The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation on Tuesday announced its 101st class of fellows, which features 223 academics, scientists and artists in 55 different fields. It was a competitive year for the prestigious fellowship, which includes a monetary stipend. Reviewers looked through a pool of nearly 5,000 applicants—1,500 more than in 2025.
With federal research funding dwindling and private funding becoming precious in its absence, understanding who typically receives the Guggenheim fellowship—one of few fellowships open to humanities, art and social science applicants—is more important than ever, said Dominique Baker, an associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Delaware and an Inside Higher Ed columnist.
Alongside her co-collaborator and husband, RTI International research analyst Christopher Bennett, Baker looked at the institutional affiliation at the time of award for more than 30,000 fellowships awarded by the Guggenheim and five other humanities- and arts-friendly fellowship programs. What they discovered was clear: Where you work is a huge predictor of whether or not you’ll receive a fellowship award.
Dominique Baker (left) and Christoper Bennett (right) plan to release more of their research on fellowship recipients.
Southern Methodist University | Michael Bush
The University of California, Berkeley, along with Harvard, Columbia, Yale and Princeton Universities, are the top institutional affiliations for Guggenheim recipients. The top five for all the fellowships they looked at is similar, only swapping Princeton for Stanford University. About 30 percent of all recipients of Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences fellowships, Russell Sage Foundation fellowships and Radcliffe Fellowships worked at one of these top five institutions when they received the award.
Inside Higher Ed spoke with Baker over the phone about her research and how fellowship programs could adapt to benefit a more diverse group of academics and artists.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Can you situate this research in the political moment: Why is it so important right now to understand who is getting these grants?
A: Historically, people who work at colleges and universities have had fairly stable jobs—maybe they’re not making the most money ever, but it’s a really stable job, particularly if they have tenure. Over time—decades, centuries—we created a world where colleges and universities have provided fewer and fewer stable jobs. This is the shift to contingent faculty. There’s also the shift in closing down large programs—in often a very contentious way … We know that the choice to [close] based on the number of majors versus the number of students in classes is a highly political one, because often the humanities may have a larger number of students enrolled in the classes, but fewer majors.
So you’ve got all these ways that institutional support for research and scholarship has been hollowed out. At the same time, we start to see a larger reliance on the federal government and private sources of funding as the hollowing-out accelerates … Now we’ve reached a point where, by and large, [many] colleges and universities are providing the fewest number of secure jobs that they ever have, which means that a lot of scholars who would love to explore and think deeply and creatively about really important topics are instead having to cobble together, like, four adjunct positions in order to eat.
We also have, within the past year, an attack from the federal government on the research infrastructure of the United States. So that means we now have very few stable institutional jobs, almost nonexistent federal funding, and then private funding—which in general has never really been expansive—is the only leg of a three-legged stool that is kind of propping up [research]. This is why it is incredibly important to pay attention to how private funders are allocating money.
Q: Your research looks at the institutional affiliation for the Guggenheim fellows, rather than characteristics like alma mater, career stage, race, gender or other demographics. How much explanatory power do you think institutional affiliation has on its own versus serving as a proxy for those other factors?
A: So I think it’s twofold. No. 1 … there’s this really good research where they looked and said, “If you have to look at the stature of a person, their research agenda, all of that kind of stuff—is it about terminal degree or where they work?” They found that it was where they work. Because of that, the first thing that we released from this [research project] focused on where people worked. We actually do have evidence that shows that there is more explanatory power in that.
The secondary thing is that where someone works is directly proportionate to all of these [other factors]. Things like structural racism, sexism and all these sorts of things impact every level of society. When we say that the people that are most likely to win these awards work at Harvard, that automatically suggests some of the racial and ethnic demographics. Those are all tangled up within where people work because we have decades of research that shows that where someone works is directly related to things like their race, their gender, where they got their terminal degree, etc.
Q: Your report mentions that fellowship award evaluators are using institutional prestige as a sort of shortcut to determine worthy candidates, and that becomes self-reinforcing. The more awards an institution wins, the higher its prestige, and then its faculty win more awards. In an ideal world without that shortcut, how would these applicants be evaluated?
A: We said that one of the ways this can work, one of the mechanisms, can be prestige. We wanted to make sure that people are thinking about the fact that [prestige] doesn’t have to just be about the name on the CV. It can also be that better-resourced institutions have all of these other things at their fingertips. They provide application assistance to their faculty. They provide in-house reviews of materials. There are a ton of resources that these places can provide so that even if [a reviewer] says, “I’m going to look at these two proposals. Oh, that proposal is more polished,” or “that proposal aligns more with what we’re looking for,” that could be because of all of the resources one of those people’s employers has to create a proposal that they are looking for.
So with that said, how do we think about how this could be done? There are [foundations] that do things like: above a certain threshold, [a proposal] is considered to be funding-eligible, and then random assignment happens to determine who the winner is. But that can create issues … you will have wide variability in what gets funded from year to year because that’s just how lotteries work. You’d have to think about things like, do you do a lottery within certain fields? Do you weight it by certain things? [A lottery] is actually a real thing that a United Kingdom agency does for some of their grants, and they actually just recently put something out about the fact that it has increased the diversity within their pool of who they fund.
It sounds small, but I do think it would be massive for the selection committee to take into consideration the resources available to someone. [Without that], you wind up in a space where the Guggenheim, for example, can give someone $50,000 who could have gotten $50,000 from their university, instead of funding someone who can’t get $5 from their university.
The third thing I’ll point out is that … several fellowships are residential. And with a residential component, you get all of these really cool cohort pieces, which is awesome, etc., etc. It also means [an additional expense for the recipient]. As an example, if I wanted to apply for the Stanford [Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences fellowship], I would have to find housing in Stanford, Calif., or the surrounding area, and I would have to find some way to pay my mortgage back in Delaware.
Q: It seems like there’s also just a practical issue that a lot of these programs run into, which is that there are a lot of applicants and not a ton of time to vet them. If you don’t want to use the shortcut of institutional prestige, are there practical solutions for getting around that?
A: I think it depends on how many resources you want to put into your selection process. Part of the reality is that things are messy with humans and that’s always going to be the case. So regardless, people are always going to use shorthand for understanding how the world works. So the question becomes: How do you train people to think about the shorthands they’re using and whether they imply the information they think they’re implying?
Q: You mention this project is ongoing. What can we look forward to next?
A: We have data on the Institute for Advanced Study, which is the granddaddy of the residential scholar experiences in the United States. It’s where Einstein fled to when he was escaping the Nazis. We didn’t bring it into this essay because we only have so much space and it has more natural sciences and mathematics than social sciences and history. But that’ll be coming in. We also have terminal degrees for a good chunk of [Guggenheim fellows and other recipients] and so we’re excited to explore that a bit more and see what patterns we can find.
(This article has been updated to correct the number and type of fellowships awarded.)
