Concluding my discussions (in posts May 12 and May 15) of the humanities and government research money.
Faring poorly in access to the U.S. Treasury, the humanities can helplessly endure their neglect relative to the physical, biological, and social sciences. Or they can take inspiration from the social sciences, which, formerly impoverished, are doing fairly well in the Washington money chase.
With a change of administration coming in January, now is the time for the politicos of the humanities to shift from lamenting to scheming. The early months of a new presidency favor bureaucratic innovation. Later, change comes hard as midterm elections loom and partisan squabbling intensifies.
The humanities’ goal should be inclusion under the financial umbrella of the National Science Foundation, where the once-neglected social and behavioral sciences have found a reliable patron. This year, NSF’s division of social, behavioral, and economic sciences (SBE) is budgeted for $233-million. That’s about 60 percent of all government support for these fields. The National Institutes of Health reports annual spending of over $3-billion on social and behavioral research, but much of that is clinically oriented; moreover, in research circles, doubts exist about the claimed total, given NIH’s penchant for putting off claimants by saying we’re already doing what you seek.
NSF’s SBE figure is not miles ahead of the $144-million budgeted for the National Endowment for the Humanities. But with science ranked high as a key to economic growth, NSF is one of the few big gainers in the Bush administration’s otherwise sparse domestic budget. The long-term prospects are favorable for continuing robust growth at NSF and its disciplinary sectors, including the social sciences. The arrival and growth of the social sciences at NSF may provide some guidance for the humanities to join the party.
In 1950, when NSF was established — after a five-year deadlock between the Congress and the White House over patent rights and governance of NSF — its joyful scientist backers were wary of including the social sciences. Delving into such ideologically sensitive topics as sex, divorce, child-raising techniques, and race relations, the social sciences were deemed radical by conservatives. Some practitioners of the “hard” sciences haughtily dismissed the social sciences as pretenders to rigorous science. NSF’s founding director, Alan T. Waterman, told Congress that NSF “would proceed cautiously in the area of the social sciences and only after serious study.” By 1958, when the NSF budget stood at $40-million, the social sciences received only $725,950. In 1980, the social sciences received $52-million out of an NSF total of $685 million.
But suspicion of the social sciences persisted. As recently as 1988, the late I.I. Rabi, Nobel laureate in physics, adviser to presidents, criticized the admission of the social sciences to the elite National Academy of Sciences, arguing that “there should be no place in the Academy for activities that aren’t connected with the hard sciences. … Sociology and economics are valuable in themselves, but they’re not science in the sense of the physical and biological sciences.”
Nonetheless, the social sciences had become sufficiently well established at NSF to withstand obliteration attempts when the Gingrich-led Republican Revolution retook Congress in 1995. Leading the defense for the social sciences was NSF Director Neal Lane, a physicist who later became White House science adviser. We need the social sciences as much as we need the physical sciences, he said—a judgment rendered more noteworthy by Lane’s career in physics. Since then, with minor fluctuations, financial support for the social sciences has been continuous, and doubts about scientific legitimacy are no longer heard. The utility of economic analysis for the trendy topic of industrial competitiveness helped root the social sciences in Washington philanthropy. Lately, the Pentagon and the White House science office have been calling for more social-science research to improve government operations. The argument is over.
It would be far-fetched for the humanities to claim utility as the reason for inclusion in NSF’s circle of beneficiaries. But arguments for bringing science and the humanities closer together, for the benefit of both and the surrounding society, have been simmering for a long time. C.P. Snow’s dissection of the “two cultures”
still resonates 50 years after publication. And Edward O. Wilson’s “Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge,” published in 1998, was welcomed by a large audience and stirred serious discussions.
Hunger for the beneficial fruits of science and fear of perverted science have already broken down the barriers between the two sectors of knowledge. The Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health comes equipped with financial set-asides for the study of ethical, legal, and social issues. Gone is the sense of intrinsic goodness that once pervaded science — which may account for its growing interest in the humanities.
So, it may be time for a new creation to emerge on the Washington landscape: Call it the National Science and Humanities Foundation. And recognize that with all major claimants to the White House extolling “change,” now is the time to organize and move.
