costs of research and writing, over and above salary replacement.

Unfortunately, these figures do not account for inflation. If inflation is brought into the calculations, as Figure 7 shows, the average stipend actually declined precipitously in value from just about $16,000 in 1983 to only a little more than $10,000 in 1991. Moreover, national expenditures on fellowship stipends also declined significantly when inflation is taken into account. Figure 8 indicates a drop from less than $12 million 1983 dollars to less than $11 million 1983 dollars in 1991.

As the figures show, of course, not all the trends described above were constant or unvarying over the period in question. Nonetheless, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that by 1991, although fellowships in the humanities were more numerous than they had been in 1983, they were just as difficult to win and less valuable in real terms to those who did win them. In addition, total national expenditures on fellowships in absolute dollars declined from 1989–90 to 1990–91, as did the number of available fellowship awards, further damaging the research enterprise in the humanities. In most respects, therefore, the rising importance of fellowships from humanities centers, which is examined in detail below, did not compensate for declining support in other sectors. Nonetheless, despite these discouraging data, humanities scholarship continued to develop, and the number of applicants for fellowships increased steadily over the period.

National Fellowship Competitions
and Humanities Centers Compared

The data described in the previous section provide a broad outline of the recent history of fellowships in the humanities. They conceal, however, the changing relationship between the national competitions and the humanities centers. Figure 9, for example, indicates that humanities centers accounted for an increasing percentage of all fellowship applications between 1983 and 1991. The humanities centers accounted for only about 15% of the total in 1983. By 1991, more than 40% of all fellowship applications were submitted to the centers while the proportion of applications accounted for by the national competitions had declined from 85% to less than 60%. Figure 10 shows that these altered proportions resulted both from sustained growth in applications to humanities centers and the lack of such an increase in applications to the national funders.

A comparable pattern emerges from an examination of Figure 11, which shows the distribution of awards between the two sectors. Seventy percent of the fellowships available in 1983 were offered by the national competitions. By 1991, that percentage had declined to less than 40%. A majority of the fellowship awards available to humanists in the United States, in other words, are now made by humanities centers. Figure 12 presents these data in absolute numbers rather than in percentages.

The growth of the humanities centers is also impressive in dollar terms. As Figure 13 indicates, the humanities centers awarded less than $2,000,000 in 1983. That figure had quadrupled by 1991, when $8,000,000 in fellowship awards originated in humanities centers. The situation of the national programs was quite different, however. Although the amount of money available through the national programs increased in the mid-1980s, it has decreased steadily since 1987, reaching a level in 1991 that was just barely above the 1983 figure of less than $10,000,000.⁸

The obvious result of these changes appears in Figure 14, which indicates the changing distribution of fellowship dollars. More than 80% of the available fellowship dollars in 1983 came from the national competitions. In 1991, that proportion had declined to a bit above 50%. Although the total amount of money available had increased, in other words, both the amount and the proportion of it awarded by major national institutions had declined dramatically.

These changes in the proportions may be usefully compared to data showing the average stipend offered by national competitions and humanities centers. Despite their declining resources, the national competitions have been consistently more generous to individual scholars during the period under consideration. As Figure 15 shows, the average stipend for the national competitions in 1983 was over $18,000 while the comparable figure for the humanities centers (which, it will be remembered, accounted at that time for a smaller proportion of the national fellowship than they would later) was $9,000. By 1991, with the centers achieving an increasingly significant role in the support of post-doctoral research in the humanities, their average stipends had increased by a third to just under $12,000.⁹

The national competitions also achieved an increase in average stipends, even though their total resources were not increasing as rapidly as those of the centers. They increased stipends by about 20% to almost $22,000. They did so, needless to say, by reducing the number of awards that they made. It is, of course, difficult to characterize these data in any simple way since they represent, especially in the case of the centers, an aggregate of decisions that reflect local conditions. On the other hand, the dramatic difference in stipend levels over a decade or so is a fact of great significance. In neither case, it should be noted, has it been possible to increase stipends significantly in the last several years. To the extent that there were important increases in stipends in the early eighties, they have now slowed for all the institutions, and Figure 15 also shows that they have actually declined in the case of the humanities centers.

As we shall see in a moment, most of the campus-based centers particularly spend a considerable proportion of their funds to support local faculty, and although definitive conclusions are difficult to come by, anecdotal evidence suggests that they could afford to keep stipend levels low because their funds were often being used in conjunction with the leave programs of their institutions. In fact, in some cases, it seems certain that the funds supporting humanities centers on campuses were not new funds at all but rather drawn out of existing leave programs. The main point is that as their financial resources increased, the centers collectively chose to support more scholars at lower levels.

In contrast, the national competitions struggled to increase stipends for those scholars they supported while also choosing to support fewer scholars in the aggregate. In any event, the sum of these two sets of decisions and the resources that lie behind them is that a larger and larger percentage of all fellowships in the country have been awarded at the lower stipend levels of the humanities centers rather than at the higher stipend levels of the national competitions.

If the role and levels of support offered by the two groups of fellowship granting institutions were changing, the ease with which scholars might receive support from them was also being transformed. As Figure 16 shows, competition for support from the more generous and prestigious national programs has always been much greater than at the centers. The ratio of applications to awards for the national programs has risen since 1983 when about one in nine applications received support. By 1991, the ratio had risen to almost 11.5 to 1, and preliminary indications are that it will continue to increase as the amount of money available and the number of awards decline and the number of applications either increases or remains constant.¹⁰

The humanities centers reveal a quite different and, in some ways, more encouraging pattern of ratios of applications to awards. About one application in four could expect to receive support in 1983. That ratio has increase, but not nearly so rapidly as for the national programs. In fact, it actually declined from 1987, when it was more than 5.5 to 1, until last year when it was closer to 5 to 1.¹¹

This difference in ratios of applications to awards merits some comment. On the one hand, it is certainly true that the more rapid increase in the ratio for national competitions reflects the slowness of growth in financial resources for those competitions while the slow growth of the ratio for the centers is evidence of the more rapid increase in their resources. On the other hand however, it has always been significantly easier to acquire support from a humanities center than from one of the national competitions. The trend of recent years has thus been to increase the distance between the two sectors rather than to create a distinction that did not exist before.

