Federal Support for University Research: Forty Years After the National Defense Education Act (Conference: October 1, 1998)

Remarks by Roger Geiger

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Sputnik and the Academic Revolution

The anniversaries we honor today mark the first legislative consequences arising from the Sputnik shock of October (and November) of 1957. As pieces of legislation they were, of course, only the beginning of profound effects that were, for the most part, experienced in the 1960s. And it is the sixties, roughly speaking, that will be the focus for most of my remarks today.

The sixties were arguably the most revolutionary decade for American higher education. To be more precise, that decade experienced no less than four revolutions, for the most part overlapping one another.

First, there was a revolution in federal support for university research and for the universities that conducted such research. From 1959 to 1964, federal support for academic research rose between 21 and 33 percent per year—which cumulated to a tripling in just five years. Moreover, the additional funds were supplied overwhelmingly by civilian rather than the defense agencies, thus going a long way toward correcting what had been regarded as the most dangerous imbalance in the postwar research system. No less important, these new funds were soon supplemented with money for the universities themselves—to support their graduate students, build laboratories, buy equipment, and hire new faculty. This was an unprecedented development to which I shall shortly return.

Second, American universities were undergoing an ‘Academic Revolution’ that accelerated at an astonishing pace in the 1960s. The phrase comes from the far-sighted volume written by Christopher Jencks and David Riesman. This book, one of the most perceptive analyses of American higher education, is apparently no longer read. Written largely in the mid-1960s, it had the misfortune to appear in 1968 when a different sort of revolution was convulsing our universities.

I call this third revolution the ‘student rebellion’ of the sixties, because the focus of its rage and energy was so decidedly negative. However, the imprint that it left was nevertheless indelible.

Finally, the fourth revolution of the sixties occurred in student access. Not only did the number of college-aged students rise enormously as the Baby Boom washed over American campuses, but the participation rates of those boomers rose by 50 percent. As a result, enrollments at American colleges and universities more than doubled, making the sixties the most expansive decade in the enumerated history of our system.

The aim of this paper is to address primarily the interaction of the first two of these revolutions—the ‘Sputnik surge’ in support for academic research and the Academic Revolution that it accelerated. Revolutions 3 and 4 nevertheless played important roles, particularly during the latter stages of these developments.

There has been a good deal of talk of late about the Bush Era in science policy and its recent or impending demise. There is a surreal quality to this discussion. For all the lofty guidance that Vannevar Bush offered the country in his celebrated summary, Science, the Endless Frontier, little of it was followed in the development of postwar academic research. Rather, the pattern that was followed largely continued the channels of wartime federal research funding, for which Bush had in fact been the architect as Director of the Office of Strategic Research and Development. (The single new organization of these years—and the savior for much academic research—was the Office of Naval Research. As a form of Naval control over civilian, academic research, ONR was the precise opposite of what Bush had recommended for his ‘National Research Foundation.’) Understood in this sense, the Bush era did not end but was superceded by the developments that followed Sputnik.

The new federal largesse was lavished on civilian agencies with something like the enthusiasm that Congress had formerly shown toward the DoD and the AEC. The first beneficiary was the National Science Foundation—the component of the federal research system with the smallest appropriation and, thanks to its claim to the mantle of the Bush Report, the most open-ended mission. Next came the National Institutes of Health, which under James Shannon had already found the key to unlock the federal treasury, but now were encouraged to make ever-larger withdrawals. And finally, forty years ago this day, came the National Aeronautics and Space Administration—the new civilian face of what had formerly been a military endeavor.

Sputnik was the catalyst that made these political reactions possible. It resolved a feud that had been festering throughout the postwar period between proponents of strictly mission-oriented R&D for purposes of defense and the academic scientists who had urged the importance of basic, disinterested research as the foundation for the nation’s other scientific and technological endeavors. After 1957, advocates for an ‘ideology of basic research’ had entry to the highest level of government through the President’s Science Advisor and Scientific Advisory Committee [PSAC]—and they apparently used it to good effect. In 1959 President Eisenhower traveled to New York City to attend a gala affair called the ‘Symposium for Basic Research,’ where he announced his support for the $100 million Stanford Linear Accelerator. But the backers of basic research still found one element of their program lacking—support for the universities that would be the chief locus of this undertaking.

At this juncture, (November 1960), the Panel of PSAC chaired by Glenn Seaborg produced the report, "Scientific Progress, the Universities, and the Federal Government," which might be taken as the credo of the new era. In his paper, Dr. Seaborg tells us that President Eisenhower, although leaving office, took special interest in the report. And the incoming Kennedy Administration clearly favored it as well. The report began by affirming four principles:

1. Scientific research was an investment: economic self-interest thus demanded that, "our proper course is to increase our investment in science just as fast as we can, to a limit not yet in sight."
2. Basic research and graduate education "belong together at every possible level."
3. These investments were an inescapable responsibility of the federal government: "either it will find the policies—and the resources—which permit our universities to flourish and their duties to be adequately discharged—or no one will."
4. Because universities lacked the means to support science, "Partnership between the university and the federal government is … indispensable."

