Will Reduced Funding Hobble Nation’s Scientific Leadership?

The dinner was impressive for its guest list alone: a dozen college presidents who gathered recently in Low Library, a handsome Italian Renaissance building at Columbia University.

But after the dishes were cleared, what ensued was a frank discussion of the dilemmas facing higher education, including one that could jeopardize the competitive position of the United States in science and other areas.

The message delivered by Columbia President George Rupp was clear: A half-century partnership between all levels of government and America’s universities is atrophying as a result of the fight to balance the federal budget.

“The biggest challenge we have is the kind of partnership between institutions of higher education--both public and private--and the larger society,” Rupp said. “That has been fundamental to our public life for the last 50 years and is increasingly eroding.

“What used to be seen as great opportunities for doing something significant together is instead turning into a kind of quarrel about how the costs can be shifted from government to the institutions.”

In his office a few days later, Rupp made a stark prediction: If present funding patterns continue, it will be very difficult for the United States to maintain its leadership in technology and research.

“It is much easier to tear down an infrastructure than to build it up,” he said.

Analysis by the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science shows that research and development expenditures as a percentage of gross domestic product stand at 2.4%, the lowest point since 1981. Some scenarios call for an almost 20% drop in federal funding for research by 2002--the target year for balancing the budget.

These cuts are coming at a time when some European and Asian nations, learning from the success of the United States, are increasing their research funding.

The consequences of this divergence may not be felt for 15 or 20 years, because basic research and discovery are long-term processes whose payoffs often are measured over decades.

The federal/academic partnership has its roots in two events after World War II. The GI Bill opened the doors of higher education to millions of veterans. At the same time, Vannevar Bush, science advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, wrote a seminal paper, “Science, the Endless Frontier,” that paved the way for government funding of research.

The result has been a cornucopia of discoveries and a scientific infrastructure that is the envy of many nations.

What makes the debate over funding for science and technology so sensitive is that it is rooted in competing social policies.

Analysis of the federal budget, Rupp points out, shows little room to maneuver. Once interest on the national debt is paid and defense spending is set aside, roughly half of the budget goes for entitlement programs. That leaves about one-sixth of the budget for domestic discretionary spending--far too slim a slice of the pie, he and some other university presidents contend, to support the historic partnership.

Any effort to trim entitlements, such as Social Security, to support spending for science or student loans clearly is a sensitive issue.

Nonetheless, Rupp says the argument has to be put on the table because a danger exists that the future is being mortgaged to pay for the present.

“I think it is a societal issue, the question of how much money do we invest in the care and feeding of our senior citizens as distinguished from other generations,” Rupp said. “The university is impaled in that axis only insofar as we are an investor in young people and in long-term research, so that we have a prejudice.”

At the dinner, Cornell University President Hunter Rawlings said that when two Cornell professors shared Nobel Prizes in physics this year with a Stanford University colleague, the members of his faculty thanked the National Science Foundation for funding their work 25 years ago.

In today’s era of budgetary austerity, saying thank you was not only good manners, it was good politics.