The foregoing analysis suggests that potential fellowship applicants should not only investigate the particular programs and centers to which they applying. They should also recognize that the greater prestige and financial support provided by the national programs is becoming more and more difficult to acquire, while the lower prestige and lower financial rewards of the humanities centers remains within easier, though by no means comfortable reach. A market model of fellowship awards would predict this result (a higher demand for those awards with higher stipends and greater prestige), but it is also probably true that a too high ratio for the national programs does not increase the “quality” of the awards they make and even discourages some highly qualified candidates from applying.¹² Too low a ratio of applications to awards for the humanities centers, on the other hand, coupled with their much lower stipend levels, can do little to increase their prestige or that of their awardees.

It remains to compare the impact of inflation upon the two sectors of the national fellowship granting apparatus. The results, as Figure 17 shows, are discouraging. In constant dollars, the amount of money available to the national fellowship programs to support humanities fellowships has declined precipitously since 1983. In that year, a bit less than $10 million was available. In 1991, only about $6 million 1983 dollars were available to support national fellowships in the humanities.

In the humanities centers, the picture is better, but still a cause for real concern. In 1983 less than $2 million was available to the centers for fellowship support. In 1991, the amount was significantly greater, almost $5 million 1983 dollars, owing primarily to an increase in the number of centers and significant augmentation of their bases of financial support. On the other hand, the 1991 figure for the humanities centers is lower than the figure for 1990, and preliminary data do not indicate that the difference can be easily or quickly made up. Despite gains in the mid-eighties, in other words, the recent trend is downward, and the corrosive effect of inflation has not been counteracted in the last several years by the capacity of any of the fellowship programs, whether national or based in centers, to increase their resources rapidly enough to keep up.

The same point may be made with respect to average stipend, although in some ways the news here is even more discouraging. In both the centers and the national programs, the buying power of average fellowship stipends has declined since 1983. In constant dollars, Figure 18 shows the average stipend at a center has dipped from about $9,000 in 1983 to about $7,000 in 1991. For the national programs, the more than $18,000 average stipend of 1983 is now only a bit over $13,000 when inflation is taken into account. Thus, not only have the resources of the fellowship granting institutions eroded, the quality of support that they can offer to any individual scholar is also significantly less than it was in 1983.

The situation is hardly one to inspire optimism, and it suggests a coming crisis of serious proportions for scholarship in the humanities, particularly in light of recent developments in the financing of higher education and especially public higher education. Nonetheless, some refinement can be provided for the foregoing data by disaggregating them for the different parts of the community of humanities centers and the major national fellowship programs.

The Campus-Based and
Independent Humanities Centers

Centers for post-doctoral research in the humanities have been in existence for many years. Venerable institutions like the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Institute for Advanced Study are perhaps the most well-known, but they are not alone. Independent research libraries have taken on an increasingly important role in humanistic research and have acquired funds, either through endowments or term grants, to support the presence of visiting scholars for a period as brief as a month and as lengthy as a year.

In addition, residential humanities centers, which vary enormously with respect to resources and stipend levels, have become an increasingly commonplace feature of life on university campuses both because they offer local faculty opportunities for research and intellectual interchange that the normal pattern of teaching and research opportunities does not offer and because many universities have recognized that in the humanities, no less than in the sciences, institutional reputation can be greatly enhanced by “centers of excellence.” Such campus-based centers serve as a focus for local humanities scholars, encourage interdisciplinary exchange and research, and, when funds are available, permit a campus to enrich its intellectual life by attracting distinguished visitors.

From the point of view of the potential fellowship winner, both sorts of opportunities, those based in independent centers and those based on campuses, offer important possibilities for research support beyond those presented by the national competitions whose fellowships are usually “portable” and not tied to the conduct of research and writing in a particular place. Indeed, in some ways these center-based awards are categorically different precisely because they can be taken up by scholars whose personal situations are quite different than those of researchers who, by reason of personal or professional circumstances, either cannot leave their homes to take up an award or must do so in order to conduct research at a distant archive or other research repository.¹³

In any case, as we have already observed, the humanities centers have become an increasingly important component of the national fellowship picture, now accounting for a majority of the dollars as well as a majority of the awards. Within the category of humanities centers, however, significant differences can be identified between those that are based on campuses and those that are independent of university settings. In addition, the campus-based centers are a relatively new phenomenon that merits detailed examination in its own right.

Figures 19 and 20 show that although there has been some fluctuation and a dramatic increase in total numbers since 1983, approximately half of the applications received by centers went to those based on campuses and approximately half to those that were independent of colleges and universities. In most years, the campus-based centers accounted for a slightly larger proportion than the independent centers. Simultaneously, however, the increasing number of awards available from humanities centers has originated disproportionately in the campus-based centers. As Figures 21 and 22 show, although the independent centers offer now, as they did in 1983, a larger proportion of the awards made by centers generally than the campus-based centers do, the gap has narrowed considerably. The campus-based centers offered about 30% of the available awards in 1983; they now offer close to 50%.

If the same data are examined in dollar terms rather than in terms of mere numbers of awards, however, the difference is more dramatic. First, Figure 23 shows that the total available resources have increased steadily for the campus-based centers but have recently declined for the independent centers. Second the long-term trend has been for the campus centers to account for a larger and larger percentage of the total available dollars. In 1983, Figure 24 reveals, they accounted for less than 30% of the total. In 1991, by contrast, they accounted for more than 60%.

A combination of the information on number of awards and available dollars yields a predictable result. Although average stipend at campus centers are now lower than in 1987–88, Figure 25 indicates that they are still significantly higher than they were in 1983. The independent centers, on the other hand, have only been able to maintain stipends at something below the level of 1983.¹⁴

Given the earlier discussion of the impact of inflation on fellowships in the humanities, it should not be surprising to discover that, as Figure 26 shows, the resources of both the independent and campus-based centers rose in constant dollars in the mid-1980s but have declined recently. In addition, Figure 27 delineates a similar result for average stipends, which, as measured in 1983 dollars, have declined in both sorts of centers in the last several years.

