Scientific and Technical Communication: Theory, Practice and Policy | Putting People Back Into the Business of Science: Constituting a National Forum for Setting the Research Agenda, Part 1

Introduction

Science occupies the sacred space of modern democracies. Generally speaking, modern democracies are hard to govern because they must balance issues of equity against those of efficiency among diverse and mobile constituencies. The time it takes to deliberate over who deserves what (equity) works at cross-purposes with the need to deliver what is deserved in a timely fashion (efficiency). Small wonder, then, that democratic theorists have been willing to make tradeoffs. On the one hand, market liberals have argued that equity will take care of itself as a byproduct of private individuals tending to their own interests. On the other hand, proponents of the welfare state doubt this rosy free market scenario, and prefer instead to ensure that everyone's minimal needs are satisfied, regardless of the inconvenience that this poses for some people. How does science figure in the democratic balancing act?

The general problem of democracy is compounded in the case of science because of the awe and mystery surrounding it. Witness the persistent failure of nerve and imagination modern democracies have displayed in their attempts to articulate the exact relationship between science and societal goals. In fact, "more science" is such a pervasive part of the solutions proposed to standing social problems that few people have taken the trouble of thinking of science itself as a social problem. Billions of dollars are annually "invested" in scientific projects, the ultimate value of which is assumed on a faith that largely goes unexamined. This faith is epitomized in the credo: "Even if science never quite solves our social problems, nevertheless it is a good in its own right that can do no harm if left to its own devices." In what follows, we shall subject this profession of faith to some critical scrutiny. Our considerations are framed by a pair of questions: What are the consequences of science as it is practiced today on both its cutting edge contributors (who work in the major research universities) and its more peripheral participants (who work in the small teaching colleges)? Are their lives enhanced or diminished by their involvement in the conduct of scientific inquiry?

Science Policy in America Today — Decentralized and Trickle-Down

Science enjoys an especially sacred status in the United States, the world's largest producer and consumer of scientific knowledge products. The sacredness of science is immediately evident from the verbal impediments one faces in trying to comprehend it in a policy context. In its treatment of science, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget appears to follow the common religious practice of referring to a sacred object only under a partial description. Thus, the federal budget allotment for "research and development" (R&D) — the expression policymakers use to refer to scientific knowledge production — is never discussed in its totality, but is indirectly referred to in line items of the budgets of particular mission-oriented agencies. These include the Departments of Defense, Energy, Agriculture, and Health & Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Aeronautics & Space Administration. Unlike most nations today, the United States lacks a cabinet-level Department of Science & Technology. The only federal agency that specifically mentions "science" as part of its mission — the National Science Foundation — ranks a mere fifth among the recipients of federal R&D funds. Add to this already diffuse image the fact that the most expensive and most glamorous scientific projects of the last decade — the Human Genome Project, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Orbiting Space Station, and the Superconducting Supercollider — have received their funding directly from Congress, for the most part bypassing the usual agency channels.

As this brief survey suggests, despite the periodic calls for Americans to "take back" their government, the public's reach fails to grasp the governance of science. On the one hand, Americans are clearly dissatisfied with a trickle-down economic policy that relegates most workers to the status of consumers of whatever investment opportunities the government happens to encourage in the rich. On the other hand, we have yet to question this country's even longer standing policy of trickle-down science. This is a policy that reduces most of us to willing — or not so willing — consumers of machines, potions, and symbols — products the design over which we exert little control. This difference in attitude to trickle-down approaches is a lesson that has come hard in the economic sphere and remains unlearned in the science sphere, namely, that the aims of all policy — even science policy — should focus more on the employment of people than the manufacture of products.

Representing the Diverse and Troubled Workforce of Science

Like any other large-scale, multibillion dollar public works project, the success of America's long-term science policy will depend on the cooperation of its citizens. Most of us will be involved, not just as grateful consumers, but as workers committed to getting the job done. Typical of recent attempts to include a wider segment of the population in science policy is the 1992 Carnegie Commission Report, Enabling the Future: Linking Science & Technology to Societal Goals. This report calls for an independent "National Forum" consisting of representatives of various groups that have a stake in the research agenda of tomorrow. So far so good. However, these groups must be imaginatively selected. The federal government has already set a good precedent for including women and ethnic minorities in other agenda-setting forums, but science policy introduces classes of stakeholders, most of whom have yet to be properly heard. These classes are not neatly categorized as either "clients" or "consumers" of scientific research. Their impact on the production and distribution of scientific knowledge is rather direct. Who, then, are these missing voices?

