Now, to the topic at hand, in my personal (albeit limited) academic expertise on the postgrad level it seems that "national return" or "interest" are merely buzzwords for cutting back on science which does not promise publicitiy or immediate financial return (terms which have become interchangeable in today's academic world). This also finds variation in the popular sentiment of "kill the liberal arts, what are those time wasters good for" or "if you want to do science, what is the harm in presenting yourself to sponsors and have them pay for your research while the uni still takes full credit for it?"
Ich bin vorgeladen!
Treating science like business, IE only allowing concentration on narrow fields with short term benefit is what I call very ideological.
Due to funding not keeping up with the cost of technology, budget cuts that force universities to rely on overhead rates (dont ask... ), and the Red Queen nightmare that is getting tenure etc, we have been doing this for years. We use NSF grants to obtain equipment and money to fund a post-doc in order to finish the short term narrowly defined project that will net the maximum number of publications (which in turn, makes obtaining grant money easier) per unit time.
These criteria are the same criteria that the NSF uses to weed out applications. Here is how it works.
Step 1: My research involves the functional morphology of prey-capture and predatory behavior of dragonfly larvae, with an emphasis on intraguild predation (predators killing off the competition), and how this affects species occupancy in ponds (yes, baby dragonflies are aquatic. Yes they are the insect version of sharks. See image below)
http://6legs2many.files.wordpress.com/2 ... llulid.jpg
Step 2: My research is driven by pure curiosity, like most basic research. Sure it has OTHER applications (for example, Dragonflies are good bio-control agents for mosquitoes, and knowing which species are likely to exist in a given body of water and what their predatory efficacy on them is, might be good) but I dont actually give a damn.
Step 3: The people reviewing grants for the NSF are like me. They are not civil servants, they are scientists who rotate in on a volunteer basis. They dont give a shit either.
Step 4: The NSF gets WAY more grant applications than it can fund (funding rate is 5-10%). So it has to have some way of weeding out applications. Formatting requirements are one way. If something is misformatted, they toss it. The other way is through the "Broader Impacts Assessment". In other words "how does this research impact the broader community in ways other than knowledge generation?". Again, no one actually cares, but it is a hurdle we have to overcome. This things fall into several categories. I will provide several euphamisms we (and I) like to use, some of which, indicated with * were ones used by a former NSF program director in my department, while she rolled her eyes. Others, indicated with $ are actual problems with the broader impact assessment and what it can create. Each followed by an explanation.
economic competitiveness:
$ Not! Basic Research. Basically, unless you are an economist, it is not possible to predict how basic research will enhance economic competitiveness. If you can, you are not doing basic research anymore. What actually happens is that the researcher must put her or his fever dreams down on paper and make it look like they are not doing basic research, while everyone knows they are doing basic research. However, if someone wants to go this route, they have to have a positive track record of following through in some way. For example, by giving a talk at an industrial biomimicry conference. "Yes.... *shifty eyes*... my research on division of labor in ants TOTALLY shows that ants have the potential to be mimicked in the organization of human resources" (hint: No it really doesn't, but that is what the HUGE biomimicry symposium at ASU a few years ago was for. A huge dog and pony show for the NSF, interspersed with people who were not doing basic research)
health and welfare
* Curing Cancer. See above with biocontrol of mosquitoes and west nile. That one actually is real. The problem is, it is overused. If you are doing genetics research, you can often spin it into being relevant to cancer or genetic diseases. A good portion of the Nasonia Genome Annotation project was spun this way (I know because I worked on it). Nasonia is a genus of Parasitoid wasp (think: Xenomorph). However, because of their haplodiploid sex-determination system (males are haploid, and are produced from unfertilized eggs, females are diploid from fertilized eggs), they can be used in knockout studies very easily, or to study the propagation of genetic mutations within a population. My old lab was studying the evolution of speciation, but this is how it was spun to the NSF.
scientific literacy
* Engaging Preschoolers. Basically, you spin your research as being something you can involve schoolchildren in. This one is used a lot for wildlife research of various sorts, because what little kid is not fascinated by bringing snakes into the classroom, or watching tadpoles become frogs? None. They all like that stuff. So you basically promise to get kids to help out with specimen collection, or to do the elementary school lecture circuit, or put cool videos up on youtube. The Dance Your Dissertation competition is, if you read between the lines. Incidentally, they are funny so I will leave some examples.
Since when do slightly rapey fruit flies know how to break dance?