It is particularly significant to note, however, that over the entire period the campus-based centers have stayed ahead of inflation not only with respect to total resources (a characteristic shared by the independent centers), but also with respect to average stipends. Choosing on average to support more scholars at lower stipend levels, the independent centers have not been able to keep pace with inflation and, in constant dollars, their stipends have fallen significantly behind the 1983 level.

Ratios of applications to awards, which appear in Figure 28, are another indicator of the general situation of the centers. For the independent centers, ratios have risen since 1983, although they have been reasonably constant in the last several years. The performance of the campus-based centers has been erratic in this respect, but alone of all the programs discussed in this report, they have actually effected a decline in ratios of applications to awards since 1983.

Before summarizing these findings, one additional set of data merits consideration. Figure 29 disaggregates the awards made by the campus-based centers according both to the affiliation of the fellowship holder and the original source of the funds used to support the award. It thus permits us to analyze the nature of the astounding growth of the campus-based centers in finer detail. In every year but one since 1987, the single largest group of fellows at campus-based centers was drawn from among members of the local faculty who were supported by internal institutional funds. Over the entire period from 1983–1991, such awards accounted for 46% of all awards made by campus-based humanities centers. When combined with awards made to local faculty but supported by external funds, these data demonstrate that the majority of campus-based humanities center fellowships since 1983 have been made to local faculty members.

These data reveal that research support for humanities scholars is not only falling increasingly upon the campus-based humanities centers, but also that these centers are choosing primarily, though not exclusively, to support faculty from their own institutions. Other scholars are thus forced to apply to the increasingly competitive national programs. A sudden downturn in the funding of humanities centers by universities and foundations would thus constitute a disaster for humanities scholarship. In addition, extramural support from outside the institution to support fellows with other affiliations grew significantly between 1983 and 1988, but it has declined since then.

In sum, although humanities centers have thrived generally, the campus-based centers have exhibited the most robust health of any segment of the national fellowship granting apparatus. In every significant measure — applications, number of awards, total dollars, average stipends, ratios of application to awards, even inflation-adjusted resource levels and average stipends — the campus-based humanities centers were clearly on the move in the period under discussion. And the main beneficiaries of this growth were faculty members on campuses where such centers were located.

There are some storm clouds on the horizon, however. Many of the centers are on the campuses of state universities that have been facing severe budgetary pressures of late. It seems virtually inevitable that these pressures will have a significant impact on the humanities centers, many of which were created in the more flush times of the mid-eighties. The current round of state budget cuts will undoubtedly undermine the centers and their capacity to support research in the humanities.¹⁵ For the moment, it is difficult to say just how drastic that impact will be, but one thing is certain: many of the same forces that have damaged the national programs and, to a lesser extent, the independent centers may well now also severely damage what is arguably the one healthy sector of the world of humanities fellowships.

The National Fellowship
Competitions Compared

This section summarizes the results of a survey of the sponsors of the four major national fellowship programs in the humanities: the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the American Council of Learned Societies.¹⁶ These four programs represent the main national competitions that are unrestricted as to subject and encompass all areas of the humanities disciplines. They represent the traditional core of fellowships in the humanities and, as a group, are far less restrictive with respect to the subjects of research and other aspects of eligibility for funding than the programs of the campus-based and independent centers.¹⁷

As Figure 30 indicates, the total available dollars for fellowships in the humanities from the four national programs rose steadily between 1983 and 1987, reaching a high point of $11.5 million in 1987. After that year, the total available resources for fellowships declined steadily to just under $10 million in 1991. Much of this decrease may be accounted for by a sharp downward trend in the spending of the Guggenheim Foundation after 1987. This step, taken by the Foundation for sound fiscal reasons and to correct a previous policy that had permitted it to invade its principal, nonetheless radically reduced the total support available to individual fellowship applicants in the humanities.

Figure 31 shows that average stipends for individual scholars increased quite dramatically between 1984 and 1998, but have been virtually flat since then. This increase in average stipends is at least partially accounted for by the fact that the total number of awards has been declining steadily since 1987 (see Figure 32), when the four institutions made a total of 522 awards, until 1991, when they collectively provided only 426 fellowships, a decline of almost 20% in the number of awards actually made.¹⁸ Taken as a group, therefore, the policies of the national programs have sacrificed the total number of scholars supported for the provision of more support to those scholars who actually win fellowships. In other words, as total resources for fellowships have declined, the national fellowship granting institutions have chosen to attempt to keep stipends at reasonable levels, even as they have been forced to reduce the number of scholars they support.¹⁹

One result of these policies is that the collective ratio of applications to awards for the national programs has risen from 9.3 to 1 in 1983 to 11.5 to 1 in the last competition, an increase of more than 20% (see Figure 33). This increased difficulty in winning fellowships grows directly from the relationship between the declining numbers of dollars and awards, on the one hand, and a steady, if occasionally fluctuating, number of applications on the other (see Figure 34). This national trend actually conceals some significant differences among the four agencies that are discussed below.

This pattern of decline is even more worrisome if some attempt is made to account for inflation. Figure 35 shows the total value of the fellowship awards made by the four agencies in constant dollars. The figure shows that the loss of value for national fellowships in the humanities has been very nearly calamitous. Over the period between 1983 and 1991, fellowship expenditures by the national programs lost more than 35% of their value.

Calculations with respect to average fellowship stipends reveal a similar pattern of decline. As Figure 36 shows, the average stipend declined in constant dollars from a bit more than $18,000 in 1983 to just over $13,000 for the fellowships for this year, a loss in value of more than 25% over the period in question.

To sum up the changes made in these programs since the 1983–84 academic year, then, there has been a significant decrease in the number of absolute dollars being spent on fellowship stipends, in the average stipend measured in absolute dollars, and in the total number of awards the four national competitions have been able to make. These losses, damaging as they are, seem comparatively insignificant when inflation is taken into account. Measurements made in constant dollars indicate far more disastrous losses to the national resources available to programs supporting individual fellowships in the humanities.