To answer this question, let us begin with an important sign of the Carnegie Commission's deafness to the missing voices. The report calls for the representation of both "top-down" and "bottom-up" approaches to science policy at a National Forum. Usually, the highlighted terms refer, respectively, to "establishment" and "grassroots" organizers. But a quick inspection of the Carnegie report reveals that "top-down" corresponds to Washington politicians and policymakers, while "bottom-up" corresponds to eminent scientists and engineers. Still more indicative of the elitist cast of these proceedings is the report's recommendation that safeguards be taken against a National Forum becoming a vehicle for groups traditionally hostile to science and technology, such as environmental activists.

However, the troublesome groups are not about to disappear. If excluded from the policy process at the outset, their voices will only be heard later, and perhaps more loudly. They will simply refuse to accept new scientific knowledge products. The annals of big business are littered with cases in which ideas that looked great on paper died still-born because they were alien to the needs and interests of potential users. A subtle variation on this theme can be detected in the case of "big science," a phrase frequently used to describe the gargantuan character of post-World War II scientific research. What we see here is not a few backward souls, "nature lovers" who fail to appreciate the gifts bestowed by modern science and technology. On the contrary, the biggest potential source of opposition to cutting-edge scientific research is found among science educators teaching in institutions of higher learning not primarily devoted to research. These institutions include both community and liberal arts colleges, as well as most state university campuses. This group may include nearly every teacher of science outside of the thirty universities that have shared 50% of federal R&D dollars in recent years. What interest do such teachers ultimately have in supporting research, little of which is ever likely to make its way into the undergraduate curriculum? Only a trickle-down mentality would assume there is a natural fit between the research carried out in those top thirty schools and the teaching carried out in the other two thousand institutions of higher learning in America.

This last point receives indirect support from a study undertaken by Carnegie Foundation President, Ernest Boyer. In his widely acclaimed 1990 report, Scholarship Reconsidered, Boyer formally identified and analyzed one of the open secrets of higher education, namely, that the scholarly perspectives of the most prestigious members of an academic discipline do not represent those of rank-and-file practitioners. Although the average faculty member strongly identifies with the discipline in which she was trained, the skills and qualities she associates with her discipline depends on her place of work. Consequently, physicists working in research universities tend to believe that cutting-edge research is what their field is all about, whereas physicists in community colleges believe that teaching is the core of their field.

Boyer's report hardly conveys the impression that teaching-oriented faculty are eager consumers of research. Rather, the image is more one of teachers being increasingly forced to adapt their work habits to the research mode, as their home institutions seek greater academic status. Boyer sees his own task as one of discouraging those institutions from evaluating their scholarly missions by the standards of the large research universities. Such a yardstick is bound to prove frustrating for all concerned — administrators, faculty, and students. It can lead to a backlash effect, whereby teaching-oriented institutions boycott cutting-edge research, say, by refusing to subscribe to the expensive scientific journals that typically publish such research.

Why, then, should a National Forum foster the contraction of higher education's diverse scholarly missions by including only faculty who define their work in terms of cutting-edge research? Instead, it would seem that the Forum should include representatives of each of the nine institutional types identified in Boyer's "Carnegie Classification." This level of inclusiveness would ensure that faculty in community and liberal arts colleges, as well as in comprehensive teaching universities, are given a voice alongside faculty in research universities.

At stake in these hypothetical deliberations is the delicate question of how a scientific discipline should be represented in a National Forum. Do all members of the faculty of physics departments count equally as contributors to the discipline of physics? The answer is clearly no, if we focus on who has the biggest impact on the research agenda of the physics community. But is that where we should focus? Boyer's report suggests that if each physics professor were to count for only one vote, the majority would call for research more teachable to students and more transferable across disciplines. For all its democratic reasonableness, the "one person, one vote" principle actually goes against the grain of contemporary academic scientific self-governance, whose sociological character most closely resembles that of an oligarchy of elders.

Between the democratic tendency to represent scientists by their place of work and the elitist tendency of having scientists represented by their most distinguished colleagues, it may be argued that scientists are better represented by their professional associations. In many cases, professional associations challenge the self-serving research priorities proposed by a field's most prestigious practitioners. One recent case that received much publicity centered on the the physics community. In 1991, the Council of the American Physical Society wondered aloud whether the future of basic research in the field was being jeopardized by tying up so much money in the multi-billion dollar Superconducting Supercollider project, about which more later.

