Senator No and the Social Sciences

David Glenn’s October 7 article in The Chronicle tells the sad but familiar story of a member of the Congress who would like to halt federal funding of social science research, in this case by eliminating the political-science category of funding at the National Science Foundation. The villain this time is Senator Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma physician renowned on the Hill as “Dr. No” for his attempts to kill appropriations bills. But, as Glenn points out, Sen. Hutchison of Texas introduced a bill to kill most federal social science spending in 2006, and there have been other assaults on federal support of social science in recent years.

In fact, of course, the feds provide only marginal support for social science research, most of it coming through the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate of NSF. According the SBE Web site, the directorate provides 63 percent of federal support for basic research in the social sciences at U.S. academic institutions. But the government does not really provide much for social science, in comparison to its support of the physical and life sciences. Glenn notes that in 2005, the most recent year for which final budget information is available, NSF “spent $9.4-million on political science research, while the foundation’s total research obligations were $3.7-billion.”

Why quibble over such a pittance? Sen. Coburn’s press secretary explained that “Federal research dollars should go to scientists who work on finding solutions for people with severe disabilities, or the next generation of biofuels, or engineering breakthroughs.” And Coburn’s office released a statement that singled out several NSF-funded projects that “in reality have little, if anything to do with science.”

So Coburn has put forward two different objections to the federal funding of political science: It does not produce socially useful products, and it is not science. The second objection goes to the heart of longstanding controversies within the field, of course. In some universities (like my own), the field is called “Politics” or “Government,” rather than “Political Science,” and periodically researchers in the field engage in brutal conflict over its methodological similarity to the natural sciences.

The first objection goes to the (related) question of whether the field produces genuinely useful knowledge: political “scientists” were notorious in the late 1980s for failing to predict the end of Communism, and, much more recently, economists were notorious for failing to predict the onset of the Great Recession. Nevertheless, few thoughtful observers would argue that the country (and the world) would be better off without the efforts of political scientists. Sen. Coburn’s amendment reflects the same crude and anti-intellectual populism that Sen. Proxmire displayed with his “Golden Fleece” awards a couple of decades ago. Populism is nonpartisan.

Coburn’s amendment will probably not become law, but it should remind us of the historic political disinclination in the United States to recognize the academic value of the social sciences. There is, after all, a reason why we have a National Science Foundation and a National Foundation for the Arts and Humanities, but no National Social Science Foundation. Social science deals with subjects frequently considered too dangerous for American politics to handle, and we have traditionally marginalized it — which is why it had to be snuck into NSF as an afterthought. But a modern nation needs first-rate social-science research, and American social scientists have to find a better way to make the case for public support of their crucial field.