Dancing Hugging Hemoglobin Subunits. The early years.
partnerships between academia and industry
$ Conflicts of Interest. It is not basic research if you are being engaged in any sort of design of application where there may not be a conflict of interest. For example, if you are partnered with 3M to come up with a way to biomimic gecko feet as a sheet-adhesive, cool, but it is not basic research. However, if you are examining the effects of a pesticide on frogs.... oh dear.
promotion of scientific progress
Carl Saganing. This is not a bad thing. However, scientists are often not very charismatic, also it sees only physicists can pull it off. Biologists who pull it off usually go the route of Publicly Notorious Atheist, because our work often runs us straight into the problem of theodicy, and H.P. Lovecraft/H. R. Giger.
*Public Databases. These are a good thing. Basically put your raw data and ancillary observations up in either your own database, or one that has been preconfigured for public access. One of the reasons I stopped working with frogs altogether (there were several) is because unless you have a research station with 30 years of data on frog reproductive events and a cabin that grad students can live in right next to a pond for 8 weeks, if you go out looking for egg masses, you will fail (unless you get very lucky, and have paid a horde of 8 year olds to scour a pond-rich camping area in a national forest, yes I had permits). The only information you have about frog breeding is the season and what general conditions they breed in. For example, the best I can get from other sources is stuff like "Rana pipiens breeds in the spring and autumn during or following rain". But they are actually much more specific than that because the eggs are only eggs for 2-3 days, and masses of 10k eggs are a huge resource investment on the part of females and they want to make sure they optimize the timing of their breeding, while not putting themselves in physiological stress or high predation risk. The stars must align, Cthuhlu must arise from the depths.
What one actually needs is "Rana pipiens breeds in the spring and autumn, when temperature is between X and Y, atmospheric pressure is between M and N, Humidity is between A and B, during Such and Such moon phase. Under these conditions males will call. However, ovulation is triggered by [different set of conditions] and breeding must occur within W-Z weeks after the ovulation conditions, while male calling conditions are met, otherwise females will reabsorb her eggs"
This sort of information needs to be available. The problem is, it takes years of work by a LOT of people to get this done for one species. It needs to be a concerted effort, and one research team does Jack and Shit toward it. Someone COULD collate everything if a lot of research groups did it, but they would need to know the databases are there, and where they are. There are only a few such databases that are well known enough to matter, and most of these are run by the feds, specifically the NIH for gene sequences and data like that, and the USGS. There are a few more run at the state level, mostly with geological and hydrological information like a registry of vernal pools in Pennsylvania.
national defence
Why Not the DoD? Seriously. You dont have to design a better killbot to qualify. Lots of research in psychology, biology, and physics has nothing to do with designing better ways to kill people that the DoD can still find useful.
Psych: Research into the neurological basis of aggression and/or PTSD for example. Screening protocols to weed out sociopaths the military does not want.
Biology: In the ultimate irony, a lot of epidemiologists and infectious disease research is funded this way, leaving the rest of us to beat our heads against the wall that is the public health category. The reasons for this are obvious given the existence biological weapons and naturally occurring pandemic diseases. However, this is for the basic stuff. The genetics of HIV or... Ebola etc. The stuff with more direct medical applications (like finding a cure) gets shunted over to the NIH. The reason this happens is because the DoD has a LOT more money than the NSF.
Physics: Long-term investment in the toolkit of engineers.
The problem with this proposal is that it enshrines a semi-informal dog and pony show designed to cope with the NSF being way underfunded into law. A law wherein the reports from program directors will be scrutinized by the legislature, and if found to be against the political interests of certain lawmakers, will lead to funding cuts. The GOP has been doing this for decades. Screaming about how the NSF funds research into forced copulation in ducks etc. Now imagine the public health category. Someone is doing research on global climate change and the implications for the spread of disease carrying mosquitoes. They will make political hay about the climate change, and this will lead to more regulation and a priori research bans. Like they did in South Carolina, when the state banned the use of updated equations when projecting future sea level changes WRT civic planning. Or when the Harper Government made the census voluntary (to prevent social science research) and gag-ordered scientists.
Someone might say "Well you should not have the Dog and Pony Show!"
Of course we shouldn't. But it is the only way the system can work as it stands. Want to eliminate it? Stop cutting university budgets and treating universities like a business (more on that in a minute). Raise the funding for the NSF by say... 300% (again, more on that in a minute)
University Budgets and Grant Funding.