Simultaneously, these less numerous and less valuable fellowships have become more difficult to win since the number of applications has not declined significantly. In other words, a comparison between the 1983–84 academic year and the current academic year reveals that fewer humanities scholars seeking fellowship support from the national programs can expect to succeed and that they will have a much more difficult time raising much less money to support their work.

The role of the national funders, some may argue, has declined in precise proportion to the rise of the humanities centers. The losses to fellowship funding at the national level, it has been said, are compensated for by the new resources that have become available in the centers. In some respects, of course, that is true. There are more awards available from all sources now than there were in 1983, and there are more total dollars available. But, as we have seen, the average stipend has declined, and the ratio of applications to awards has hardly budged. Moreover, inflation has virtually erased the increase in total dollars.

Even more important, however, the role of the national funders is more than financial. They distribute honor as well as money, and no other funders, except perhaps the Center in Palo Alto and the Institute in Princeton, can pretend to distribute as much honor (or money!) as the four discussed in this section.²⁰ That is not a small matter for members of a profession where honor at the national level is a key not only to professional geographic mobility, but also to vertical mobility within institutions.

The fellowship programs of the national funders differ from those of the centers, moreover, in another significant way. They are unrestricted with respect to the subjects of research and writing. Most of the local humanities centers have a thematic emphasis that changes periodically. Scholars winning fellowships must propose projects that suit that theme or they are not eligible for support. In recent years, the themes of the centers have frequently bypassed many traditional areas of the humanities altogether with the result that scholars who work in those fields can only apply to the national fellowship programs.

Furthermore, the fellowships of ACLS, Guggenheim, and NEH offer a practical advantage that neither the National Humanities Center nor any of the other humanities centers can offer: they are portable. Scholars who win them need not uproot families for a year in order to pursue their work. Instead, they may use the funds to engage in either writing or research as their projects require and in a location or locations most appropriate to their personal and professional circumstances. This is not an inconsiderable factor at a time when many fellowship winners are likely to be members of two-career families.²¹

In addition, it should also be said that the professional honors distributed by the national fellowship programs are not merely a matter of perception. No other process of peer review can possibly be as competitive as those that open the possibility of a fellowship award to any scholar in any field of the humanities inside or outside the academy from anywhere in the country. Data on ratios of applications to awards confirm this conclusion. The decline of the national fellowship competitions is thus palpably a loss to the entire scholarly world for it removes a substantial fraction of the profession’s ability to determine for itself who among its many members is most deserving of national recognition, regardless of field, institution, or the locus of research.

What of the distribution of the available funds among the four funders? The NEH has consistently controlled the largest share of the available national fellowship dollars in this country. The Endowment’s proportion of those dollars has increased since 1983–84, however, from about 57% to 64% (see Figure 37).²² Similarly, its share of the total number of available awards has increased from just under 50% in 1983 to more than 57% this year (see Figure 38).

These changes represent a shift in the nexus of decision-making. One of the great virtues of the existing system is that control over fellowship decisions is decentralized and made by different panels of scholars in different institutions. A shift in the national competition that decreases the number of awards and the amount of money, while simultaneously placing a greater percentage of the remaining awards under the control of a single institution (in this case, NEH), is a source of concern. On the other hand, these data also remind us that the health of NEH and its budget are essential to all scholarship in the humanities in this country.

Among the other funders, the most significant change has been that the Guggenheim Foundation’s share of both dollars and awards has declined from almost a quarter of the total in 1983 to a bit more than 15% in the current year. This is a consequence of the Foundation’s recent decision, referred to above, to cease invading its own capital without allowing average stipend levels to fall. The inevitable result has been a smaller expenditure on stipends and fewer awards. ACLS and the National Humanities Center have about the same role in the national picture that they had in 1983: they are smaller but nonetheless significant players. In any event, NEH accounted for more than half of all the national fellowship awards that were made over the entire period and almost 60% of all the dollars that were spent on fellowship stipends.

The number of applications that each institution receives varies from year to year (see Figure 39). Of the four, the steadiest rate has been experienced by the National Humanities Center, which is the only one of the four that requires its fellows to be in residence. It received 519 applications in 1983; this year it received 561, an increase of 8%. In contrast, the number of applications to NEH actually fell significantly for much of the period in question, only returning to the 1983 level in 1990–91. Guggenheim’s application numbers have declined rather steadily, reaching a low point this year of 1,388, a decline of almost 11% since 1983.

On the other hand, ACLS, whose average stipends have consistently been the lowest of the four, underwent a significant increase in application levels over the period from 891 in 1983 to 1,125 in 1991, a rise of 26%. These decreases in application numbers at Guggenheim and NEH can only be accounted for by self-selection by applicants and the perception on the part of some scholars, for whatever reasons, Guggenheim and NEH fellowships are difficult to obtain. In contrast, during the same period ACLS has been quite self-consciously attempting to solicit applications from scholars who might not otherwise have applied. The ironic result is that ACLS’s less generous fellowships have become increasingly difficult to win.

A comparison of the number of awards each institution makes reveals a slightly different pattern (see Figure 40). Again, the NHC’s experience has been quite unvarying; it made precisely as many awards in the current year as it did in 1983, although in no year during the period was it able to provide enough fellowship awards to fill all of the available studies in its building in Research Triangle, North Carolina. All of the other agencies, however, have reduced the number of awards that they make; Guggenheim by almost 50%, NEH by about 4%, and ACLS by a third.²³

These figures compare interestingly to the data for average stipends (see Figure 41). Leaving aside for the moment the impact of inflation on average stipends, all four agencies have been able to increase their average stipends somewhat. Of the four, Guggenheim has done the best in this respect, increasing from over $19,000 in 1983 to more than $26,000. The NEH has also raised average stipends significantly from a bit less than $22,000 to just under $25,000. The National Humanities Center and ACLS, with fewer resources and less flexibility than their larger colleagues, have managed smaller increases.²⁴

It should be noted, however, that none of the national funders has been able to keep up with inflation. Only Guggenheim has come close to doing so, and it has achieved this result only by cutting its total number of awards in half, a much more drastic cut than any of the others have instituted or could have contemplated. Indeed, of the four agencies, only the Guggenheim Foundation has the financial resources, institutional flexibility, and independence to be able to approach the inflation rate in setting stipend levels without reducing the number of awards. For the others, less drastic but still significant cuts in the number of awards have only prevented them from falling even further behind the CPI than they otherwise would have done; these cuts have not permitted NEH, ACLS, and NHC to set realistic stipends for their fellows.

