Some Kind of Numbness
A brief story of a grant application failure.
In the wake of this week’s Bondi Beach mass shooting in which 15 people died the “after action review” or post-mortem has raised a key intelligence question: Why was this terrorist attack not foreseen and prevented?
Public outcry has focused on the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation which oversees domestic threat intelligence on ideologically motivated violent extremists and terrorists. This is not unexpected. Few people know what ASIO actually does or how it fits within the Australian Intelligence Community. For many Baby Boomer activists and artists it was a rite of passage to get your ASIO file declassified. Media coverage was often critical: ABC’s 4 Corners would run stories every 5 years or so with former employees who had turned whistleblower.
This is not a story about ASIO. Nor is it a story about triumphalist winning.
In late 2023, I began to put together a Postdoc scheme grant application for another Australian Intelligence Community agency. This was for the Office of National Intelligence. ONI (formerly known as the Office of National Assessment) dealt with strategic intelligence: the high-level integration of varied information on nationally significant threats and transnational issues of significance. The ONI Postdoc scheme was focused; innovative; and had very clear paperwork. I dealt with it in two separate roles in which I made Conflict of Interest disclosures. For one university, I was an Applicant. For another, I was a PreAward Senior Grants Officer who worked on and shepherded their highly confidential applications to submission, and who then provided feedback to ONI for their quality assurance.
When you put together a competitive grant application there is a general process that you go through. You have a focused research program and a publications track record that is assessed “relative to opportunity”. You read the scheme guidelines and focus on what its funding priorities are. The ONI Postdoc scheme’s paperwork was very well designed on this: it was easy to read and to understand. I had an MSc, an MA, a PhD and both past relevant academic publications and journalism - so I knew already about the particular topics. My garage and Amazon Kindle software had relevant books: a personal research library.
The specific topic I chose was called radicalisation (onshore and offshore).
I had a long-term relationship with a valued PhD Supervisor who agreed to act as the nominated institutional Partner Investigator. This was really significant: grant applications are often assessed also in terms of mentor-mentee and knowledge translation opportunities as well as institutional support. I developed a specific hypothesis (H1); a null hypothesis if it was wrong (H0); and even considered several rival hypotheses (H2, H3). I did a literature search on Amazon; in several university libraries; and considered my own background in various cultic or new religious movement contexts as well. The proposed grant needed to be innovative. I looked at several very detailed software packages for data coding and analysis: I negotiated quotes with several suppliers. I also considered my valued colleagues and networks that I was part of: who I could cite; who I might be able to also work with in a collegial way.
The Australian Intelligence Community would be a policy client for any publicly available translational research outputs. After considering relevant journals for potential target publications I narrowed down the list of AIC clients beyond the ONI that I might approach. These included ASIO and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission. In the United States form of grantmanship it is very usual to speak with grant or research managers in federal government agencies to establish contact and to hone the final grant application to reflect their research priorities.
Usually, you scope and write the proposal including the literature review, research project, methodology, and benefits sections. The grant’s budget often “falls out” of these scoped activities. But it is here that I began to run into some unforeseen problems. The people I was dealing with administratively had a Business Development background rather than PreAward grants. This introduces some nuances. BD people deal primarily with contract research and with tailored consulting. Their budget emphasis is in part on having enough margin to both make the project profitable to run in terms of resources allocation and competitive neutrality rules (in Australia, public sector universities cannot use this tax entity status to outbid commercial firms), and to ensure value capture. This was the first “showstopper” in a project management sense where I floundered.
The grant proposal went through four rounds of budget review and approval. This is done using university costing models and spreadsheets that are rather like what a sell-side junior investment banker would use to price a transaction. In the first two rounds I went back and forth with the PI to scope the project and the resources needed. In the next two rounds I made significant cuts in order to create the margin to please the BD people. “Trimming the fat” is normal in order to get a competitive grant funded - as the funder may only give you 60-70% of your proposed budget request anyway, and you usually have to be in the top 5% of submitted applications for many major schemes.
The counterintuitive aspect here - which you only see as a PreAward grants administrator when you work on many applications across a range of fields and disciplines and not as an academic working on your own grant proposal - is that most submissions will fail. It is normal to cut salary allocations and resources. Overseas conference travel for something like the International Studies Association is also prohibitively expensive: I went to Toronto in 2014 for ISA, and knocked back 2013, 2015, and 2022 confirmed papers because I did not have access internally to travel budgets and could not fund it myself.
