I would like to offer two components that I think Howard Birnbaum underemphasizes in his accurate and useful discussion of problems that have developed with university research funding. These are my personal observations, distilled from decades of trying to play the game.
The first concerns peer review of proposals, which many of us, forgetting that peer review can be no better than the peers, are loath to disparage. In my 40-plus years of experience, the process has changed almost beyond recognition. I remember when peer reviewing was essentially free of self-interest on the reviewer’s part: A proposal showed up in the mail, often submitted not in response to some “announced opportunity” stating that research funds were available, but because an individual investigator had an idea he or she wanted to pursue—and one reviewed it in that light, then sent it back.
Today, the process seems anything but individual or disinterested. The peers have a level of awareness of each other and networks of connection and organization that surpass anything imaginable in the 1960s. Potential research collaborators formally combine with a deliberate effort to add so many prestigious names to a proposal that a junior reviewer would have to be very brave to do anything but approve it. The proposers are well aware that they will be among each other’s reviewers and that personalities will matter.
The peer review process is enhanced by agencies that advocate “critical mass” and “adequacy of facilities” as necessary criteria for a proposal’s viability. The funding needs for some research groups are so large and so continuous that every announced opportunity is followed up with a proposal, whether or not any prior interest or expertise in the specific area was present in the group. Groups propose first and ask questions afterward, often on a very short time scale; many are still looking for new collaborators a week or two before the proposal is due.
Formal but minimal commitments, in terms of time allotted, may be spread over many proposals for a single prominent investigator. Principal investigators will often appear on different multi-institutional proposals in competition for the same funding. That type of competition could only be altered by a new and uniform set of civil-service rules and procedures that the present generation of agency managers would not know how to enforce. Rules for dealing with, regulating, and avoiding conflict of interest within government agencies have been historically rather scrupulously enforced; but application of conflict-of-interest regulations in nongovernmental applications for agency programs seems often to be essentially nonexistent or unenforceable. (And if the agencies tried to implement such regulations, they would be said to be behaving “bureaucratically.”)
My other topic is the use of now indispensable graduate student labor in university research programs, usually programs supported by federal grants. There is no cheaper source of high-quality labor, and it frequently comes with a level of motivation not available at any price. Graduate students are intensely interested in the research and would like to pursue it after they finish their education. It is insufficient to tell them when they are applying to graduate degree programs that the buyer should beware and that opportunities to continue doing basic research may be in very short supply when they finish their PhDs. Such warnings only filter out the brightest American students, who are typically better attuned to the practical consequences of their educational choices and better able to choose from a wide range of possibilities—the students who should continue doing basic research in physics for the rest of their lives. The productivity of any research group is surely much greater if several graduate students are involved. The only mechanism I can imagine that would end this practice would be to give funding agencies the authority and competence to stop rewarding universities for the overproduction of PhDs in physics. It would not be an easy task, and the overall national research effort would go more slowly. But difficult problems sometimes do not have easy solutions.
