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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Dan Greenberg

Academic Pork Has Accomplished a Lot of Good

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.

Posted at 11:32:42 AM on March 25, 2008 | All postings by dgreenberg

Comments

  1. Why on earth should the money go to some politician or lobbyist’s favored institution? In my opinion, the bulk of grant money should be distributed fairly evenly amongst those who ask for it, with a sizable minority being granted based on peer review. The exact split would require more inquiry, but my initial instinct is to say a 60/40 split.

    — Dan · Mar 26, 09:10 AM · #

  2. The money should not go where politicians say. The money should not go where peer reviewers say (read a really interesting journal lately?). The money should not go where you say. The money should go where I say, hidden by me referring to someone admirable we can all somewhat follow. Fund allocating is a pristene political phenomenon—plural people, limited resource, decision required, what results? Funding should NOT be political because I personally am bad at politics and it detracts from me writing books no one reads (unless forced in my seminars). Funding should NOT be political—how stupid can we all collectively get? Life should not be political—if only I were alive how nicely everything would fit together and go skippingly along!!! Wow, we humans fall for BS so easily—at least I do.

    — Richard Tabor Greene · Mar 26, 10:11 AM · #

  3. Some individual “have-not” institutions may have successfully employed earmarks to strengthen their ability to win peer-reviewed research grants and become “haves” — however, the little independent, empirical evidence available suggests that most colleges that receive large amounts of earmarked dollars do not reap this benefit. As the Chronicle article said, an alternative method of helping “have-not” institutions already exists: the federal government’s Epscor programs (or Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research.) These distribute grants to increase the capacity of colleges and universities in eligible states (most of them rural or with small populations) to compete for peer-reviewed grants. A strength of the Epscor programs is that their grants are themselves peer reviewed. Earmarks are not. However, Congress has provided much less money for Epscor than for the noncompetitively awarded earmarks. Perhaps Mr. Greenberg could elaborate, then, on why he described Epscor as “welfare” while praising earmarks.

    — Jeffrey Brainard, Chronicle of Higher Education · Apr 1, 12:19 PM · #

  4. Jeff Brainard, who’s the best education journalist I know, asks a good question, and I’ll try to answer it. Epscor has always been an anemic program, and there’s little to show for it, whereas pork has helped buiild some great universities, as noted in my post. Epscor is hush money for the have-nots. Peer review is mythologized as a pristine, politically antiseptic system for wise allocation of government research money. In reality, there’s no standard method of peer review. NIH, NSF, and DARPA each do it their own way. And there are no retrospectives on the results. They have their own bridges to no where, but we just don’t hear about them. The federal agencies naturally prefer to control the money, and therefore glorify peer review. Where’s the evidence that it produces better results than good old pork? When universities connive to get federal money for a facility or a program, they usually—-though not always—-are dedicated to performing good research and raising their quality. Getting legislators into the science game is good for science.

    — Dan Greenberg · Apr 3, 09:01 AM · #

  5. The answer to Dan’s question “Why on earth should the money go to some politician’s…favored institution?” is an easy one: the U.S. Constitution, which give appropriations power to Congress.

    — Ben Dover · Apr 10, 05:02 PM · #

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