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  • Enabling American Innovation: Engineering and the National Science Foundation *
  • Daniel Lee Kleinman (bio)
Enabling American Innovation: Engineering and the National Science Foundation. By Dian Olson Belanger. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1998. Pp. xiii+375; tables, notes/references, appendixes, index. $39.95.

Much of the history of science and technology can be understood in terms of boundary struggles. This is certainly true of the travails of the National Science Foundation (NSF). The origins of the agency are rooted in debates about the relative value of “basic” and “applied” sciences. Early legislative discussion focused, in part, on what kinds of research should be funded by the organization and what varieties did not warrant support. With the 1950 enabling legislation, basic science was given pride of place in the foundation, and this determination has marked NSF policy struggles ever since.

As Dian Olson Belanger ably shows in this book, the entire history of engineering in the National Science Foundation is intimately bound up [End Page 917] with questions of engineering’s character and status relative to basic scientific research. And across the agency’s nearly fifty-year history, the field’s fate in the NSF depended on particular social conditions—at various junctures the cold war, social unrest, and economic crisis—that drew the attention of members of Congress and thus limited the autonomy of basic science advocates within the organization.

In the foundation’s early years, engineering, understood as “the application of knowledge to produce things and processes to solve practical problems for human betterment” (p. 2), did not receive support. Those in control of the NSF believed basic science to be the fount of all technical innovation, and in this context engineering got a foot in the organization’s door through the category “engineering science”—“making specific scientific principles usable in engineering practice” (p. 40). But even under this rubric, the status of engineering in the NSF “was not quite first class” (p. 43). Indeed, in 1952 the agency approved funding for only three of ninety-six engineering science proposals.

In a period of limited funding and with a relatively low public profile, NSF officials were able to carry their basic science agenda forward. But with an increasing budget, in a period of social upheaval, calls for an agency that would more directly serve national needs became increasingly loud. In 1968, President Johnson signed into law the Daddario Amendment, a piece of legislation that for the first time sanctioned foundation support of applied research. This intervention did not, however, end the struggle between engineering and basic science constituencies at the agency. According to Belanger, “The purists were loath to yield to any dilution of NSF’s basic-science mission, and generally they dragged their feet, opposing the implementation of change” (pp. 82, 83). In this new environment, however, engineering figured prominently in foundation programs, and William McElroy and H. Guyford Stever, the agency’s third and fourth directors, actively supported the expansion of the organization’s mission into applied studies.

A parade of new programs—many short-lived—and frequent bureaucratic reorganizations suggest, according to Belanger, ongoing tensions among NSF constituencies. When Richard Atkinson became foundation director in 1976, he made it clear that he did not have the enthusiasm for “prompt and practical results” felt by his predecessors (p. 118). But in 1981, pressure from Congress, troubled by an emerging crisis in national economic competitiveness, ultimately led the agency to grant engineering “full citizenship” in the form of an independent directorate in the NSF (p. 152). Throughout the 1980s Congress maintained pressure on the foundation to promote economically relevant research, and engineering’s gains came in response to this insistence. At the same time, Belanger documents “a current of wariness and dissent” that ran through the NSF basic-science constituency, which felt threatened as this “intruding, alien culture, gained in status, visibility, and fortune” (p. 249). [End Page 918]

The story Belanger tells of the ongoing boundary struggle at NSF is important because it reflects a more general clash between science and engineering in U.S. history. And Belanger convincingly points to forces beyond the agency that shaped engineering’s fortunes at the foundation. Where the...

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