How to Double or Triple Science Funding
Science is not going to face a friendly climate with the Republicans controlling the House. But the big problem in science, as with most government programs, is that a large fraction of the money is frittered away on peripheral expenses instead of addressing the core mission of the program. So here are some suggestions for getting more of the money to science.
1. Abolish institutional overhead Up to half of the money in a grant goes to administrative expenses. Universities claim, with evidence on their side, that research creates a better teaching environment. Fabulous. If it’s so good for the institution, let them pay the administrative costs.
2. Abolish investigator salaries, release time, and fringe benefits. If research is better for a university’s students, does it make a lick of sense for the public to pay to take scientists out of the classroom? Let researchers work between classes, or in the summer, with salary paid by the institution. This measure would improve faculty-student ratios, permit a wider variety of courses, and possibly reduce reliance on non-tenured faculty.
So what’s left after we take out 1 and 2? Funding for equipment, travel, maintenance and supplies, assistants, in short, the things really needed to do science.
3. Ten hours a week in the classroom. The rest is needed for updating classes and administrative work, as well as research time. Evenly split between lower- and upper-level classes. This was proposed here in Wisconsin to shrieks of panic from Madison, and would probably have encouraged people to leave, but if it’s an across the board Federal requirement for funding, there’ll be no place to hide.
4. Outlaw Grantsmanship Forbid institutions from using grant gathering as a criterion in hiring, promotion, or termination, just like they’re forbidden to use race or handicap. Measures 1 and 2 will go a long way by destroying the financial incentives for institutions to get grants. Success in getting grants can be used favorably, but lack of grants cannot be used negatively (Whoa, triple negative. It’s OK: -1 x -1 x -1 = -1). This measure would protect academic freedom by enabling researchers to work on subjects less likely to get grant funding without fear of being penalized.
But you have to do research. When I co-authored a textbook, we had chapter reviewers from institutions ranging from major research institutions to community colleges. The comments we got from people who never did research themselves were horrifying. In many cases they flagged something as wrong simply because they had no idea it was published years ago. So yes, it is publish or perish - intellectually.
5. Publish all publicly funded research in the public domain. In fact, get a server at the NSF and NIH to house it.
6. Ban publication of publicly funded research in for-profit journals. These tie up library shelves and budgets and are full of superfluous papers.
7. One published paper per grant. Right now researchers publish dozens of papers per project, most differing only trivially from one another. Piecemeal publication beefs up the vita while creating a market for for-profit journals to choke libraries. No limits on online publication, however.
What about the First Amendment? Exercise your First Amendment rights on your own time and your own dime. If the public is paying for your research, we have the right to tell you to publish it in ways that benefit the public.
8. Outlaw the use of citation indexes and impact factors. These merely increase the herd mentality in research. But how will we monitor quality? You think quality is objectively real (I think it’s real, too, but 90% of what we call “quality” is mere fluff) - you come up with an objective measure.
9. Abandon the Rutherford Myth. Rutherford, the physicist, once said that all science was either physics or stamp collecting, meaning that scientists either investigated fundamental laws or busied themselves with trivial cataloging. To be fair, biologists in his day embodied the stamp collecting mentality on steroids, and in other fields we had people devising ever more elaborate descriptive systems for auroral displays and microstructures in rocks. And in all those cases, they eventually gave up because the elaborate descriptions resulted in no new understanding. It’s like the novel Solaris, where there are vast archives describing structures rising out of a sentient sea, and finally a visitor asks “but what do you do with all this?”
Read a lot of scientific journals, however, and you’ll find a lot of papers micro-analyzing some process long after further analysis has ceased to supply any useful insight, or you’ll find papers tying some field area into some grand problem when what is really needed is simply a good, thorough description of the area.
So write a grant application to map the vegetation or geology of some area simply because it’s poorly known and you’ll get it thrown back with a sneer. Ditto if you want funding to radiocarbon date something simply because it will illuminate the prehistory of an area, or drill a hole to find out what’s beneath the surface. Write a paper describing the geology or biology of an area just because it’s poorly known and the journal will probably kick it back in your face.
Meanwhile, every time we actually try to apply science to a real world problem, we run headlong into the fact that nobody has done the stamp collecting. We don’t know within a factor of ten (more likely 100) exactly how many species occupy the earth. Do an environmental impact study of an area and you will almost certainly find nobody has really cataloged the flora and fauna (that’s when a lot of “endangered” species turn up. Some are truly endangered, but many others are actually common, but because nobody has had funding to do general surveys, they haven’t been noticed.) You find that nobody really has a clear idea what’s under the surface. Because you don’t get grants and tenure for doing that sort of work.
On January 2, 2011, George Will’s piece “Needed: a Science Stimulus” in the Washington Post, quoted Nobel Laureate Julius Axelrod as saying, “Ninety-nine percent of the discoveries are made by 1 percent of the scientists.” Just as an aside, I once heard a Nobel laureate speak. He won his award for molecular biology, and his ignorance about anything outside molecular biology was staggering. Words to describe this person just defy me. I sat there in open-mouthed incredulity as he declared that no real science had come out of space exploration. Axelrod’s comment is about at the same level. I can assure you that if aliens abducted every Nobel laureate on Earth, science would go on unimpeded. Ninety-nine percent of the discoveries in science are actually made at mid-tier institutions, and virtually all the science teaching is done there. That’s where future voters learn the science that they either apply or mis-apply when it comes time to picking the people who will make the key decisions on climate change, recombinant DNA, energy, and the environment.