Critique of Scientific American Article Attacking Grants.gov

By Bob Beattie

I had a professor who once said that if you want people to believe your argument, it is best to be accurate in the presentation of your facts. It seems to me that almost every statement George Musser makes in this recent SCIAM article is inaccurate. Is George taking a view of writing that if you tell a big enough distortion, people will believe it?

In the article, George asserts that IBM, Adobe Systems and the U.S. federal government have created technology that “retards human progress” by creating Grants.gov. He claims that “no one would have thought that the process of applying for scientific and scholarly grants could be made any more unwieldy and wasteful than it already was,” but that the joint effort of these three has “managed to achieve exactly that.”

I recently wrote a rebuttal you can find here and here is my drift:

I will be the first to say that Grants.gov has growing pains and I have done so at meetings of research administrators, including at FDP. Yet I do not mindlessly attack the process but try to focus on specific, fixable problems that I know about from using the system and talking to others who have done so. The Grants.gov staff and some agency users such as NIH are very responsive to suggestions.

George, on the other hand, makes inaccurate statements one after the other. Has he ever used the system, does he make any positive suggestion, what is his purpose? 

Is there anything useful in George's commentary? I cannot find any truth in it. I have been using Grants.gov for 3 years and I have taught some 60 groups at Michigan on how to use it. Michigan folks have prepared, and our grants office has submitted, some 1000 applications during that three years. We feel Grants.gov is a useful system. It has processed some 100,000 applications in three years so they must be doing something right.

So read my article and tell me what you think.

Comments

[Tim]

When I read George Musser's piece, I certainly didn't take it as an "article," but as a tongue-in-cheek op-ed.

That being said, my experience in three years of using Grants.gov in a 99.5% Mac environment was very difficult. The Citrix workaround for Macs was very time-consuming, both in accessing a remote server and in the instability of the files. Saving the file, per the instructions, with the same file name, caused crashes, with complete data loss each time. When we called Grants.gov tech support, they told us to save with a new filename each time (well why didn't the instructions mention that?!?). We eventually gave up and now the preferred solution is to commandeer the sole Windows machine in the building, which means the financial services officer is taken off her key duties to enter forms. In addition, our Sponsored Projects Office is bewildered at the long response time for Grants.gov to even confirm electronic receipt of a proposal.

Does Grants.gov retard our progress? Compared to the individual e-application sites of NSF, ED, and NIH-- the answer is yes.

Mr. Beattie, while your response to Musser's humorous column was thorough, it seemed harsh in light of Musser's obvious sense of humor.

[Bob Beattie]

I can appreciate humor, but not when it is based on statements that are not true. When we see the truth, and laugh, that is good humor. Musser's piece was not funny because it was not truthful. Anyone can make false statements funny. It was not satirical because it makes no point for correction. I was not harsh enough.

Regarding Macs, no Citrix since January, we have used IBM Forms Viewer for 100's of applications with NO problems.

Grants.gov does not retard our progress (toward what?) as it gives us a single system to learn, not 26, it gives us only a couple of forms. Moreover, it will allow many of us to create system to system versions, to integrate grants management on campus.

[George Musser]

Bob, I'm flattered that you took the trouble to respond to my sciam.com blog entry. It might, however, be more productive to address the substantive issues. The complaints I had with grants.gov were based on direct personal experience. I am not an expert on the system -- and that's precisely the point. An expert such as yourself might have no trouble submitting forms or figuring out which software company is responsible for which piece of the operation, but why should someone have to an expert? Call me Luddite, but I think a system should be dummy-proof. The vehemence and defensiveness of your response is, to me, indicative of the dismissive attitude toward ordinary users that produces so bad design in software, architecture, and other domains.