The report specifically called for the federal government to aid the entire endeavor of university research through support for graduate fellowships, new faculty, new fields of research and education, university facilities, and of course greater funding for research itself. Particularly timely was its call for the doubling of the number of "first-rate academic centers of science … in fifteen years"—from 15-20 to 30-40. Otherwise, it largely endorsed the interests of those existing ‘first-rate’ universities by stressing best-science procedures like peer review. Amazingly, the breathtaking assumptions of the Seaborg Report set the course for federal policies toward academic science for the next eight years.

Strictly speaking, there is no federal science policy. Rather, each of the agencies that support academic research—NSF, NIH, NASA, DoD, and the AEC—develop policies and relationships subject to the influences of the Congress, the Executive Branch, and the scientific establishment. I have provided an overview of these complex developments in Research and Relevant Knowledge, and I have summarized how this burgeoning federal role changed the shape of the university research system in "What Happened After Sputnik" (Minerva, 1997). Here, I will only look briefly at the most distinctive feature of this federal effort—the goal of the Seaborg Report to develop new research universities.

If one were to summarize the situation in the early 1960s, it could be said that direct support for research was the least constrictive input to the academic research system. In greater scarcity were the academic scientists needed to perform the research, and probably more so, graduate students to supply future needs. Still, the bottleneck of the entire system was the institutional funding base needed to support the expansion of university research. This problem was actually addressed first and foremost by the Ford Foundation. We tend to forget that as late as 1960 the Ford Foundation was granting more money to universities for research-related purposes than the NSF. However, Ford’s ample development grants were limited to a small number of private universities.

The first federal agency to implement a university development program was NASA. This effort had less to do with the Seaborg report than it did with the peculiar situation in which the agency found itself. It was a newcomer to the research system, attempting an entrée into a booming seller’s market for research. NASA had to go to extra lengths to attract prominent scientists to work in space sciences and to train more space scientists for the future. The result was the Sustaining University Program launched in 1962—the largest and in some ways most generous of the federal university development programs. NASA made grants on exceedingly liberal terms to create a research capacity for academic space science that would generate interest in and expertise for its mission. Nobelist Willard Libby at UCLA, for example, was given $800,000 per year in unrestricted support. NASA also spread the goodies around in order to maximize good will and exposure. All told, its Program made grants to 175 colleges and universities.

The NASA program was followed three years later by an extensive NSF effort that did truly reflect the injunction of the Seaborg Report. NIH and the DoD followed with smaller programs. All together, what was the effect of this massive effort, which invested more than $800 million of 1960s dollars in the expansion of the base of academic research? It might be said that the policy goal was ultimately attained, although the policies themselves look more like failures. That is, in the long run more "first-rate" research universities emerged, as called for in the Seaborg report, however, the link with science development programs of the sixties is tenuous.

In my book I examine the performance of 36 developing universities that received at least $6 million in science development grants—some 55 percent of the total expenditures. On balance, they under-performed: more lost research share than gained, and they did worse than a comparable group of institutions receiving less than $6 million. This is a crude comparison, which includes many caveats, but the result is remarkable all the same. Skipping the details, let me offer two very general reasons for this result. First, the gains in research share largely flowed to a group of universities even lower in the research pecking order—meaning that there was such an abundance of research funding that agencies had to seek performers ever further down the queue. Second, a good many of these universities failed to follow through on the commitments they had made: ‘take the money and run’ was all too often the operating principle—for science development funds, support for graduate education, and much else. Both these causes speak to the excess of the academic revolution.

The academic revolution of Jencks and Riesman referred specifically to the academic profession—the emancipation of faculty in the academic disciplines from meaningful control by lay society. Academics at those colleges and universities that mattered were now able to devote themselves wholly to the theoretical concerns of their discipline with scant regard for the wishes of those whom they taught or those who ultimately supported them. This situation progressed furthest in the graduate departments which had become "autotelic: they resent even being asked whether they produce significant benefits to society beyond the edification of their own members." From these peaks of influence, the academic revolution was translated into "university colleges"—those undergraduate colleges of research universities or leading liberal arts colleges that largely prepared students for graduate and professional school.

The conditions of the Sputnik era clearly exacerbated the main tendencies of the academic revolution. Faculty needed only to delve deeply into their own disciplinary paradigms to be assured of rapid career advancement. Graduate departments mushroomed in size and number, and their graduates staffed the burgeoning academic departments in colleges and universities across the country. Here the access revolution played a supporting role. As American higher education doubled in size, it actually became more homogeneous in character, as newly minted Ph.D.s bore the fruits of the academic revolution into institutions that had been remote from disciplinary frontiers.

On the whole, this was an extraordinarily positive development. But it carried with it a number of distortions, in addition to those that Jencks and Riesman caricatured. It created a set of expectations about universities and their role that increasingly lost sight of mundane realities. In research, it was assumed that the federal government should and would provide for the needs of basic academic research with few questions asked. It was at the end of the Sputnik surge, for example, that scientific leaders agreed that federal appropriations for university research ought to grow by 15 percent each year—every year. This support also tended to displace research relationships with what were now unwelcome patrons—the defense establishment and private industry. In short, the academic revolution produced and reinforced an ivory-tower mentality in American universities.

