On February 17th, President Laura Walker announced via email that Bennington College had been selected as one of four recipients for an $8 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The grant was awarded as part of the NSF’s ongoing EPSCoR program, a federal grant program designed to identify and support areas of the country with historically limited access to scientific research opportunities.
Overseen by CAPA Associate Director Dr. David Bond, the grant application was created in collaboration with the other recipient institutions as part of the Science and Technology Research Initiative for the Vermont Economy (STRIVE) program. STRIVE is an association of four southern Vermont institutions (Landmark College, Bennington College, Community College of Vermont, and the Brattleboro Development Credit Corporation) intended to develop support for scientific research opportunities in the area, which has historically been underfunded. In fact, the $8 million award marks the largest NSF grant ever awarded to a Vermont institution outside of Chittenden County.
The grant, which is expected to be disbursed over the next four years, is intended to support the science departments at Bennington in a variety of ways. According to the President’s email, the grant is hoped to help finance “new analytical equipment for the sciences, two new positions, and support towards a timber-framed barn to reintroduce sheep and chickens to the campus.”
Bond explained that the grant is expected to help finance a wide variety of new equipment available for the use of science students and faculty. In addition to several pieces of less-expensive equipment, the grant also covers a handful of big-ticket items including a Scanning Electron Microscope primarily intended for use in geological research.
“It’s one of the primary instruments that I employ in marine geology research, and it would be fun to be able to teach a course in scanning electron microscopy here at Bennington,” said Dr. Tim Schroeder, a geologist at Bennington. “We’re entering courses for next year’s curriculum right now, and I’m writing up a description of a scanning electron microscopy course in the hopes that this actually comes through.”
The grant is also expected to enable the creation of two new staff positions. One would be a full-time grant writer, who would assist faculty members with the creation of grant proposals to fund their research projects, alleviating the time and labor required to finance research. Grant proposals – which are essential to most scientific research endeavors – can take up a significant amount of a researcher’s time.
“These are huge, huge undertakings to write all of the text, and make budgets, and assemble all of these supporting documents – it’s a lot of work,” Schroeder said. “Having more institutional help around for all of those would really reduce the amount of time that I personally have to spend on submitting the proposal, so I would be very appreciative.”
Dr. Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie, an ecologist at Bennington College, echoed Schroeder’s enthusiasm for the grant writing position. McDonough MacKenzie also mentioned that, with regards to ecology, the priorities for grant writing are slightly different from other sciences.
“While I have relatively low cost equipment, I need a lot of human power to do my research, and so I would love to be able to write bigger grants to get students involved in some of my projects,” said McDonough MacKenzie. “And so that includes really large grants that would be five or ten years long, and that would get students moving through, building up skills, getting to their advanced work, doing independent projects related to it, and then continuing to share knowledge across classes that way.”
In discussing what they view as the current priorities of natural science faculty at the College, both Schroeder and McDonough MacKenzie agreed that there is a lack of departmental cohesion, and that greater community among Environmental Science students is a priority with the grant.
“I think community building is a big part of that, because Environmental Studies is scattered across lots of different divisions, lots of different classes,” McDonough MacKenzie said. “I see that as program-wide being a priority, but also for my own research being a priority – to build that community within students that I’m able to work with in their Advanced Work, or as research assistants.”
Schroeder broadly agreed with that assessment: “At the moment, we’re not particularly integrated on our priorities there. We could integrate more of the curriculum around a common theme, and sustainable agriculture is a pretty good theme to be thinking about these days.”
These discussions about departmental priorities and community-building led, in large part, to discussions about the creation of a second staff position dedicated to building out educational possibilities at Purple Carrot Farm.
“The second position would be someone to oversee the farm as a STEM hub, and they would be teaching a few classes in the sciences while also managing research activities on the farm,” Bond said. There has also been discussion of the grant contributing to the construction of a timber-frame barn for livestock, as part of a long-term goal to “to reintroduce sheep and chickens to the campus,” in the words of the President’s email, but plans for the barn still remain in the early phases.
The holdup? The Federal Government.
The disbursal of this grant – awarded in January – is currently pending institutional responses to recent actions by the White House. On January 27th, the federal Office of Management and Budget issued a memorandum ordering that all “Federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by the executive orders, including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”
Since the memorandum’s publication, several district judge’s have ordered halts to the funding freeze, and the White House has since rescinded the memo. As of the writing of this article’s publication, the National Science Foundation has continued to permit access to its Award Cash Management Service, permitting grant recipients to access their awards.
Despite the funding freeze being halted, concerns are still widespread about the attitude of the federal government towards science funding generally. The possibility of a second freeze, or other hostile actions, loom large among the scientific research community.
“It’s thrown a spoke in the wheel of how most science happens in the U.S. It’s impossible to do serious science when the largest source of science funding is on the chopping block,” Bond said. “When your funding and ability to plan ahead is suddenly thrown into question, it’s really hard to do good science. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe the point is to cause as much chaos and confusion as possible to undercut our ability to do good science.”
“There’s a lot of trepidation right now,” Schroeder said. “Obviously you want to continue your own work in the best manner possible, but you also wonder, is it worth the amount of time and effort that it takes to get a project rolling and off the ground and to write proposals? There’s a lot of arbitrary decisions being made and you know it feels overall very, very anti-science now.”
The attitude of the current administration – which many scientists perceive as outright hostile – has been noted down to the very language used. Some researchers have questioned their approach to grant-writing; Schroeder and McDonough MacKenzie, for instance, have both questioned the inclusion of terminology such as “biodiversity,” “carbonate,” or “climate” in their federal grant proposals as being an obstacle to their acceptance.
At this point in time, it’s difficult for anyone – scientists, political analysts, both – to determine exactly which way the wind will blow. For scientific research, however, the prevailing attitude seems to be determined to push on despite the headlines.
“Being at Bennington and being in a place that’s really reaffirmed its commitment to sustainability, to supporting students, to getting this research done, and to being in an area where this work matters makes the morale here a lot higher than many of my colleagues who are really struggling,” said McDonough MacKenzie. “It’s helpful to know that the work that we’re doing right here on the ground is meaningful and has an audience and a community that cares about it.”
“We have a four year project, full of exciting investments and opportunities,” Bond said. “And we’re trying to figure out how you go forward into a four year project when there’s so much uncertainty coming out of DC. We’ve done our best to come up with a really solid plan to move us forward in increments so that we can build confidence at each step.”
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