Then show what the fellowship would pay, if awarded, and start asking people how you can find funding for the rest. Ask (at first) like you’re naively seeking information about a second, simultaneous grant.

Not trying to overpromise, that’s for sure! OSP is very unlikely to be able to “do” very much for you outside of forcing entities to sort out who pays what in the event you’re funded.

And it’s quite likely OSP will think sorting out your dept/school funding relations is a lot more trouble than it’s worth to them (since your project will only cost their unit time and effort). BUT. If you stay strong and are not deterred, they will have to officially punt the decision to deal with you.

Then, the fight goes like this:

OSP: This researcher is tying up our resources. Researcher, do you want to just do your own thing here?

Historiann: no.

OSP: OK. Well, Dept., we’re trying to help her secure the permissions she needs to apply. What’s the problem.

Dept: We can’t pay. Ask the college.

OSP: A&S?

A&S: We’re not paying for this. Really, it’s a research expense. You pay it.

OSP: We thought we gave you indirect cost return so that you could fund researchers in need of more resources in order to continue their projects.

A&S: We thought you took “our” money away so that you could create research slush funds that funded projects like this.

OSP: We don’t even want to deal with this application. The researcher doesn’t “have to” go through us, you know. Sort it out yourselves.

A&S: If you’re not going to fund our faculty and submit their applications, why do you take money from our grants?

And so on. Eventually they tend to find a split that allows you to submit. It requires a lot of tenacity.

That’s Grantastic, I really appreciate your perspective, although it seems like using OSP is *not* a standard practice across the humanities. I take your suggestion that it should be, and for those of us who have OSPs, we should see what they can do for us.

However, I will report on my investigations so far with the OSP at my uni: I checked out their website, and clearly it’s laid out for science and tech researchers. There is no link to any humanities fellowships/grants, and the language that guides the site seems to be clearly targeted at people who need IRB approval & the like for their research projects. That won’t deter me next year when I start applying for grants again, but the message that I’m getting is that our OSP is not geared to humanities scholars or fellowships. Clearly, I’d need to have an in-person sit-down meeting with some people in this office to understand more clearly their mission and what they might do for humanities scholars like me.

I find it really interesting that those of you who teach at comprehensive unis are getting salary matches, when many of us at R-1s are not. Excellence with Our Money (as Dutchie said, wayyyyy upthread) indeed!

But like some other commenters, my sabbatical would be one semester at full pay and a year at half-pay, so I’m really trying to pay down debt in the hopes that in a couple years’ time I could afford to take the full year–even if that means reaccumulating some debt.

Grantastic and H’Ann, thanks. Yes, chairs and deans in Humanities tend to tell one that one doesn’t “have to” go through OSP or even that one doesn’t “get to.” But, I’ve found OSP to be quite good on other things; I’ll try this.

[enormous chunk of text redacted]

Ooops. Guess I’m still a little bitter about that experience. Short version: if we want any chance of keeping our benefits during a fellowship year, we have to go through a process that actively discourages us at every step. In the end, I keep applying out of pure spite.

The first public R1 university where I was on the tenure-track did not offer salary top-ups. However, my salary was so pathetically low that many of the fellowships for which I applied would have offered a salary increase (yes, as a tenure-track faculty member, I was making just over $30,000 a year less than a decade ago; my husband made significantly more than I did as a public high school teacher–frankly, I think that should probably always be true, given the demands of high school teaching, but it never had been the case where we lived before and hasn’t been the case since). Insurance would not have been an issue, because I was covered on my husband’s policy, which offered better benefits than those offered by my institution as well. I didn’t get any fellowships during the time I was at that university, but I wasn’t even sure they would have given me unpaid leave to take one had I gotten one, because humanities faculty were meant to be in the trenches, cranking out the student credit hours. Humanities fellowships and grants were really not an institutional priority.

http://liberalartscommunity.tamu.edu/docs/Bjobling/Development%20Leave%20External%20Fellowships%20and%20Course%20Buyouts%2011sept.pdf

Similarly, those who don’t want to strategize any ways to apply pressure to the funding system in an effort to change its functions, but rather believe that a) the cause is hopeless; or b) commiserating about the injustice of the funding distribution will somehow cause the moneyholders to have some collective come-to-Jesus moment, can just go ahead and skim over my posts.

How’s that for a bigger, better, broader caveat?