Washington
Top administrators from several research universities were given a chance Tuesday on Capitol Hill to plead their case for more federal money to rebuild science facilities that have been left to deteriorate over decades of insufficient government support.
Lawmakers took the opportunity, however, to question whether the universities were doing enough themselves.
The hearing was held by the House Subcommittee on Research and Science Education, whose members expressed concern that the United States could be losing its global edge in science.
Those testifying included Leslie Tolbert, vice president for research at the University of Arizona, who said her institution this year alone was about $200-million short of what it needed for building maintenance.
And Thom Dunning, director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said he was concerned that shortfalls in facilities budgets eventually could let other countries catch up in supercomputing abilities.
The university officials generally heard support from lawmakers on the panel. The subcommittee's chairman, Rep. Daniel W. Lipinski of Illinois, said he was concerned that American universities with crumbling facilities "could lose our position as scientific leaders, finding it harder to attract top scientists and engineers."
But some members of Congress asked universities to do more to help themselves. Rep. Marcia L. Fudge, a Democrat of Ohio, asked if the universities were doing enough to lobby for support from states and industries that benefited economically from the institutions.
And Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, a Democrat of Texas, asked if the universities were doing enough to collaborate in areas where facilities could be shared. Even if Congress could find some additional money, Mr. Lipinski said, "trade-offs will have to be made."
Comments
1. intered - February 24, 2010 at 10:45 am
As someone who enjoyed the benefit of federal research grant support for a decade in my early career, I can appreciate the many challenges faced by these research institutions.
That said, I believe we would all benefit if these leaders would devote a portion of their budget balancing efforts toward eliminating a few of the wasteful and deeply inefficient practices within their own institutions. They might even do this before or at least concurrent with asking congress to make up the difference. Instead, they ask as if their operation had no room for improvement.
Most of the internal changes that will lead to increased efficiency, and millions of additional dollars, are not difficult for a university to make but they do require leadership and political will.
(Examples: http://www.intered.com/higheredbriefing/2010/1/26/an-alternative-to-begging-how-our-state-universities-can-do.html)
Many millions of dollars are to be reclaimed here, dollars that benefit no one at present. Quality will improve as well.
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Robert W Tucker
President
InterEd, Inc.
www.InterEd.com
2. davi2665 - February 24, 2010 at 04:15 pm
Why is it that the Universities usually seem to line up in Washington DC with their tin cups in hand, or in the state capitols doing the same, seeking yet more hand outs for buildings, programs, grants, virtually all aspects of the university. The universities already receive billions of dollars in salary support, research support, staff support, overhead support, from NIH, NSF, DOD, and many other agencies, often for projects that are not a vital national interest but are actually investigator initiated projects that are reviewed by their own peers. Perhaps those investigators who receive such federal largess should become federal employees (as happens with intramural NIH researchers). Those who question whether the universities should do more for themselves are absolutely on target. There is a poster child for success in this arena. The University at Albany for the SUNY system has perhaps the best nanoscience/nanotechnology program and facilities anywhere, not just the US. While that program received some state and federal support, VP Professor Kaloyeros has assembled an incredible array of business, scientific, and development resources to build a multi-billion dollar program that may be one of the nation's most valuable technological resources for the future. Instead of whining with a tin cup in hand, this program built something world class with the entrepreneurship and brilliance of their participating faculty and staff. Quite a departure from the nanny state "gimme more" mentality of so many universities.
3. mpagel - February 25, 2010 at 08:43 am
While the multidisciplinary support of the UA-SUNY naoscience program should be lauded as described by davi2665, it should be pointed out that this posting lists that "some state and federal support" was involved. Unfortunately, this posting doesn't quantify this support from gov/non-gov sources. I suspect that the fed & state support was > 50%, and >> 50% if you count buildings on campus (unless there was a benefactor that donated $ for buildings, these buildings were paid for with government $, and almost never by industry that wants an immediate return on investment). Also, many small businesses are supported by federal research $, perhaps including some businesses that contributed to the UA-SUNY nanoscience program.
More generally, our nation spends ~$55B on medical research, with about half ($29B) from government sources (NIH, DOD medical programs, USDA, and a few smaller programs) and ~25% from the pharmaceutical indiustry. For better or worse, high-risk/high-reward research and research at the interface of traditional fields tends to spur new innovations. But this type of research is not well-supported by risk-averse industry, so industry has slowly come to rely on NIH to heavily subsidize biomedical research. In other words, the suggestion that academic researchers should find non-federal sources for $ doesn't make sense if the nonfed sources now rely on the feds to cough up at least half of the $.
I actively participate on both sides of the grant peer review process, and it is brutal: 10-15% of federal grant proposals get funded, with slim chances that a proposal will be funded on its first submission. Considering each review cycle is ~9 months, getting funding takes a very long time. Scientists are trained to be excellent at making critical assessments, so review critiques tend to be quite critical---it's a brutal process. For comparison, just once I would like to see a physician make a diagnosis, and then have three physician peers go out of their way to make every posible criticism about the original diagnosis. In other words, the notion that the acad. research peer review system is an old-boys' network is far from the truth.
A typical biomedical academic research program needs ~$400k/year for salaries and supplies, and to use on-campus facilities (the facilities are NOT free, as they have overhead and their own staff). Although faculty make a decent salary (perhaps $100k on average), they are on 9-month appointments and need grants for their summer salary. Because medical schools have a higher faculty-to-student ratio, there is less $ from tuition/faculty member and many (perhaps >50%?) of PhDs in medical research only have a 50% guaranteed salary, with the rest coming from grants. So this forces biomedical researchers to write an average of 8 to 12 grants per year. While this high rate of grant-writing could be considered a "gimme more" mentailty or "begging with tin cups", it's just the only economically viable solution. Again, for comparison, if a bright young student is deciding between med school and a guaranteed $200k/year salary or grad school and a guaranteed $50k salary (without "begging for grants"), then this will eventually kill biomedical research in the US. As a side note, there seems to be a concern that we are training more international PhD students rather than US PhD students these days---part of the problem is that our bright US students are choosing med school over grad school with $ being one of the major reasons, and we can't fill our grad programs with the remaining bright US students.
The NIH tracks % effort on all federal grants. Some see this as a waste of time to have scientists "punch the clock", but it does provide more assurance that taxpaer money is spent on the projects that were funded rather than other endeavours. To track effort, the NIH designates 60 hours/week as 100% effort. I can't think of another profession besides academic biomedical research that is willing to work 60 hours/week for only ~$50k/year (guaranteed).
Finally, there are quite a few economic models that show the value of different aspects of our lives. One conservative model shows at U Chicago that we invest $6.2M in our lives on average (i.e., where we invest our resources, and considering that time is also a resource that has a $ equivalent). Biomedical research has increased the value in our lives by $1.2M from 1900 to 2000 by letting us live longer and more actively, and is by far the greatest factor of improvement relative to other advances (electronics, transportation, etc). Multiplied by 350M US citizens (and not counting some of the other 5B people in the world who also benefit from US biomed research), this equates to ~$40 TRILLION in added value to our lives. We are currently experiencing a new "biomedical revolution" through the Human Genome Project, proteomics, evidence-based medicine and molecular medicine, etc, all driven by biomedical research, so this trend is expected to continue for the next 100 years. With that in mind, the $29B/year for federal government-sponsored biomed research through our "gimme more", "begging with tin cups" grant programs is worth the investment.