Figure 42, which provides details of the decline in average fellowship stipends measured in constant dollars, indicates just how precipitous the decreases have been for each of the funders. All of them have experienced serious losses; even Guggenheim, which has had the most flexibility to move stipends up to compensate for inflation, has failed to keep up in the last two years. For the others, the data are self-explanatory and the results for individual scholars may easily be surmised.

Data measuring the ratio of applications to awards (see Figure 43) provides an important context for understanding the data on the number of awards and the average stipends. They also raise one of the more perplexing anomalies of the national fellowship picture. Generally, success ratios for the individual institutions have been rising, but there has also been some significant variation. The NHC’s pattern has been comparatively steady with the ratio increasing slightly. ACLS’s ratio has risen more steeply.²⁵ Guggenheim has undergone the most radical upward swing, increasing its ratio of applications to awards by two-thirds. The NEH ratio, in contrast, has hardly changed at all. More than that, NEH fellowships have always been by far the easiest of the four to win. At present, they are twice as easy to get as those of ACLS and NHC; they are three times as easy to obtain as those of the Guggenheim Foundation.

It is difficult to provide a definitive explanation for this anomaly. NEH stipends have been consistently higher than those of NHC and ACLS, and very close to or above those of Guggenheim. Yet application levels have remained steady over the period while those of ACLS, with much lower stipend rates, have risen dramatically. When combined with a cut in award numbers less drastic than Guggenheim’s, the result is an atypically slow rate of increase in the success ratio at NEH.

One explanation is that NEH applications are due for submission rather early, in the May before the academic year in which the Endowment makes its decisions. The other agencies do not require that applications be submitted until fall of the relevant competition year. Another explanation is that the universe of national fellowship seekers is a limited one, perhaps no larger than 2,000 scholars in any given year. This inherent constraint on the size of the applicant pool would necessarily cause the ratio of applications to awards at NEH to be lower than for the other institutions since NEH has the largest number of awards to give. Thus, if we assume that there is an annually self-selected pool of eligible and qualified applicants that has not expanded very much in the last decade, lower ratios of applications to awards at NEH may not be so mysterious after all.

One final set of data merits brief examination. The total annual expenditure of each funder on fellowship stipends appears in Figure 44. The only one of the four that has been able to achieve a significant increase in total expenditures is NEH, whose spending on stipends increased by almost 15%, amounting to more than three times the amount spent by the next largest funder, Guggenheim. In absolute terms, Guggenheim’s expenditures dropped most radically, by about 25%. ACLS’s expenditures dropped off by about 10%, while NHC’s expenditures increased by a bit more than 10%. Again, it bears repeating that even the two funders that did increase expenditures did not do so at anything near the rate of inflation.

Moreover, Guggenheim’s apparent capacity to maintain stipend levels was clearly accomplished in spite of a decrease in total expenditures, further evidence both that the Foundation was supporting fewer fellows at the end of the period than at the beginning, and that it had the resources and flexibility that the others lacked to decrease radically the number of awards and increase the average stipend while continuing to maintain a credible program. Still, Guggenheim’s choices were consequential: its total decrease in expenditures, when measured in constant dollars was the greatest of the four, falling by almost 55%.

Figure 45 adds some refinement to this discussion. It shows the corrosive effect of inflation on total expenditures. All of the national funders have suffered real losses here just as they have in the average stipends they can offer to their fellows. What is even more significant, however, is that these losses have occurred at a time when inflation has been rather moderate. If inflation should increase in the next decade, as it may well do, the losses the funders have sustained in the past eight years will seem almost desirable by comparison since there is no prospect that the four, either collectively or individually, will find a way so radically to increase expenditures that they will either be able to compensate for past losses to inflation or keep up with it in the future.

Of the four programs, it is clear that NEH’s has been consistently the most generous with respect to the number of scholars the Endowment has been able to support and with respect to the amount of support it has been able to give to individual fellowship winners. On balance, it is also true that the National Humanities Center has managed a program whose consistency by almost every measure has been impressive, despite the Center’s acknowledged difficulties in raising the money necessary to support its fellows. Unless the Center can radically increase its stipend levels, however, it seems unlikely that it will be able to attract as many distinguished scholars in the future. Inflation has eroded the support the Center can provide to individuals. The future of the Center’s program will thus be deeply affected both by the general fundraising environment and by the larger economy.²⁶

Insofar as the Guggenheim Foundation’s program is concerned, it is arguably the healthiest of the four. Although the cuts in the Foundation’s program described above have been damaging in the short term to the larger scholarly enterprise, there can be no denying that they were necessary. What is more, they will have the effect of putting the Foundation’s fellowships on a much firmer footing in the future. Unlike NHC, NEH, and ACLS, the Foundation has a substantial endowment whose growth has been assured by the policies of the Foundation’s current leadership.

Even more important, the Guggenheim endowment is large enough to permit Guggenheim to continue to maintain a credible fellowship program, even without additional infusions of capital. The Foundation is now seeking additional capital, however, and owing to its support for artists particularly, there is some prospect of its acquiring considerable corporate support. Finally, Guggenheim has an additional advantage: it is entirely independent of the politics of higher education. The various attacks on scholars and scholarship in the humanities that have been so common in recent years have no effect on the Foundation because it does not depend either upon the government or other foundations for support of its programs. None of the other three funders has this advantage. In the long run, that may prove the most important fact of all.