The Ivory Tower then received an even more powerful impetus from the student rebellion. Students were adept at turning the language of academic idealism to their own purposes. Clark Kerr in the early sixties had admiringly seen the university rendering greater service to society, but the students charged that this was making them ‘cogs in a machine.’ For the student movement, the university was meant to be aloof from society, all the better to criticize it.

Since faculty shared much of this perspective, they found it difficult to fault this logic. When pressed to justify the university’s research portfolio, faculty tended to agree that dealings with the defense establishment or with the corporate world were not appropriate. The purview of the university, after all, was theoretical knowledge, which could only be sullied or corrupted by the patronage of self-interested sponsors. One well-known West Coast scientist, after pondering this issue, announced that the university ought to exercise ‘collective moral restraint’ over the kinds of research it would perform. Oblivious to academic freedom, universities actually contemplated right-thinking inquisitorial boards to decide what research might pass such a test.

Examples abound. The point, however, is that the legacy of Sputnik, the academic revolution, and the student rebellion, was that the university lost its bearings in a number of respects. The ivory tower mentality made it lose sight of numerous ways in which the university needs to be and ought to be connected with its society; and the exaggerated moral sensibilities that prevailed by decade’s end obscured any realistic appreciation of the university’s many functions.

The 1970s, then, brought the hangover from the excesses of the sixties. Higher education pundits, perhaps taking Jencks and Riesman to heart, pronounced against the academic revolution. Disciplinary scholarship was denounced for its irrelevance; students were advised to break out of the "academic lockstep." Federal appropriations for academic research, instead of growing by 15 percent, shrunk (although not by very much). The programs heralded by the Seaborg Report—support for universities and graduate students—were largely eliminated. The huge numbers of students that now populated higher education turned their backs on disciplinary studies; soon one-quarter of them were majoring in business alone. The largest and in many ways the best trained cohorts of Ph.D.s ever graduated from American universities looked in vain for faculty positions. With supply and demand now working against them, those fortunate to have academic appointments saw their real earnings decline.

But through all this pain, the psychological legacy of the sixties seemed to persist. Faculty and students still preferred to view the university as an ivory tower, and (paradoxically) they still sought to invoke moral purpose, or social responsibility, as a guide for its actions. These attitudes acted as a considerable constraint, as universities sought to grapple with their manifold difficulties. Only at the end of the seventies did this mentality begin to wane.

The catalyst for a new outlook toward academic research came from a new national failure and resulting sense of crisis. In this case it was the economic competitiveness of American industry that had been surpassed by foreign foes, and as in 1958 the failure to invest in and gather the fruits from academic research was an important dimension of the problem. In this case, however, the remedy could not come from the federal government alone (although it could do much to help) but rather required direct linkages between industry and universities. Old thought patterns die hard. Those familiar with the literature on university industry research relationships will recall that these links were portrayed in largely negative terms through most of the 1980s.

This juncture nevertheless represents the end of the Sputnik era, and the beginning of the era in which we still find ourselves. After 1980 universities began to operate on a different set of assumptions about the purposes of academic research and how it might be supported. This is the era of privatization, which has its own inconsistencies, blind spots, and inherent problems. Most likely some of these will be addressed in this afternoon’s session.

Not least among the uncertainties of the current era is the proper role of the federal government. In many ways the questions that need to be asked are the same as those posed in the Seaborg report nearly forty years ago. Given the undeniable value of basic academic research, who should support what portions, and with what implications for universities? Today, I think the answers are a bit different than they were in 1960.

1. The importance of our national investment in basic research for our economic self-interest is more evident now than ever. The injunction today is not to ramp up for another surge in support, but rather to maintain the stability and moderate growth of this massive enterprise. Academic research now comprises just over 3/10 of one percent of GDP: 3-4 percent real growth from that level is sustainable a in the national interest.
2. Basic research and universities and graduate education still belong together. For quite some time universities have performed roughly 50 percent of the nation’s basic research. This appears to be a healthy level, but sustaining it requires continual exertions on the part of universities to keep abreast of the changing frontiers of research.
3. Achieving points 1 & 2 implies a large, vital, and continuing role for the federal government, even in the era of privatization. Neither the demand from the private sector nor the direct demand arising from technological application are sufficient to sustain more than a small fraction of the current investment in basic research. The health of the entire enterprise—the goose that lays the golden eggs—depends upon the resources of the federal government.
4. But others are needed as well. Instead of a partnership between just the university and the Feds, a larger partnership is required that includes industry and ideally state governments too. The highly successful policies of the 1980s leveraged the resources from all these sources, but they seem to have slipped to a lesser priority today.
5. Finally, There has been a widespread sentiment that there are now too many research universities. I am skeptical. The dispersion of academic research to more and more performers proceeds unabated—as it has throughout the entire postwar era. This unprecedented pluralism has been one of the glories of our academic research system and a source of its continuing vitality.