I am a social scientist. I like the social sciences. I also like the humanities, even if I do find many people’s defense of the humanities to be shrill and weirdly ahistorical. So, naturally, I’m a fan of SSHRC.

What I am not a fan of, however, is some of the drivel that passes for advocacy on SSHRC’s behalf.

One argument that gets pulled out every once in awhile and which annoys me immensely is the one that says, “Social sciences and humanities have 55% of the professors but only get 15% of federal grant dollars” (or whatever the numbers happen to be this year). Sometimes this is phrased via applications, such as “1 in 3 professors/postdocs/grad students in sciences gets an NSERC grant compared to only 1 in 9 in the social sciences and humanities” (or whatever the numbers are this year).

These arguments aren’t wrong because the figures are wrong – the figures are immaterial. These arguments are wrong because they presuppose some kind cross-disciplinary equity which is neither true nor desirable.

Society is not under any obligation to give research grants to scholars. To the extent that it does, it will do so in pursuit of societal goals. Some of these will involve the social sciences and humanities, but it’s safe to say that most will not. There is no country in the world which divides research dollars equally by discipline; Canada, by and large, treats its social sciences and humanities extremely well (seriously – go check out the proportion of granting council dollars given to SSHRC disciplines in the U.S., the U.K., Australia and France and see if you still think Canada’s miserly on this front).

The idea that the underlying logic of research grant funding should be “equal treatment of scholars” rather than “spending money where society thinks it will bring greatest returns” is actually fairly offensive. It reeks of entitlement, for one thing, which is never a good start from a PR point of view.

SSHRC funds great work. Sure, there are duds, but that’s true at NSERC and CIHR, too. It’s the nature of the beast. Researchers in the social sciences and the humanities can and should make their case for funding on the social returns of their research, not on some half-baked notion of equality.