From the outpouring of derision and anger inspired by academic earmarks — a.k.a. the Congressional pork barrel — you might conclude there’s nothing good about legislators delivering money to the local university. The pork total for 2008, reported in The Chronicle of March 28, is a record $2.25 billion for 2,300 projects at 920 institutions. In the quoted assessment of Michael S. Lubell, director of public affairs at the American Physical Society, the numbers show “a system that’s out of control.”

Under the principle of “give a dog a bad name,” earmarks are routinely denounced and rarely defended. But the reality is that political pork helped build America, and political pork has financed or buttressed some of our leading research universities. The opponents of earmarks insist that scientific peer review is the soundest method for distributing federal money for science. They’re right, if top-flight research performance is the measure. But peer review guarantees that those who possess scientific capability get more, since they are best qualified to make good use of the money, while those who trail can’t compete with the leaders. That’s untenable in the American political system — and it explains why earmarks continue to flourish.

Without pork, the American scientific landscape would be starkly divided into haves and have-nots, instead of being merely lopsided in favor of well-endowed private universities and a handful of public flagship institutions. With pork, there’s been a general upgrading of scientific capability nationwide that would otherwise not have happened.

Consider the University of Washington, which had the good fortune to be represented in the U.S. Senate from 1945 to 1981 by Warren G. Magnuson, who served for many years as chairman of the appropriations subcommittee for the then-Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the parent of NIH. Magnuson poured so much money into the university, as well as elsewhere in the state, that it was joked that the initial G in his name stood for “grant.” The late Senator is memorialized in the Warren G. Magnuson Health Sciences Building on the university campus.

In Oregon, the landscape is laden with pork delivered by a longtime Republican Senator, Mark O. Hatfield, who is memorialized by the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, the Hatfield Library at Williamette University, the Hatfield Research Center at the Oregon Health and Science University, and many other sites. Serving as chairman or ranking member of the NIH appropriations subcommittee, Hatfield was a legendary booster of medical research and Oregon.

Lister Hill represented Alabama in the Senate from 1938 to 1969, during which he chaired the Labor and Public Welfare Committee and served on the appropriations subcommittee for NIH. The University of Alabama at Birminghan is home to the Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences and the Lister Hill Center for Health Policy.*

At Boston University, longtime President John Silber was an unabashed pork-barrel proponent. As a client of the high-priced Cassidy firm, he reaped millions in earmarks. Peer review, he argued, inevitably enriched Harvard and MIT. Thanks to the earmarks, Silber claimed, BU became Boston’s third great university.

The anti-porkers correctly point out that strict reliance on scientific peer review has shielded the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation from earmarks, which fall heavily on the Pentagon, the departments of Energy and Agriculture, and, to a lesser extent, on almost all other government departments. True. But NIH and NSF, mindful of congressional scrutiny over geographic distribution of the goodies, spread their money widely. In implicit acknowledgment of peer review’s tilt to the already rich, NSF runs a welfare scheme for the scientific needy, the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, which doles out grants to 24 states. Other federal agencies run similar though smaller programs.

A few righteous souls in academe occasionally call for a universal renunciation of earmarks. But they’re howling in the wilderness. The Association of American Universities, comprising 62 research institutions, long ago gave up on an anti-earmark resolution for a good reason: many of its members were too busy soliciting pork to bother with such nonsense.

Congress recently altered the rules a bit to require identification of earmarking members, but that makes little difference, since most members proudly announce delivery of money to the home folks. The system brings happiness to everyone but the devotees of peer review, who, actually, are not faring too badly. For all the griping about this year’s record batch of earmarks, the great bulk of federal research money still goes through peer review of some sort. With federal spending on academic science totaling about $30 billion this year, $2.5 billion for earmarks is bearable, despite claims that night is descending on American science.

*This post originally incorrectly identified the Tufts University nutrition school as an earmark. The Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging is part of a cooperative agreement between the USDA and Tufts University. Located on Tufts’ campus, it is a federally-owned facility and is included in the president’s budget annually.