Panel Sees Scaling Back of University Research Programs : Education: Report’s bleak forecast contrasts with expectations that the Clinton Administration will allot more money for academic science.

Faced with steadily dwindling levels of federal aid, the nation’s major research universities must begin shrinking or eliminating scientific departments that do not rank at the top of their fields, a presidential advisory panel said Monday in a long-awaited report.

“This process will call for painful decisions on the part of university administrators, faculty and students,” said D. Allan Bromley, assistant to President Bush for science and technology and a former Yale physicist. “Universities will no longer have the luxury of maintaining departments and laboratories in all disciplines and sub-disciplines.”

Overall, the report forecasts a bleak future for the 150 to 200 large universities that receive 90% of all federal funds for academic science and produce 90% of doctoral degrees in science and engineering.

Already this year, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation--the two major funding agencies for academic research--have had their annual budgets cut by $217 million and $13 million, respectively.

The report’s pessimistic tone contrasts with the heightened expectations in some scientific circles that the incoming Administration will make more federal funds available to university researchers.

That expectation has been fueled largely by the statements of President-elect Bill Clinton. As a candidate, he said repeatedly that the Cold War has signaled that it is time to shift $7 billion in federal spending from defense to civilian research and development.

But such funds may do little for individual research centers, according to Bromley, National Science Foundation Director Walter E. Massey and Princeton University President Harold Shapiro, who was director of the report.

“It is not at all obvious that that will happen because of the number of competing claims on the funds,” Bromley said at a Monday press conference called to release the report.

Coming at a time when U.S. basic research funding already is lagging well behind that of Japan and Germany, the report may spur a new assessment of the nation’s system of dispensing research and development funds. Bromley said that he already has urged such a reassessment on the incoming Administration.

The United States spends about $113 billion annually on research and development. Nearly two-thirds of that, or about $76 billion, goes to projects with direct military applications, compared to only 4.8% in Japan and 14.5% in Germany.

“The end of the Cold War warrants a new examination of the nation’s R&D; system: its rationale, goals, organizations, funding and administrative mechanisms,” said Bromley.

Among its other recommendations, the report:

* Demanded that research funds be granted only through a competitive, peer-review process based on merit and not on congressional appropriations--a growing practice that some say encourages pork-barreling that has little to do with scientific merit. Although many universities now seek direct congressional funding, the report specifically singled out the 700 federal laboratories that receive $23 billion annually from Congress.

* Urged senior faculty members to rely less on graduate assistants and to do more teaching themselves as a way to create better trained and motivated students.

* Said that universities need to “keep educational costs from rising faster than average family income.”

* Urged universities to “eliminate fraud and waste of any kind” as a way to regain public trust in the wake of “a few isolated cases of scientific misconduct and misuse of public funds.”

The report was praised by Robert M. Rosenzweig, president of the Assn. of American Universities, the lobbying organization for big academic science.

“It takes a sober and serious look at what the world is going to be like in the next decade. And every university would be doing itself and the nation a service if it were to take a careful look at what it’s doing and concentrate its efforts on what it does best,” he said. “Are we going to be able to? I don’t know.”