Conclusion

In general, the data reported in this document present a depressing picture of declining resources to support the work of individual scholars in the humanities. The main conclusions of the report may be easily recapitulated:

1. Although the amount of money available to support humanities fellowships has increased significantly since 1983, the number of scholars seeking such support has increased even more rapidly. It was easier for a scholar to obtain a fellowship in 1983 than it is now.
2. Although stipends have also increased since 1983, they have not kept pace with inflation. Today’s more competitive fellowship competitions provide less support to individual scholars in constant dollars than they did in 1983.
3. In addition, these changes have not occurred evenly among the various institutions that award humanities fellowships. Humanities centers now account for a majority of fellowship awards. The national competitions have declined in quantitative significance, both in terms of dollars and in numbers of awards. Moreover, the support the centers offer, while much easier to obtain, is generally less generous than that offered by the national competitions.
4. Among the humanities centers, those based on university campuses appear to be healthiest and to have experienced the most robust growth since 1983, although this growth has not kept pace either with inflation or the general scholarly demand for fellowship support. In addition, their tendency to offer a majority of their awards to their own faculty radically changes the fellowship picture in a fashion that prompts real concern.
5. While the main national fellowship competitions retain their prestige, the number of fellowships that they award as well as the dollars they spend on those fellowships is declining. This trend is especially disturbing because, unlike those of the humanities centers, their fellowships are unrestricted as to subject. Generally speaking, traditional and still significant fields of humanistic inquiry are injured by this trend since they have, on balance, received scant attention from the humanities centers.

It should be quickly added that comparisons like those above can be misleading. The fundamental problem is finding ways to support more and better scholarship in all fields of the humanities, the emerging ones as well as those that are more traditional. The underlying difficulty is the relative weakness of the entire fellowship enterprise. Higher ratios of applications to awards, declining total resources and individual stipends in real and absolute terms, and so on, represent a danger to cultural life generally in this country, not only to research in the humanities. These data also portend real damage to undergraduate education in the humanities which, despite public rhetoric to the contrary, is nourished and regenerated by new scholarship.

Thus, this report concludes where it began. The real losses are actually not losses to individuals or to institutions at all. They are instead losses to the world of learning as a whole and to the culture of which it is a part. The recent recognition that we may actually face a shortage of capable scholars in the 1990s has prompted many graduate schools to increase enrollments in the Ph.D. programs in the humanities. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many of the major graduate schools are seeing increases in both the number of applications they receive in the humanities and their quality. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has launched a major new program of support for these newly recruited students. How will they be able to undertake productive careers as teachers and scholars if fellowship programs continue to decline in general availability and value?

In addition, if it is true that we are about to enter a period of unusual stringency in university budgets that will be accompanied by a serious shortage of well-trained scholars to fill soon-to-be vacant positions, how can we expect colleges and universities to continue to fund generous leave programs, which are also a vital part of the national system supporting scholarship in the humanities, to say nothing of continuing to fund campus-based humanities centers? Indeed, one of the reasons that many scholars can even afford to accept a fellowship is that ho me institutions not only provide a leave, but “top up” fellowship awards in order to see that the fellows suffer no financial loss as a consequence of accepting the national award.

Further, the increasing ratio of applications to awards, general throughout the system, is disturbing for another reason. It has never been easy to make decisions about fellowship awards. There have always been far more qualified scholars than fellowships. This is not an entirely bad thing since stiff competition assures the reputation both of the fellowships and those who receive them. Still, there is a level above which the ratio should not rise. No one who has served on a selection panel in recent years or as a responsible staff officer at a fellowship granting institution can fail to have been impressed, even overwhelmed, by the high quality of the applicant pool.

If the number of applications rises faster than the number of awards or if, as seems more likely, the number of awards falls rapidly, these decisions will become ever more difficult. Juries and selection panels in the national competitions already complain that the amount of work involved is not justified by the number of awards. Perhaps even more important, all parties have begun to have the uneasy feeling that many distinctions are being drawn among applicants without any real difference. This eventually leads to the view among decision-makers and applicants alike that the selection process borders on arbitrary and is almost certainly unfair.

In the end, therefore, it would not be too dramatic to say that the decline of fellowship support for humanities scholars detailed in this report can only be understood as a trend with potentially harmful consequences not only for the individuals involved, but also for higher education at ever level and, in the end, for the quality of cultural life in this country. The unwillingness of so many private foundations, to say nothing of corporations and the federal government, to provide more long-term assistance with fellowship funding is thus short-sighted and does not endanger the humanities centers and other fellowship granting institutions (which are only institutions after all) nearly so much as it endangers something far more valuable and difficult to replace: the nation’s capacity to preserve, interpret, and disseminate the irreplaceable cultural resources that the humanities represent.

Notes

1. More will be said below about the difficulty of acquiring fellowship support for research projects in the humanities, but it should be noted at the outset that fellowships in the humanities, whatever their source, are much more difficult to obtain than grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, which account for the majority of federal support for research in the sciences. Although it is difficult to generate data that is strictly comparable to those generated by humanities fellowships competitions, the success ratio at NEH is approximately 2.2:1, while at NSF it is closer to 5:1. Last year, the ratio of applications to awards for all humanities fellowships was almost 8:1. [return to text]

2. ACLS has received two Challenge Grants from NEH as well, one for $1 million and the other for $250,000. Since receiving the first of these grants, by agreement with NEH, ACLS has not been eligible for additional assistance from the Research Division. [return to text]

3. These include, among other general areas of inquiry, Women’s Studies, African-American studies, area studies and public policy studies. [return to text]

4. This report includes data from 38 campus-based humanities centers and 15 independent centers. To the directors of each of these centers and to Lynn Szwaja of the Rockefeller Foundation ACLS records its thanks for providing so much of the data that made this report possible. [return to text]

5. Since decisions about awards are made in the year before a fellowship is actually taken up, the last “class” of awardees included in the data for this report is the class of the current academic year, 1991–1992. [return to text]

6. In this and subsequent discussions of numbers of applications it should be borne in mind that most fellowship seekers apply for more than one fellowship. The number of applications is therefore significantly greater than the number of people who seek support in any given year. [return to text]

