David Velleman (NYU) writes with the following interesting information about the Newcombes and the selection process; I would particularly urge graduate students and young philosophers to heed the points about presenting one's work to non-specialists. Professor Velleman writes:
Having served on the final selection committee for the Newcombe Fellowships (though not in the most recent years of the competition), I'd like to add some background to your comments on the distribution of the awards.
The Newcombes were funded by an endowment from a nonacademic family, but the inspiration for them came from the philosopher Robert Adams, who was a friend and personal advisor to the family, having been (as I recall) a neighbor when he was young. Bob's role in the early years of the program may explain why it elicited more applications, and better applications, from philosophers than from students in other disciplines. To my knowledge, there has always been a philosopher on the final selection committee, but these days the vast majority of applications come from English, History, Anthropology, Politics, and so on.
In my experience, the applications from philosophers look weak by comparison. The very best applicants from other disciplines display truly stunning feats of scholarship, fieldwork, and intellectual synthesis; they write vivid and stimulating descriptions of their projects; and they can make the significance of those projects clear to nonspecialists. In my years on the committee, its membership was highly inter-disciplinary, but everyone could discuss the merits of all the applications -- except those from philosophers. When philosophical applications came under discussion, the other committee members would often turn to me and say, "Can you explain the point of this -- if there is one?" There were years when the committee said, in effect, "Well, we want to give some fellowships to philosophers -- tell us which ones."
I'd like to be able to say that these remarks manifested a prejudice against philosophy, but they didn't. The other members of the committee were widely read, highly intelligent, and open-minded. The fact is that in the context of the entire appllicant pool, I too found the Philosophy applications unimpressive, sometimes embarrassingly so. I did my best to advocate for the philosophers, but it was an uphill climb, even in my own mind.
Now, part of the problem may be that graduate students in other disciplines have more experience writing grant applications. Anthropology students, for example, have to apply for funds to support their dissertation fieldwork, and the Anthroplogy applications were among the most impressive. But our applicants tended to do poor job of presenting themselves even when compared with the applicants in English, where grant opportunities are just as rare as in Philosophy.
Another part of the problem may be that doing original philosophy is simply harder than, for example, doing fieldwork in a region or archive that no one else has studied. Ph.D. candidates in Philosophy are understandably immature when compared with candidates in other fields.
Still, I have to attribute much of the problem to our discipline's indifference to making itself understood outside a fairly narrow region of academia. The Philosophy applicants came across as not having bothered to explain themselves. I managed to explain what they were up to, but the mere fact that I had to explain it, when the applicants from other disciplines had done their own explaining, put me at an obvious disadvantage as advocate for the Philosophy applications.
I don't know whether our insularity contributes to our underrepresentation among recipients of other national honors. I suspect that it does.
I wonder what others who have served on these kinds of selection committees think? Non-anonymous comments will be very strongly preferred.
