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About the Author
Dan Greenberg is a longtime observer of science policy and politics. He is the author of "Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism" (University of Chicago Press), as well as other books, and has published widely in newspapers and popular and professional magazines.
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Recent Posts
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The Humanities' D.C. Money Chase -- Part III
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.
Posted at 12:27:28 PM on May 19, 2008 | All postings by Dan GreenbergComments
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Come to think of it, the word “humanities” in many languages exists as “science”: French: sciences humaines, for example.
Hmmm…. Linguistics and history are “double-dippers” already, aren’t they? Humanities and social sciences.
Time for some “scheming”, indeed.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 19, 01:01 PM · #
With so much of the humanities corrupted with politically correct thinking and polemics instead of scholarship, it would be a shame to see NSF polluted in this way.
— Bill in Pasadena · May 19, 01:56 PM · #
And the social sciences are never concerned with being “politically correct” in their research, eh? (Hint: race, class, gender)
Further, NSF already funds projects involving collaborations between the sciences and the humanities; in those cases, under DG’s “scheme”, the only reversals would be the positions of principal and co-principal investigators.
Not to worry: any and all “corruptions” already “polluting” NSF grant funding and administration (e.g. the sleight of hand with overhead allocations, etc.) would likely remain unchanged.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 19, 06:32 PM · #
cf. Jonathan Gottschall on literature and science:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/05/11/measure_for_measure/
— Benjamin.L · May 20, 04:57 AM · #
More on “corruption” and “pollution” (cross-commented from “Part II”):
Yes, indeed, the “adjunctification” of the university is at the crux of the humanities crisis. However, the use of graduate student labor in the classroom, as well as that of the (generally) science post-doc, has also vastly eroded the sciences and social sciences as well as the “professional” fields.
One of the ironies of the “great grant chase” is that generally Federal agencies wisely expect principal investigators to be “regular” (i.e.tenured or tenure-ladder) faculty. Further, as any experienced grant administrator knows, the quickest way to drive up any required “cost share” is with the “release time” of the “regular” faculty whose percentage of salary then is requested in the grant.
In order to meet this “regular” faculty requirement, the intellectual property of contingent employees is often “shared” by and formally attributed to a senior faculty member PI for the purpose of applying for grants. The “honorific” status of the senior faculty placed as authors on the publications of their contingent workers is an extension of this practice.
The cost of the “adjunct” or graduate student, et al., to replace the “regular” faculty member in the classroom or in other duties is subtracted from the “regular” faculty member’s salary fraction to arrive at the “cost” of the faculty member’s time.
This system of determining the PI and calculating “cost share” not only fosters the use of contingent academic laborers but also encourages keeping their salaries low and exploiting their intellectual property as well as the work of their teaching.
And again, all of these and other usual “corruptions” and “pollution” of “the great grant chase” (including the scandals of the improper use of indirect costs by administrators for personal and/or non-grant related purposes) remain unchanged and, by and large, unchallenged by Federal grant administrators.
While, in theory, teaching and research are the reverse and obverse of the same coin, in practice teaching is the handmaiden/stable boy of the university whose work is increasingly transferred to ever more lowly-compensated workers in the academic fields.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 20, 07:49 AM · #