Education: Impoverishment by Riches

THE UNIVERSITIES & FEDERAL MONEY THIS year the U.S. Government will spend nearly $1 billion on research and development in universities and related laboratories—about 70 times as much as it spent in 1940. The federal research funds provide the schools with roughly one-quarter of their total operating income and more than two-thirds of their research budget. The effects of this flood of money— the biggest influence on U.S. campuses in this century—are now being debated across the country: Is the easy wealth distorting the entire spirit and purpose of U.S. universities? ”Research Factories.” The problem is being studied at 23 major campuses by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. It has stirred worried words from Princeton’s President Robert F. Goheen, the University of Chicago’s Chancellor George W. Beadle, and Harvard’s President Nathan M. Pusey, who recently issued a report summing up Harvard’s philosophy: the university “will serve society well only as it remains true to its essential nature—a university, not an agency of government.” Unquestionably, federal support has richly benefited universities in new facilities, sharply improved faculty skills and graduate training. Yet in the process many universities are fast becoming “contract research factories.” In 1958-59, for example, the U.S. supplied 67.2% of Johns Hopkins’ operating income, 78.2% of M.I.T.’s, and 83.6% of Caltech’s.

Accepting Is Expensive. Critics worry that universities are shortchanging themselves by accepting the money. As nonprofit institutions, universities may not make a profit on Government research, and to guarantee that they do not, Congress has set conditions that actually force universities to subsidize federal research.

In taking on a federal project, the university incurs extra costs—more heating, lighting, cleaning, postage, additional teachers to replace researching faculty men. Since the Government pays only part of these extra costs, the university must dip into tuition and endowment.

The National Institutes of Health puts a ceiling on reimbursing these indirect costs: 15% of direct costs. Congress is now mulling ceilings on research grants from the AEC, the Defense Department, the National Science Foundation, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. In 1959 federal research cost universities an extra $95 million.

But impoverishment by riches is only one of the strange strains that federal money puts on schools. Among professors, the academic pecking order has made the research grant, in the cutting words of Critic Jacques Barzun, “tantamount to a patent of nobility.” Moreover, most federal research is still confined to a few great universities with a corner on great scholars.

Even at favored universities, a flood of federal money for some specific purpose makes one department a rich empire, leaves others poor foundlings. Princeton’s Goheen sees “a marked and dangerous trend” to skimp on undergraduate education. More and more professors now devote full time to research—often far off-campus—and see no undergraduates at all.

Bucking Big Science. One way to take the pressure off universities is to take the load of big research projects off the universities proper. At hand is a convenient device: the great research centers, mostly war-bred and usually off-campus, which universities run under contract to federal agencies. They include California’s Los Alamos, Livermore and Lawrence Radiation Laboratories; M.I.T.’s Lincoln and Servomechanisms Laboratories; Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Chicago’s Argonne National Laboratory.

Spending more than half of this year’s federal-university research outlay, these centers tend to siphon scientists away from teaching, but they also get research done—and perhaps in its proper place.

Though he prefers keeping research and teaching under one roof, Chicago’s Chancellor Beadle is impressed by the system in Britain, where medical research units work off-campus, “free of teaching chores and administration overhead.” One fervent advocate of expanding the U.S. centers is Physicist Alvin M. Weinberg, onetime researcher at the University of Chicago and now director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Worried that universities are being invaded by “Big Science,” which turns professors into “operators” frantically “spending money instead of thought,” Weinberg suggests that new technical universities and graduate schools be clustered around the centers.

Already adept at handling the federals, the centers might thus shield universities from Big Science’s “triple disease—journalitis, moneyitis, administratitis.” Able to Say No. Meanwhile, a hopeful sign is the new Federal Office of Science and Technology, created in June to coordinate the research contracts of 75 federal agencies. The new office will police wasteful duplication of research projects, and perhaps curb research empire-building.

So far, the universities feel more threatened by pressures and distortions than by outright federal control, but that remains a worry. Predictably, this fear makes them want money from other sources. “We can protect ourselves,” says Chicago’s Beadle, “by keeping available sufficient uncommitted funds to say no to any proposal that threatens our independence.”