However, before the reader develops an unrealistic view of the democratic potential of professional associations, she would best see bodies like the American Physical Society as operating much as political parties do. They serve constituents who will maintain and strengthen their numbers in the local precincts of higher learning. Sometimes the associations do a good job of representing the interests of the rank-and-file disciplinary practitioners, but sometimes they cave in to the special interests of the more elite practitioners. Given the latter possibility, it is important that faculty also be represented in a National Forum according to the type of institution in which they work.

At this point, the reader may find it helpful to examine some collateral information about the social structure of science before deciding on the best way to secure representation in a National Forum.

Some Evidence from the History and Sociology of Science

Scientists often make it seem as though most scientific research consists of little more than solving the puzzles left behind by a revolutionary genius. Typically, the work of such a genius — say, Newton's Principia Mathematica or Darwin's On the Origin of Species — is presented as an achievement of such magnitude that the rest of the scientific community gladly takes up the challenge of tying up the genius's loose ends. However, close inspection of the historical record reveals that these supposed works of genius were not immediately recognized as such. For example, the amazing powers imputed to Newton's mathematical vision of physical reality grew in direct proportion to the number of groups — both scientific and nonscientific — who found it in their interest to subscribe to Newton's way of seeing things. These alignments had less to do with prolonged exposure to Newton's own text and more to the work of partisans who translated "Newtonianism" into a variety of idioms, including those of education and politics. Whereas Newton actively promoted himself, less outgoing "geniuses," such as Darwin and Einstein, were fortunate to have in their corner such first-rate advocates as Thomas Huxley and Max Planck. Otherwise, they too would have joined the multitude of intellectually ambitious and technically proficient scientists whose works sank without a trace because of their inability to attract the support of a broad enough constituency.

Because relatively few scientists come to be recognized as either revolutionary geniuses or even distinguished technicians, it is tempting to conclude that science education at the graduate level sets students up for long-term career frustration. The pattern noted here is most pronounced in the natural sciences, yet that does not stop the social sciences and other fledgling fields from copying the natural sciences in their worst tendencies. All this does is to enhance the legitimacy of the more mature sciences, regardeless of palpable differences in subject matter. For example, social theorists are perennially drawn to analogies between, on the one hand, intrinsic human agency and extrinsic social control, and, on the other, the principle of inertia and the law of gravity. One is then led to believe that society is nothing more than an elaborate network of mechanical pushes and pulls on people. Even though physicists now find such images of mechanism quaint, if not embarrassing, they continue to live on in the minds and theories of social scientists. And what applies to research practice applies with a vengeance to research training.

Perhaps the most striking pattern is of graduate science training is that it is devoted almost entirely to the development of cutting-edge research skills, with little, if any, attention paid to the interpersonal skills need for teaching and administration. Yet, most science Ph.D.s who remain in academia are employed in teaching-oriented institutions. And even if a freshly minted Ph.D. is fortunate enough to be employed in a research university, the value of her hard-earned skills is bound to depreciate at a rapid rate, especially if she trained in a field with a rapidly advancing research front. This last point helps explain why scientists tend to do their best work before they turn forty. For, unless scientists continually upgrade their skills, they become obsolete as researchers within a dozen years out of graduate school. As a result, most scientists conduct the bulk of their professional lives in teaching and/or administrative posts for which they have received no formal training. Interestingly, these well-known facts have yet to elicit outrage from scholars of management and labor.

On the contrary, the situation just described is often taken to be not merely normal, but exemplary of science as a self-organizing enterprise. Indeed, the clearest reasons that federal policymakers give for adopting a laissez-faire attitude to the allocation of R&D funds turn on an analogy drawn between science's internal means of picking its winners — the so-called peer review process — and the "invisible hand" of the capitalist marketplace. The basic idea is that good scientists are in the best position to know — and to acknowledge — good science when they see it. After all, are they not the primary consumers of scientific research? Without any special prompting from the government, science would seem capable of ranking its many practitioners according to the merit of their contributions. This hierarchy is more evident, the more mature the science is perceived to be. For example, in the more advanced natural sciences, it is not uncommon for 80% of the footnotes in journal articles to go to 20% of those publishing in the field.

In addition, more than two-thirds of scientists who begin their professional careers by publishing research undertaken in graduate school will soon cease publication altogether. Typically, publication ends with the awarding of tenure, though often it results from discouragement born of the scientists' failure to generate interest in the "marketplace of ideas." The overall trend, then, is toward what sociologists call a principle of "cumulative advantage." Scientists who distinguish themselves early in their careers — a group that nearly coincides with those who participate in the "old boy networks" of the prestigious research universities — tend to be the ones who distinguish themselves later on. As in capitalism, so too in science: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Of course, such a pattern is common to numerous large organizations. However, the difference is that in those other cases, we often say that the organization suffers from a "structural bias" that systematically underutilizes the pool of available talent. Why not the same diagnosis in the case of science?