The second “showstopper” occurred in the Authority to Submit stage. I thought I had final budget approval. The grant proposal went to the relevant Responsible Decision-Maker at the Faculty level for their approval. The Authority to Submit was withdrawn - there was both some misunderstanding and mis-communication. I had wasted 3 months at that point and was still to write and finish the actual proposal - what was more important was the budget commitment - and how I had gutted the project already to its very minimum to ensure the institutional clawback of resources via margin. This however was still not enough. I have seen this happen only a few times during my 17-year career working in research administration / management. It was not the first time it had happened to me as a researcher. It was still a significant emotional shock to experience. I was not just proposing a single grant proposal on an important defence, intelligence and national security issue. I saw this as the first grant in actually building a capability at the university - having worked administratively for many Centres, Institutes, and consultants with high charge-out day rates, I knew how this was all structured, and could even read both the contracts and relevant background and projected created intellectual property clauses.
This was the second final grant proposal that I worked on in 2019 to 2024 that was unsuccessful. The second was a different Postdoc application on indoctrinability and belief systems that focused on reactionary politics in the far right. For several years, I had immersed myself in a range of websites - the now deplatformed VDare; American Renaissance; Occidental Observer; Countercurrents; The Jolly Heretic; The Unz Review; IM1776; Arktos Media; Imperium Press; and others. None of this period of research has yet been academically published although I have referred to aspects of it in presentations to the Australian International Political Economy Network and other scholarly networks. As I was gathering this material, there were of course much more experienced rival researchers who got into print, notably the historian Quinn Slobodian and his recent book Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right (London: Allen Lane, 2025).
In retrospect even if I had submitted the competitive grant to ONI for consideration I might not have been funded. The above mentioned other grant applications all had key ideas - and all were not funded. When you understand how this all works - and how you must get the sequencing of the 5-year “up or out” Postdoc or Early Career Academic phase (now extended for some funders to 10-years in length) - you will see why I failed. I did not have new post-PhD academic publications. I did not have my peers’ extensive networks. I do not have the usual Group of 8 elite university background - despite MA and PhD conferred degrees from one, and working at three others. Few people even remember the former Disinformation website that I wrote for and was site editor during two key periods over 1998-2008 (with the late Russ Kick taking over editorially for an interim period). If I mention my new religious movement background then this usually makes me persona non grata: you can study this as a researcher so long as you are objective and not emic; and you certainly shouldn’t try to apply relevant insights to your life, such as to deal with “lived experience” trauma and to try to develop metacognition and other life skills.
When the Responsible Decision-Maker closed the stage gate for my Authority to Submit to proceed I wrote them an email. It was really to make one essential point that the BD people did not understand. The internal conversation about competitive grants, contract research and other institutionally backed funding is often about what is called the value proposition: why do we fund this and what is our risk-reward return profile for doing so? This is the importance of the benefits section. Most projects are fitted into the corporate finance models of Net Present Value or Internal Rate of Return. Maybe there is a further discussion about valuation; about building relationships; or even being an initial loss-leader in order to test a potential market; certainly not in the Eric Ries Lean Startup entrepreneurial sense of building a Minimum Viable Product - to get your first customers and to harness network effects to scale. That is Silicon Valley talk. How many unicorns does Australia have? (One: Canva). How many of those came from non-venture capital environments? (None.)
Defence, intelligence, and national security research is very difficult to get funded. It’s a small community: we all know each-other; we all see each-other at the same conferences; and we all celebrate when you get your book published and out there. If you are reading this from that research community then you know that I am a bit of an outsider compared to most people. My work doesn’t fit the NPV or IRR model - and in some cases such as the reactionary / far right oriented work mentioned above it remains either unpublished or I have sat on it for years. If you read the sequence of the grant proposals then you can see anticipation of things like the January 6th protests or the second Trump administration’s embrace of economic sanctions, tariffs, and a more mercantilist-driven multipolar world. I simply was not convincing enough to the respective funding committees.
That is not what “building a cumulative track record” usually means and nor does it fit the prevailing “publish or perish” model that most institutions use to harness Postdocs - and then either promote them or let them go onto other opportunities. It also may come across as sour grapes: what I am trying to do here is to share with you a little bit of an insider’s view about the grant proposals that both don’t get funded and don’t even get submitted - the equivalent in academic publishing of the research that doesn’t validate the prevailing theory or accepted narrative - and that gets left in the drawer. This is the Cassandra Complex: you can see the emergent future, but (again) you do not necessarily convince others, and nor does it fit into the marketing / public relations playbook that is desired to drive growth in student enrolment numbers.