7. As in the case of applications, the number of awards can also be deceptive since some scholars, when funding agency rules permit, combine awards from different funders in order to put together a “package” that will permit a year of full-time research and writing. [return to text]

8. Some of the reasons for this decline are discussed in a subsequent section of this report that disaggregates the data for the national programs. [return to text]

9. The policies of centers with respect to the size of awards vary enormously. Some offer quite large average fellowships; others provide only modest grants. Some grants are for a full year; some are for much shorter periods. Indeed, the policies of the centers are so varied that it simply proved impossible to normalize these data in some way that would make them strictly comparable to those for the national programs or to each other. On the other hand, however, one irreducible fact cannot be avoided: The average expenditure per scholar by the centers over the entire period was lower than for the national programs. [return to text]

10. For the moment, as we shall see in a subsequent section, the increasing ratio appears to be an artifact of declining award numbers rather than increasing applications. The likelihood of the number of the applications increasing is great, however. The number of Ph.D.’s in the humanities has begun to increase as have admissions statistics in the major graduate programs. In the short and medium term at least, these data would lead us to predict an increase in applications numbers. Without significant infusions of new money to fund a larger number of awards, therefore, we may expect the ratio of applications to awards to continue to increase. [return to text]

11. Some centers do not accept applications. Their programs have been excluded from these calculations. [return to text]

12. In time, of course, market forces may well intervene in another way: some fellowship applicants, recognizing the steep odds against receiving one of the national fellowships, will stop bothering to apply for them and focus their attention on the humanities centers. The result of such a development, should it occur, will be to reverse current trends and cause the ratio of applications to awards to increase in the humanities centers and decrease in the national competitions. [return to text]

13. The difference between residential and portable fellowships is discussed in footnote 21 below. [return to text]

14. Part of the explanation for this difference is discussed in footnote 9 above. [return to text]

15. As recent news stories have indicated, the public universities are not alone in their budget woes; private institutions too, even the most prestigious among them, face serious problems whose impact on the humanities is only too easy to guess. But some of the humanities centers on private university campuses have endowments that produce an assured income. This is much less frequently true on state university campuses. In any event, external funding for humanities centers, for which the only reliable resource has been the Rockefeller Foundation, is likely to become more important as the budgets of research universities continue to experience severe pressure. [return to text]

16. The American Council of Learned Societies gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Peter Kardon of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Kent Mullikin of the National Humanities Center, and Guinevere Griest of the National Endowment for the Humanities in providing data on the fellowship programs of their organizations. [return to text]

17. Data reported here for the National Humanities Center, like those reported in the previous section on the campus-based and independent humanities centers, are not strictly comparable to those reported for ACLS, Guggenheim, and NEH because of differences between the NHC and the institutions that offer portable fellowships. Stipend expenditures do not indicate the true financial value of a fellowship at the center, which also provides funds for travel to and from Research Triangle, North Carolina; office space; library service; manuscript typing; and a subsidized food service. The value of none of these items is reflected in the information discussed in this report. In addition, each year a few scholars who come to the Center arrive with most of their basic stipend covered by other agencies (including ACLS, Guggenheim, and NEH). In these cases, the Center provides only a small supplement to the other fellowship awards. The presence of such minimally funded fellowships in the data reduces average stipends for the Center somewhat. Moreover, the range of stipends at the Center is greater than those for the other agencies. The highest stipend offered by the Center during the period considered in this report was $35,000. The lowest was $1,100. Data for the Guggenheim Foundation include only those awards made to scholars in the humanities. Those made to artists, scientists and others are not included in these data. [return to text]

18. As noted above, data presented on the number of available awards in a given year are deceptive since many individuals receive more than one award in a given time period and are able to combine them either by holding them simultaneously or consecutively. Thus, the precise number of scholars being supported in any academic year is actually smaller than the number of awards. Unfortunately, the existing data do not permit us to estimate precisely how much smaller. [return to text]

19. The Guggenheim Foundation’s reduction in total expenditures, referred to above, is complex and involves technical information on the Foundation’s tax credits with the Internal Revenue Service. Of more interest is the fact that after a five-year reduction in total expenditures and number of awards, the Foundation will be able to increase both substantially. Depending on where it sets the level of average stipends, the Guggenheim Foundation will increase the number of awards it makes in the humanities from 66 in the current competition to between 80 and 90 in the competition of 1994–95. [return to text]

20. In fact, both the Center and the Institute account for a significant proportion of the data on the centers. If they are removed from the calculations, the independent centers’ contribution to the national fellowship picture seems less significant. [return to text]

21. As a matter of statistical fact, residential centers that are distant from a scholar’s home support fewer women than men. For example, more than half the awards in the most recent ACLS competition went to women. Fewer than one-third of those at the National Humanities Center went to women. While this is certainly not a matter of conscious policy, but more likely a matter of self-selection by potential applicants, it is nonetheless true that portable fellowships offer greater flexibility for scholars with significant concerns about child care and schools. The result is that there are fewer practical opportunities for fellowship support available to women than to men and, in all probability, to younger scholars than to older scholars. [return to text]

22. The data for ACLS and the National Humanities Center include substantial funds that originated in the regrant programs of the Research Division of NEH. They are counted here as ACLS and NHC funds, however, because NEH did not control the selection process through which they were distributed. [return to text]

23. ACLS will reduce its total awards again in 1992. [return to text]

24. In the case of ACLS, this increase is almost entirely accounted for by the 1986 decision to raise the maximum stipend for the Recent Recipients program from $8,500 to $10,000 and to raise the maximum grant for the regular Fellowship program from $12,500 to $15,000. In 1991, the ACLS Board of Directors chose to decrease the number of awards radically in order to be able to increase stipends in the 1992 competition to $20,000. [return to text]

25. Furthermore, this year ACLS can expect another radical upward swing in its ratio of applications to awards since, as noted above, the Council has determined to increase its stipends (from a maximum of $15,000 to a maximum of $20,000) and to reduce the total number of awards proportionately. [return to text]

