Well, it's actually very much tied, I think, to the discussion of viewpoint diversity that we're having here. The idea that, 15 years ago, digital humanities were being, essentially, run out of smaller universities.... It was not just a Canadian thing. If you look at the universities in the States, for example, the most dominant universities in digital humanities were in places like Nebraska, not at Yale. One reason for that was the ability and freedom to experiment, which you had in smaller universities at the time.
I think the reason things changed is not that we're losing at tri-agency.... I'm in the humanities. I'm an English professor. I have had over a million dollars in grants during my career—which, for a humanist, is not a bad number—but like I said, I have an untenured adjunct professor who became the lead on a 40-year-old project now in digital humanities. Exactly to the point that my colleague was making, she brought it to us as an adjunct. Hiring her in our department in order to keep the five graduate students she brought—this $300,000 grant would increase my faculty complement, in the department that I chair, by about 12%—that's a huge ask compared to the University of Alberta or the University of Toronto.
I think the issue that's really coming.... The bigger universities in digital humanities were behind the curve in the beginning because these are big departments that are, in many fields, fairly consensus-based, and it was the smaller departments, where you had a bit more intellectual freedom to pursue things quickly and early, that developed the field. However, it's much easier for a big university to play catch-up, and it's absolutely the case that a big university is never going to lose an insight grant because they can't create a position for somebody. I think that's where it's coming.... It's not even the size of the equipment that you have; it's the scale.
Ironically, smaller universities.... The description of how block grants or how grant overhead is paid earlier is not anything that I am aware of. Normally, what happens in Canada is that you get a block grant that's given to your university based on your success in funding. I think that about $7 million is the tipping point. Below that, you get less money, and you also don't get a percentage the same way as you would at a big university, when it really should be the other way around because the cost of maintaining a grant at a small university in relation to the overall size of the pot is massively different.