OK. How are these two connected? Overhead and Tenure. Here is how it works. Universities have a few sources of funding. Tuition, State budgeting, Alumni Donations and Endowments, and a portion of all incoming research funds from state and federal sources over a certain amount (small grants dont apply). Basically, whenever the NSF (or any other federal agency) funds your grant proposal, they tack on an amount of money equal to a rate negotiated between the NSF and the University (for example, if your proposal is for 100k, they pay out an additional 46% at my institution for a total of 146k). This is called Overhead. It is the contribution of the NSF to the running expenses of the university itself. Keeping the lights on, maintaining common equipment like the gene sequencer and SEM in the basement, and paying Draal who operates the Great Machine. That sort of thing.
In Ye Olden Days, this worked. It was OK. Universities had sufficient funding that these extra monies were nice, but not necessary. A professor could go his entire career without needing a HUGE grant from a federal agency so long as they published regularly. The publications got prestige for the university, which increased the ranking, which allowed the university to charge more for tuition without anyone giving a damn, which allowed the university to expand. The motive was not profit, but rather "we are badass, and shall show the world!", because at this time, the university upper administration came from the faculty rather than some dude with MBA. If students cheated on exams or simply failed, you could give them the boot because you were not operating as a business and the retention rate did not matter.
When funding from the state gets cut there are a few things that happen if it goes on long enough either with more cuts, or funding never gets returned to commensurate levels.
The first is a paradigm shift. Universities stop being a curiosity and prestige driven enterprise, and become a money-making enterprise out of a sense of self-preservation. Now, students have to be "retained" so they keep paying tuition. This means things like academic dishonesty is met with academic probation and failure is met with more academic probation. Students need to be attracted, not on the basis of badassery on the part of the faculty (though that is still some of it), but by the university providing a credentialing service, so there is grade inflation that is all-but-mandated. If grades are too low, TAs get in trouble, that sort of thing. This is bad, but secondary to my point.
Tuition gets raised. But there is a disincentive to do this because students get priced out and get pissed off. If the tuition is not accompanied by an increase in prestige, ranking goes down, you attract fewer students.
Increased reliance on Contract Faculty. Lecturers and others who are not on the Tenure Track and who can be dismissed and rehired as befits the whim of administrators, and who work for Much Less than tenured faculty, have no job security, high work loads, and no benefits. These are people with PhDs, or people who are in their PhD apprenticeships. Graduate students fall into this category, often taking on unpaid (or not-paid-extra) duties as teaching lab coordinators and other administrative tasks on top of doing their own research, taking their own courses, and teaching. This leads to more graduate students being taken in than the post-PhD tenure-track job market can support, leading to a self-perpetuating supply of Contract Faculty and post-doctoral researchers, forever chasing after the Holy Grail that is a tenure track position.
Alumni Whoring. Self Explanatory
Grants. All of the Grants. Aaaand they can "encourage" tenure-track faculty to apply for grants. By this I of course mean attaching a dollar value to obtaining tenure. By which I mean "if you dont bring in enough grant money, we will not give you tenure and find someone who WILL bring in grant money". How much is enough? That varies, but here we had one dude who failed to get tenure (despite actual protest from the entire faculty of the college of science) after bringing in a grant worth 1.5 million dollars. Though we DID just get a new provost (MBA holding son of a pig) who reflexively denied tenure to everyone who came up that year as a way of asserting his power. In general, several hundred thousand dollars over six years SHOULD be sufficient if the university hierarchy is stable and you are not at a really big institution. Which is no mean feat considering the funding rate on grants (again, 5-10%).
So because EVERY member of the faculty has to do this... WAY more grant applications come in than can ever be funded. Leading to the Dog and Pony Show.
I think we can all agree that this situation is Absolutely Fucked. So how to fix it? There are two solutions. One state, one federal (at least, these are the solutions that do not involve armed revolution or mass crucifixion in front of student unions).
State solution. Raise fucking taxes and increase education funding so that this clusterfuck does not need to be maintained anymore.
Federal Solution: Triple (or more) the budgets of the various granting bodies of the federal government. This seems like a lot, but it really isn't considering the size of the federal budget. A few tens of billions of dollars is chump change to the feds, and that is before you get into the Demand Side economics end of things, where even if someone deferred, that money will be made back by way of taxation on the economic stimulus from research spin offs, employment, supply and provisioning etc.
Thank you Gruman that made my morning.