26. This is not the place for an extended discussion of the funding environment and the role of the large private foundations in supporting unrestricted fellowships in the humanities, but since both the National Humanities Center and the ACLS have counted on the foundations in the past to maintain their fellowship programs, it may at least be worth observing that the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation have entirely abandoned their historical role with respect to unrestricted humanities fellowships. As noted above, the Rockefeller Foundation continues to support humanities research through its support of the local humanities centers. The Pew Charitable Trusts, which have on occasion provided support to both ACLS and the National Humanities Center, have recently announced that they will no longer support post-doctoral fellowships of any kind. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has only occasionally provided this sort of support in the past, and, at the moment, there is no prospect that it will do so in the future. Among the largest foundations with a conceivable interest in the humanities, that leaves only the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, whose support for the humanities has been unwavering but which cannot reasonably be expected to bear this burden alone. [return to text]

List of Figures

For the most part, the charts are self-explanatory; they amplify or support points made in the text. One clarification is necessary, however. Labels in the figures that refer to “Humanities Centers” do not include the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle, North Carolina. That center is of such size and significance that it is instead grouped in the figures with the “National Competitions” of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the ACLS. [return to text]

Figure 1. Federal Appropriations for Research since 1980 in Millions of Dollars, FY-80 to FY-92

Figure 2. Number of Fellowship Applications in the Humanities, 1983–1991

Figure 3. Number of Fellowship Awards in the Humanities, 1983–1991

Figure 4. Ratio of Applications to Awards for Humanities Fellowships, 1983–1991

Figure 5. Value of Fellowship Awards in the Humanities, 1983–1991

Figure 6. Value of Average Humanities Fellowship Stipend, 1983–1991

Figure 7. Average Stipends for Humanities Fellowships in Constant Dollars, 1983–1991

Figure 8. National Expenditures on Humanities Fellowships in Constant Dollars, 1983–1991

Figure 9. Percentage Distribution of Fellowship Applications in the Humanities, All Humanities Centers vs. National Competitions, 1983–1991

Figure 10. Number of Fellowship Applications in the Humanities, All Humanities Centers vs. National Competitions, 1983–1991

Figure 11. Percentage Distribution of Fellowship Awards in the Humanities, All Humanities Centers vs. National Competitions, 1983–1991

Figure 12. Number of Fellowship Awards in the Humanities, All Humanities Centers vs. National Competitions, 1983–1991

Figure 13. National Fellowship Resources, All Humanities Centers vs. National Competitions, 1983–1991

Figure 14. Percentage Distribution of National Fellowship Resources, All Humanities Centers vs. National Competitions, 1983–1991.

Figure 15. Average Stipends for Humanities Fellowships, All Humanities Centers vs. National Competitions, 1983–1991

Figure 16. Ratio of Fellowship Applications to Awards, All Humanities Centers vs. National Competitions, 1983–1991

Figure 17. National Fellowship Resources in Constant Dollars, All Humanities Centers vs. National Competitions, 1983–1991

Figure 18. Average Stipends for Humanities Fellowships in Constant Dollars, All Humanities Centers vs. National Competitions, 1983–1991

Figure 19. Number of Fellowship Applications to Humanities Centers, Campus-based vs. Independent Centers, 1983–1991

Figure 20. Percentage Distribution of Fellowship Applications to Humanities Centers, Campus-based vs. Independent Centers, 1983–1991

Figure 21. Number of Fellowship Awards by Humanities Centers, Campus-based vs. Independent Centers, 1983–1991

Figure 22. Percentage Distribution of Fellowship Awards by Humanities Centers, Campus-based vs. Independent Centers, 1983–1991

Figure 23. Fellowship Resources of Humanities Centers, Campus-based vs. Independent Centers, 1983–1991

Figure 24. Percentage Distribution of Fellowship Resources of Humanities Centers, Campus-based vs. Independent Centers, 1983–1991

Figure 25. Average Fellowship Stipends at Humanities Centers, Campus-based vs. Indpendent Centers, 1983–1991

Figure 26. Fellowship Resources of Humanities Centers in Constant Dollars, Campus-based vs. Independent Centers, 1983–1991

Figure 27. Average Fellowship Stipend at Humanities Centers in Constant Dollars, Campus-based vs. Independent Centers, 1983–1991

Figure 28. Ratio of Fellowship Applications to Awards in Humanities Centers, Campus-based vs. Independent Centers, 1983–1991

Figure 29. Affiliation of Fellows at Campus-based Humanities Centers by Source of Support, 1983–1991

Figure 30. Value of Awards by National Fellowship Competitions, 1983–1991

Figure 31. Average Stipend for National Fellowship Competitions, 1983–1991

Figure 32. Number of Fellowship Awards by National Fellowship Competitions, 1983–1991

Figure 33. Ratio of Applications to Awards for National Fellowship Competitions, 1983–1991

Figure 34. Number of Applications to National Fellowship Competitions, 1983–1991

Figure 35. Value of Awards Made by National Competitions in Constant Dollars, 1983–1991

Figure 36. Average Stipends for National Fellowship Competitions in Constant Dollars, 1983–1991

Figure 37. Percentage Distribution of National Fellowship Dollars Awarded by National Competitions, by Program, 1983–1991

Figure 38. Percentage Distribution of National Fellowship Awards Made by National Competitions, by Program 1983–1991

Figure 39. Number of Applications to National Fellowship Competitions by Program, 1983–1991

Figure 40. Number of Fellowship Awards by National Competitions, by Program, 1983–1991

Figure 41. Value of Average Stipends for National Fellowship Competitions, by Program, 1983–1991

Figure 42. Value of Average Stipends for National Fellowship Competitions in Constant Dollars, by Program, 1983–1991

Figure 43. Ratio of Applications to Awards in National Fellowship Competitions, by Program, 1983–1991

Figure 44. Value of Expenditures on Stipends by National Fellowship Competitions, by Program, 1983–1991

Figure 45. Value of Expenditures on Stipends by National Fellowship Competitions in Constant Dollars, by Program, 1983–1991