In one of the final lines to the Responsible Decision-Maker I wrote something like this: “The value proposition of this work is to help prevent future terrorist attacks. This doesn’t fit NPV or IRR model calculations of a 5-6% return and being cashflow positive. It is a strategic, targeted investment. Your decision is very disappointing. When a future terrorist attack happens that might possibly have been prevented, please maybe reflect on what you have done here. I won’t be thinking about it.”
In truth, even if my grant application had been funded it would likely not have been able to prevent the Bondi mass shootings or the 15 tragic deaths that have occurred. It would be very arrogant and wrong for me to think so: a grandiosity schema (Jeffrey Young, Schema Therapy). There might have been some academic journal publications that would have been with their major publishers - read by maybe at most several hundred people. I would have gone to a couple of conferences - if ISA 2014 was any guide (and it was a great collaborative team facilitated by the College of Wooster’s Professor Jeffrey S. Lantis) I would have spoken to maybe 10 people in the conference room.
All of this emergent body of work would have been based on Open Source Intelligence that was publicly available. Relevant insights would have been shared with the Australian Intelligence Community agencies - and maybe fed to relevant intelligence analysts as one (of many) methodological inputs into their analytic product for policymakers. Analysts assess and evaluate; policymakers decide, prioritise, and implement. But it will now forever remain a ghostly, never-realised counterfactual: shadow research.
What is often not observed is the cumulative adverse psychological impact that this has on researchers (of any field or discipline). Professor Inger Mewburn (aka The Thesis Whisperer) has referred to the tournament theory informed landscape as being like the (Academic) Hunger Games books and films. Having worked in research administration / management for 17 years I have seen the differential, longitudinal outcomes involved for a large cohort across multiple Australian institutions and overseas. Overreliance on federal government monopsonies will not work. Community and philanthropic partners often are unable to make significant cash financial commitments. Industry can be both a valued co-designer and will probably use any project created intellectual property more effectively. Global publishers provide valuable services, networks, and digital platforms - and use “work for hire” equivalent standard contracts that unlike other industries do not pay royalty income streams to academics or institutions.
All of these “wicked problems” are well known; all of them have been debated for decades (along with innovation and periodic renewal of funding systems). None of this gets fixed due to complexity, arbitrageurs, free riders, moral hazard, adverse selection, and coordination problems. It has taken up three years with my non-EAP clinical psychologist to discuss this academic funding landscape and its well known vicissitudes (not unlike Metallica in Some Kind of Monster). Some people are very successful; others are caught in a “valley of death” and become failures to launch beyond an initial first stage. The competitive grant proposals sit in unread PDFs or in desk drawers largely forgotten - like the slush piles of book publishers or the “development hell” of Hollywood’s optionality-driven film script market. It’s a broad peril of any creative industry that develops both background and project created intellectual property or intangible assets. Everyone knows about it - yet it’s the status quo - the way things are always done. It never gets fixed.
When news broke of the Bondi mass shooting I felt initially sad. Over subsequent days I watched the Australian and the international media go through a very predictable narrative arc that is now - most appropriately - about remembering and honouring the 15 victims and their lives. I reflected on the above unsubmitted grant proposal and decided to share this as a “lesson learned” that others might benefit from. I knew both the academic terrain and how the institutional administrative processes worked: I still got (relatively) blindsided. What I express above is known in behavioural economics as loss aversion. It was just one grant submission for them; it was a loss of trust for me and a significant transaction cost (along with all of the other grant applications I developed and submitted to various Australian and international institutions) which ultimately meant that it was a complete waste of time.
I have to take the sole blame here: I didn’t have the new academic publications out post-PhD and so I would very likely have been knocked back - no matter my Bayesian “priors” in terms of my cumulative track record “relative to opportunity” or the respective merits (or not) of the grant application’s specific project. If you don’t get the sequencing absolutely right - and this also requires institutional support to achieve - then you simply will not be successful in getting funded. It’s very easy for this to fall apart or to go off-point - and to get derailed. By now I am very used to it. It is not Some Kind of Monster anymore. Rather, it is some kind of numbness.
If you have learned something from this then that’s really great. You have to let it go.