Historical Look at Praxis Funding Structures

One of my basic job duties has always been trying to figure out how we can best match the goals of our fellowship programs to the funds that we have available for them. This is true now more than ever. Everyone in higher education is trying to figure out how to make do in a climate of increasing austerity. Right now, we’re all dealing with cuts, budget freezes, canceled hires, and more. Given the present challenges, I thought I would take some time to put a bit of institutional memory out into the world about how our own fellowships have been constructed over the years. In what follows I am not talking here about the funding source for our programs—that topic could be a separate post on its own. Instead, I’ll focus on the various forms in which we’ve decided to distribute funds to students and the reasons for doing so. A lot goes into such decisions, and the pedagogical choices are likely to be invisible for most people not on this side of the fence. I’ll focus on the shape of the financial structure of the award associated with the Praxis Program, a program in its fifteenth year. My knowledge during the first through sixth years of the program comes from either my first-hand experience as a student fellow or second-hand discussions with friends in the fellowships. I took on my current role in year six, so I have more direct experience after that point. What follows, then, is a mix of speculation and evidence-based analysis. I’ll try to make which is which.

Praxis was not actually originally advertised as a research fellowship. If you look back in the Scholars’ Lab archives, you’ll find an advertisement for “Scholars’ Lab Research & Development Assistants.” The position sounds like something else entirely, focusing on a range of R&D tasks, but there are pieces that flag the position as the nascent Praxis Program:

Students will have the opportunity to partner on Scholars’ Lab collaborations with UVa faculty and to help test Omeka plug-ins and craft geo-temporal scholarly arguments using Neatline, a tool we’re building with funding from the Library of Congress and in partnership with the Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. We’ll also be undertaking a brand-new project with our R&D assistants in Fall 2011: “Crowdsourcing Interpretation.”

“Crowdsourcing Interpretation” would go on to become Prism, the project developed by the first two fellowship cohorts. By that time, the focus of the program had shifted more towards original research on a particular topic. That first year the program was advertised as an hourly wage position, and, according to friends in the cohort, the students filled out time cards each week. I know from anecdotal conversations with students in the program that this fact made them feel compelled to put in the full amount of work every week.

The second-year cohort was formulated differently, which I know first-hand because this was the year Shane Lin and I were fellows in the program. In this second year, the fellowship award was now dispersed as a lump sum stipend given at the beginning of the year. I can imagine all sorts of reasons why this change might have been made. I wasn’t actually a staff at the time, though, so I can only speak to my own experience years later. There are many restrictions on what things can be paid out on an hourly wage basis versus what things can be paid out as stipends. It’s a complicated question, because some of these are university policies, some state, and some federal. The guidelines are also meant to cover both humanities research and lab experience, which is often an imperfect fit for work like ours. After all, our humanities inflected research is pretty distinct from the kind of lab work science students take on working in an advisor’s research for 40 hours. I suspect that the change in funding structure naturally followed the change in the program’s framing from being a research assistantship towards a fellowship.

At a certain point in the subsequent years, the fellowship changed from offering an outright award on top of a student’s package to, instead, providing funding to relieve a student’s teaching. In this new model, a student’s overall take home financial package remains the same, but they no longer have to teach. In case it’s easier to have numbers in front of you, this is the distinction I am making:

• Under the old system, a student who would normally make a $20,000 stipend (partially made up of teaching wages) would receive a Praxis award of $10,000 for a total of $30,000 (including teaching wages).
• Under the new system, a student who would normally make a $20,000 stipend (partially made up of teaching wages) would continue to make $20,000 for the year. But now there would be no teaching (the Praxis award slides in to take the place of teaching wages lost).

This shift also coincided with the development of the PHD+ program at UVA, which sought to gather and cultivate similar professional development programs across campus, and their internships are typically structured as teaching replacements. By relieving a student’s teaching, we hopefully were able to make space in their schedule for them to focus on their work with us. There is also a complicated policy at UVA wherein graduate students can only receive up to a maximum of 130% of their financial package before their financial support from the university starts to be reduced. Switching to a teaching buyout instead of a flat-out award meant that we no longer had to worry about this policy that sometimes required us to frame part of the funding as a summer research award.

There are, of course, some drawbacks to this formulation. Teaching should not exclusively be framed as a burden: some students want to teach, either for professional development or because they have a legitimate interest in pedagogy. The structure also impacts the students’ home departments more directly, as they lose graduate instructors from their course listings. Smaller departments, especially, feel a greater impact. Because of this, we’ve moved the Praxis application to the fall instead of the spring in the hopes that we can give departments early notice about complications to their teaching logistics. Another important point: not all graduate students have teaching to relieve. The first year of Praxis was open to master’s degree students, but our shift to teaching buyouts precluded that option. As a terminal MA recipient myself, I regularly think about what kinds of opportunities master’s students have—or more often don’t have—available to them. Different schools at UVA also have different teaching requirements, which makes the program difficult to explain to, say, an architecture student who might be interested in applying. And, of course, many students living on impoverished graduate student wages would rather take the time burden in favor of more funding.

This teaching replacement structure has remained the norm for us for a number of years. For several of those years, graduate teaching wages remained relatively stable. But, happily, teaching wages have started increasing. The Virginia General Assembly mandated annual raises for state employees at a certain point, and graduate students qualified. Furthermore, the Graduate School, significantly revamped packages last year to greatly increase student packages. This means that the amount of funding that it costs per student for teaching buyout has increased every year (at present about 50% more than when I started in this job). These changes have been difficult to map onto our budget for the fellowships, which has followed the opposite trajectory, steadily decreasing for a range of reasons. We’ve been able to make things work through a combination of careful budgeting and strategic cuts (the program now typically takes five students instead of six), but we are approaching our limit to match funding needs to costs.

Now that we have extreme cuts coming down the pipe through the various political and economic climates that we live in, I was forced to weigh the increased costs of the program against significant decreases in the amount of funding to take on such costs. Do we reduce the number of students further? Do we close the program? Do we end a different program to preserve this one? After considering all the options, we decided to return to the previous funding model, where the award consists of a single lump sum instead of a teaching buyout. One significant change: we now have good models in place for how students can still elect to relieve themselves of one semester of teaching and keep the rest of the Praxis funding. The single lump sum approach also loosens some of our eligibility requirements, streamlining things with the other schools at UVA and making it easier for their students to participate in the programs. We had our first information session last week, and I had double the number of students I typically have attend those meetings.

This post has gotten lost in the weeds a bit, as it’s probably clear that I’m trying to work out in real time what the best option is for the future of our programs. Hopefully it’s useful for someone else out there who might also be making their way through the underbrush of their own institution. I want to close with one final, important point: I am very happy that graduate wages are increasing. Students deserve a fair and living wage, now more than ever. Institutional memory should never lead us towards inertia, towards leaving things the way they are because that’s how they’ve always been. Institutional memory is only useful insofar as it helps us know what is possible and what is not, insofar as it helps stretch our funding as far as we can to do the most good with it that we can.