Anti-Gay ‘Flagging’ at NEH?

When most scholars have their grant applications rejected by the National Endowment for the Humanities, they shrug. Only a small minority of grants are approved, so there’s no way any application can be a sure thing.

But what about an application that earns the top possible rating from every member of a peer review panel? When Marc Stein learned that his application had been rejected despite getting the best possible ratings, he started to investigate patterns at the NEH — and they led him to give a scathing talk Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association questioning the fairness of the NEH in dealing with his grant and others having to do with gay studies.

Saying that it was time to “name names,” Stein reviewed the results of his inquiry, quoting from peer review comments he obtained, and the comments he received from NEH program officers. Stein also conducted a review of NEH fellowships and research awards and found recent years in which few or none of the projects had words like “gay,” “lesbian,” “queer” or various other words in their titles — even though such topics are quite common in the humanities. (He acknowledged that this was not a precise measure and that some scholars may be doing work on these issues and keeping those words out of project titles.)

Stein’s talk, which he also published with more detail and footnotes online at the History News Network, was widely discussed at the history meeting, with other gay scholars saying that he had demonstrated that their work was being unfairly evaluated and excluded.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/01/09/neh

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