Lest the reader think otherwise, there is a strong positive correlation between initial R&D funding and the number of scientific publications subsequently generated. The most highly funded research universities produce the most professional papers. A similar tendency occurs at the international level, as nations with more lavish R&D budgets outpace the scientific publication of less endowed countries. However, these facts address only issues of production, not of productivity: that is, the amount of scientific bang one gets for each R&D buck.

While no one denies that, in the modern era, she who has the largest budget generally has the largest impact on the research front, there lurks the more interesting question of the proportional impact of budget size on the direction that research takes. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers to this question, largely because the question can be framed in two quite distinct ways. Should scientists be seen primarily as adding to a potentially endless storehouse of knowledge? Or, should scientists be seen as inching closer to some ultimate goal, such as a unified theory of reality?

When appealing for public support, scientists like to conflate the two images, typically by presenting a torrent of publications in some field as evidence for scientists' closing in on nature's fundamental principles. But once examined a bit more closely, the two images do not fit so neatly together. On the one hand, there is evidence that the nations with the lion's share of R&D funding generate an even larger share of the total number of scientific publications. On the other hand, there is also evidence that each additional increment in R&D investment advances the frontiers of knowledge a less little than the previous one. In other words, accelerating the rate at which scientific publications are produced is perfectly compatible with decelerating the rate at which agreement is reached on the solutions to a field's fundamental problems. The overall image of the dynamics of scientific inquiry, then, is one of a goal that seems to recede the more vigorously it is pursued: Tantalus would have appreciated the ruse!

The steady stream of professional papers serves to assuage the fears of those who worry about how scientists spend their time at work. Nevertheless, it is the image of scientists getting closer to unraveling the secrets of the universe that enables scientific inquiry to escape standards of accountability to which other productive enterprises are routinely held. Yet, it is precisely here that we find the familiar phenomenon of diminishing returns on investment. An economic indicator of a "mature" science is that more resources need to be invested in order to make comparable advances. The main reason is that mature sciences work on increasingly specialized problems, solutions to which call for the manufacture of sophisticated instruments. These can be quite large and expensive, as in the case of the 53-mile underground oval tunnel known as the Superconducting Supercollider, whose $10+ billion pricetag proved too much for a budget-conscious US Congress.

Upon completion, the Supercollider would have been the world's largest atom-smasher, presumably capable of experimentally testing rival accounts of the fundamental forces of nature. But the custom-made Supercollider would have been good for little else, a point openly admittedly even by its most eloquent defenders. Moreover, if history is our guide, a set of decisive tests, or "crucial experiments," of the sort proposed on the Supercollider would have yielded still more ideas for experiments requiring yet more customized equipment. Thus, plans were already afoot for a Super-duper-collider! In fact, one would be hard-pressed to find a scientific research program that ever died a natural death, that is, as a result of having solved all of its own problems to its practitioners' satisfaction. None of this should surprise those who are used to the self-perpetuating tendencies of social welfare programs long after their effectiveness has expired.

Strategies for termination have had to be invented — often by those outside of the science concerned who nevertheless laid claim to the resources consumed by that science. Megaprojects like the Supercollider, which are funded directly through Congress and not through a federal science agency, are forced to confront a truly formidable array of rivals. In fact, resistance may be strongest from big budget programs outside science altogether. For example, because weapons funding was possibly threatened by continued support for the Supercollider, the Defense Department reversed its traditional pro-science stance and refused to intervene on the megaproject's behalf.

Needless to say, the scientific establishment used the defeat of the Supercollider as an opportunity to decry these forced encounters between scientific and non-scientific projects. However, given the ease with which scientists themselves have been willing to claim long-term, large-scale public benefits for their most expensive efforts, it is perhaps not so unreasonable that they be made to compete against other projects that claim similar consequences, be they proposed by the Defense Department or the Department of Health and Human Services. Nevertheless, in what follows, I want to focus on a much narrower science policy arena: Not where Nobel Prize winners face off against four-star generals, but where biologists face off against physicists. It is to these contained strategies of termination — these institutionalized forms of "cognitive euthanasia" — that we now turn.

Putting People Back Into the Business of Science:
Constituting a National Forum for Setting the Research Agenda, Part 1

Steve Fuller

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Putting People Back Into the Business of Science: Part 1