Please notice that the title of this post promises a “paranoid response”, not a careful analysis. It’s one of those unscheduled features of this blog. Kind of like a snow day.
Yesterday’s Inside Higher Ed has an article about the U.S. Senate getting kind of testy with the director of the NSF about certain research projects the NSF has seen fit to fund. Regular readers know that I think we can have a reasoned debate about funding priorities (especially when that funding is put up by the public). It does not sound to me like the exchange in the Senate was that kind of reasoned debate.
From the IHE article:
Senators don’t think the National Science Foundation should fund research they think is a) covered somewhere else in the government, or b) stupid?
Answer: c) both.
“Determinants of Husband-Initiated and Wife-Initiated Divorces,” read Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas Republican, in an effort to point out what she thinks is a ridiculously titled endeavor for the NSF to be funding.
Hutchison, chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation’s Subcommittee on Science and Space, which had a hearing Tuesday on the NSF budget, repeatedly took the mic to express her bewilderment at certain NSF social science projects, several of which involved study of topics before the 17th amendment to the Constitution.
on’t know much about human society.”
No, no, no! Actual research in the social science might turn up actual answers — answers that don’t always play well to the base. It’s more fun when politicians can pull study conclusions that they think they remember out of thin air.
Also, any claim you make about people is going to be more controversial that claims about neutrinos. We all have opinions about people, but not so much about neutrinos.
Hutchison repeatedly argued that the U.S. must focus on economic gains, not social science. “At a time when we’re trying to get every dollar directed toward research that will keep American competitive, I would have to question” work like the election database, she said.
Getting clear on the facts doesn’t keep us competitive, yo!
Hutchison took a moment to find the right word for what she thinks social sciences are doing to NSF’s ability to carry out the President’s American Competitiveness Initiative. She eventually landed on: “burdened.” Beyond that, Hutchison mostly asked Bement in several different ways whether the mission of NSF should be redefined to focus on basic research in the physical sciences and engineering.
Eventually, with just a hint of her preference, she went with: “Do you think we should reassess the mission of NSF in any way?”
Bement, as if magically sensing a theme in the senators’ questions, eventually pegged his response to applied science. Social sciences “compress the lead time from discovery to application,” he said.
Hutchison isn’t the only senator that doesn’t like stuff, and let Bement know it in emphatic terms.
Sen. Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican, wants the NSF to “light a fire” under science education, and Sen. John Sununu, a New Hampshire Republican, thinks NSF should get out of the education game altogether.
In Stevens’s high school, “science teachers made the subject come alive.” Stevens expressed some discontent that he may not be raising a pack of Einsteins. “Today … as a father of six … I’m stupefied to see that kids would rather … clean their room” than study science. “What took out the spark?”
Parents (who deliver the clean-your-room edicts) may still be allowed to use corporal punishment …
Steven’s also blamed the Internet, which was developed and proliferated with United States government funding, for letting students push a button for answers, thus straying from books and “personal contact.”
… and corporal punishment is a kind of personal contact.
Anyway, funding social sciences instead of engineering is of no use when there are bridges to be built.
Sununu asked Bement to identify where the funding dearth is that is allowing India and China to catch up.
Bement said “that’s a question that changes daily,” which was the comment that broke Sununu’s camel’s back.
“When the head of NSF has trouble answering that question,” Sununu said, “I frankly wonder what you’re spending your time on.”
Don’t be telling us that dynamical systems are complicated! The problem with you scientists (and administrators of scientists) is that you’re not prepared to just give us an answer!
Shifting NSF to concentrate on just the physical sciences will surely tell us why the educational, funding, and employment landscape in India and China is better than the one we have here.
Sununu also implied that he doesn’t find senators – as in, those studied in the election database – worthy of study. “Conversely, you seem to have no trouble studying how and why people vote for U.S. senators … though it is my current profession … I don’t think that’s useful.”
Stop looking at us! There’s nothing to see here. And while you’re at it, call off those ethics investigators, too.
The people know what they like. Just let them keep voting the way they like to vote.
Anything else Bement had to add, especially about education, was basically tied to the tracks with the Sununu express barreling through. “Everybody likes to talk about education,” Sununu said. “It makes it seem like we care” about “kids … about the future. But to direct money to K-12” is “counterproductive when we’re spending” big bucks in the Education Department every year.
