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[totoro]

If I were unemployed, or at an institution that regularly grants leave for faculty to take external fellowships, I would be a very competitive applicant for some of the relatively few such fellowships available in my field. And I have been very successful in such applications in the past. But my institution will not allow me to take leave (funded or not) for many years to come. "Apply for more grants" really doesn't help here.

It's much harder to get a grant if you are unemployed. In many cases it makes you simply ineligible. But the original complaint was that some people had private funds for travel and the OP didn't. So I was thinking about the grant application I wrote but in the end was ineligible to submit here because I didn't have ongoing funding. It would have funded research trips between the collaborators on the project. And even if teaching there are plenty of breaks when these can be scheduled. They would be one week to one month visits.

[totoro]

For the record I'm unemployed though I have a campus office and am called "Visiting Fellow" and various things are being dangled in front of me. I was tenured once upon a time. But I quit.

[spyzowin]

Feel free to accuse me of whining.

Okay. Whiner.

I'll start by saying that my institution generally used to cover about 50% of all of my travel whether I did one, two, or eight conferences. Generally, they were happy to do this for solo papers at well-established international conferences, but I spoke at so many such conferences that travel was a fairly significant monetary burden.

Obviously, you should apply for more grants (which is something I did).

You could always tell your spouse to find a job, any job, or barring that, you could find a spouse and then tell your spouse to get a job, any job. Then you could use your spouse's income to indulge yourself in conference travel, or barring that, you could examine your family's habits... do you go to the movies, go to restaurants, go on holiday? If so, cancel these activities to pay for conference travel.  While I was making the push to tenure and promotion, the entire family made sacrifices to ensure that my bid worked, but then again, my spouse worked.

Or you could obtain a stack of credit cards and go heavily into debt (which is also something I did) in order to speak at a lot of conferences in order to increase your profile so that you could get early tenure and promotion.  Oh but you are tenured, so why don't you do what I do now, which is to cut your conference travel in half? I only do three disciplinary conferences per year now.

And since you're now a permanent fixture at your university, why not start to focus on conferences that will help your institution? You know, AAC&U, WAC/WIC, Accreditation, Honors, larger administrative concerns like that? If you deliver papers at those sorts of things, your institution will probably pay the entire bill, not just a small portion. I go to three or four such things a year, and all of my expenses are always covered, in some cases, by the conference as part of some institutional membership or another.  The publication opportunities that come from these sorts of conferences are also pretty real. It's good to show that you're interested in the nuts and bolts of an institution, especially if a future promotion to full professor will be based on a vote by some institution-wide committee of the most senior faculty.  Where I work, they want to see evidence of an international scholarly reputation, but also evidence that you're good for the institution itself, that you've taken an active interest in its smooth operation.

[grasshopper]

Amnirov, you are a maverick with money. A long-range plan, wide-reaching goals, and mountains of debt.

You should spearhead my socialist funding revolution.

[t_r_b]

But the original complaint was that some people had private funds for travel and the OP didn't. So I was thinking about the grant application I wrote but in the end was ineligible to submit here because I didn't have ongoing funding. It would have funded research trips between the collaborators on the project. And even if teaching there are plenty of breaks when these can be scheduled. They would be one week to one month visits.

Right. I'm thinking that funding for trips to visit collaborators would be of little use in fields (read: the humanities) where collaborative work is rare (or even discouraged).

Saying that there are resources in your field that might address the OP's situation is of little benefit when the OP is in a completely different field where said resources are not available (and IIRC, mignon is in the humanities).

The simple fact is that in many fields (perhaps especially in the humanities), the lack of research funding gives an advantage to those with private resources, and/or those whose family situations don't limit their mobility. The fact that research funding is more plentiful in other fields does not mitigate this basic unfairness.

[totoro]

This was a grant application to the Australian Research Council. They are open to all fields. If I needed to travel to an archive or whatever I could have put that into the grant application instead. If you are a teaching faculty member then you have 3 months in the summer when you can do that without having to also get buyout money. I was actually trying to get them to pay me a salary too. It didn't happen. In the US there are many foundations that are willing to fund that kind of research. We have few of those in Australia. I know that getting an ARC (or NSF or NEH in the US) grant is very hard too. All I am saying is that the expectation at the US R-1 university was that they'd give us about as much funding as the OP mentioned but we were then expected to raise more. They didn't expect you to pay out of your own pocket. Of course, academia could be organized differently in theory. But it isn't.

[post_functional]

Feel free to accuse me of whining.

Okay. Whiner.

I'll start by saying that my institution generally used to cover about 50% of all of my travel whether I did one, two, or eight conferences. Generally, they were happy to do this for solo papers at well-established international conferences, but I spoke at so many such conferences that travel was a fairly significant monetary burden.

Obviously, you should apply for more grants (which is something I did).

You could always tell your spouse to find a job, any job, or barring that, you could find a spouse and then tell your spouse to get a job, any job.

You have a job.  Will you marry me?

[mignon]

Thanks for the perspective (and polyamorous offer).  I don't think there's anything that can/should be done about such situations--after all, like is full of inequalities, including ones more serious than this--so I was basically just articulating frustration.  Aka whining.