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chapter 9 Supporting University Research Bleibermacher has managed to parlay all of this into a remarkable reputation. Until he came to our place, he had never held an academic job. He didn’t have to. Guggenheims, Sloans, Revsons, MacArthurs came his way one after the other. What they thought they were supporting God only knows. I suppose each one reasoned that the last place that had given him a grant must have known what it was doing. It reminds me of a man I know who found himself stateless after the Second World War. His wife stitched together a document that looked like a passport. He said the real problem was the first visa. Some country . . . gave him one, and after that he got visas everywhere. Jeremy Bernstein, “The Faculty Meeting” One of America’s great advantages in the global economy is our higher education system. In sharp contrast to the reputation of its elementary and secondary schools, U.S. colleges and universities are the envy of the world. To this day, American scientists and engineers set the pace for innovation. American STEM students have the valuable opportunity to learn from the world’s leading researchers and to participate in research. Most university research in the United States is supported by federal tax dollars . In financial support, as with every other aspect of STEM, rigorous evaluation and accountability are essential. Distribution of federal research funds is a central concern. The concentration of federal science funds at top-tier institutions limits the productivity of brilliant junior STEM professors at second- and third-tier universities. Furthermore, scientists at lower-prestige schools may subsequently be unable to demonstrate to undergraduates what the research process looks like. And, of course, they may be unable to engage undergraduates directly as participants in that research process. College students who hear young professors talk about the excitement of research but note that those same professors are not conducting much research are less likely to choose careers as scientists. 178 s t e m t h e t i d e This situation is made more serious by the fact that there are vast numbers of students, many of them highly capable potential scientists, enrolled at these universities. While some of the recent literature about future scientists focuses on the Ivy League and elite research universities or selective liberal arts colleges like Antioch or Pomona, the fact is that there are far more students enrolled at the large state universities. The perennial debate about the dispersal of federal science funds is largely political. Federal science funds are authorized and appropriated by congressional committees, whose members often come from states other than those that receive the lion’s share of federal funding (such as Massachusetts, New York, and California). But it is not simply a political question, a case of “porkbarrel science.” The legislation creating the National Science Foundation underscored , as has all policy since then, the basic funding criterion of excellence. Legislation also recognizes and endorses the notion of “geographical equity,” and the NSF has created a series of programs and policies aimed at building and maintaining strong science programs at non-elite institutions across the country. In several research projects I focused on the impacts of academic demographics on the productivity of scientists. In one study, our research team conducted field visits in each of seven states that competed for early funding in the NSF’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), a program I discuss at length below. Those seven states ranked at, or close to, the bottom in annual federal science funds awarded. The visits provided an opportunity to interview hundreds of scientists and science managers about barriers to the successful development of a research career. We also analyzed survey data retrieved from 60,000 university researchers and examined the dispersion of many of the nation’s outstanding scientists, particularly young scientists, to peripheral higher education institutions as the result of a shrinking academic job market. Once on the faculty, scientists at such institutions found it virtually impossible to develop productive research careers. In the 21st century, scientific progress is greatly determined by institutional environments and is no longer strictly the result of individual creativity (if it ever was). We drew several conclusions from our field visits to these seven states: • A growing army of highly capable “forgotten scientists” are employed in “peripheral” U.S. universities. • Relatively small, specific changes in federal and institutional policy could stimulate significant productivity by these...

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