The schools are already rolling in money, and our students are the best in the universe, so please call off your science education initiatives and go back to funding the atom-smashers.
(Besides, unlike you science geeks, the Education Department got the memo about “softening up” the schools for the glorious privatization of education to come …)
Bement said that funding priorities depend on national priorities, whether defense or economic, or otherwise.
Sununu added that “if you can identify an economic benefit [for research] you shouldn’t be funding it, that’s what we have a venture capital community for.”
Wait, so you want the science funding to go to projects without practical applications?
Senator, am I being Punk’d?
yea… of course the Sens and Reps questioning particular projects and large-scale goals has been going on since V. Bush started this whole system 50 years ago. And Senator Proxmire was particularly on the ball…. (link)
1. The research Hutchison complained about, on divorce, was probably done at the request of Congress, especially the Republicans, who have tried to skew NSF funding to support things like Bush’s “anti-divorce” initiative (Hutchison forgot about it like the rest of America? Hutchison doesn’t support efforts to keep people married? Hutchison has a stick . . . take your pick; she’s my senator, and I can abuse her wasting a hearing if I choose — and let me take this opportunity to note that Barbara Radnovsky would make a better senator from Texas, and badly needs your contribution).
Sununu doesn’t know that the U.S. Department of Education does not write curricula? So he’s ignorant of the law, of the customs, and of his own job. He then has the gall to complain about what other kids learn?
NSF funding is way below where it needs to be. Anything funded by NSF today is very, very, very worthy — having had to compete and beat out 20 other funding proposals. Gone are the days when frivolous studies might have been done.
But it appears the Senate isn’t paying attention at all. They’re still sniping as though the titles are everything — which suggests that their niggardly (look it up) behavior in the past was wholly unjustified.
By the way, NSF is the lead agency in federal government on science education. Sununu doesn’t know that?
Over at IHE, one reader wondered about the snarky tone of the article. As for me and my house, who live and love science, it was not nearly snarky enough.
Write your senator, today.
I’ll write my senators.
So wait… according to the government we shouldn’t fund studies without practical implications, studies with practical (economic) implications, anything that promotes science education, anything that won’t help us get ahead of Asian students, social science, or biological sciences that might turn up unpopular stuff like evolution?
At least physics is safe, until the senators get a gander at some physics study titles and decide that anything confusing is also suspect.
“When the head of NSF has trouble answering that question,” Sununu said, “I frankly wonder what you’re spending your time on.”
Reminds me of this:
“What is YOUR solution?”
“There are no solutions,” I said. “There are only trade-offs.”
“The people DEMAND solutions!” she shot back angrily. (Source)
Steve
The more one listens to our conservative elected officials, the more narrow-minded they sound. Are these reps. trying hard to sound as ignorant as George W. Bush, or is it that they really are?
Sounds good – I’d find it difficult to think of practical applications for some of my experiments, but I can easily think up fifty thousand experiments which I can perform which have no practical applications. Can I have funding for them, Janet?
Yes, just as soon as I’ve been elected to the U.S. Senate!
Well, ‘Aunt’ Jane, who was for a while an NSF funding officer for Astronomy, in response to this post supplies the following information:
The most tricky part of my job at NSF was reworking the abstract to post on the web for proposals we funded. That’s where Senators or Representatives (i.e. staffers) troll looking for things that can be quoted (out of context?) to make it sound like NSF was funding nonsense research. The classic example was the mileage Proxmire got out of the research NSF funded to study stress in plants. What he/staffer didn’t know (or didn’t care to acknowledge) is that “stress” is a word used by biologists for what happens to plants under adverse conditions, e.g. drought.
Janet did a nice job showing some of the more absurd side of fudning science.
So you got an ‘attagirl’ from A. J.
I was looking for information to confirm an email I got from a reputable source regarding a new amendment S.2802 to stop funding by NSF for social and biological science. If the amendment is true and not a hoax, I’d say your level of paranoia was underplayed. I’d call it the beginning of a new dark ages, agency by agency. I think the aim is to let religion and oil companies answer all our questions.