Birnbaum replies: I had hoped that my article would open a discussion of this important factor in US science. After that article was published, I received communications from many individuals; most agreed with the points I made but were not anxious to go public with their views. I appreciate these three writers’ willingness to engage in such a discussion.
Gregory Salamo’s letter focuses on the role and effect of outreach programs in the funding of science. He argues that it is the scientists’ responsibility to involve all parts of our society in the understanding and excitement of science and to extend to underrepresented segments of society opportunities to engage in science and engineering. This statement, with its aspects of “motherhood and apple pie,” is one I fully agree with. The issue is how this involvement is done and whether the programs are effective. Such programs as EPSCOR have existed long enough to allow a careful determination of their effectiveness in extending science opportunities to researchers in states that have not received their share of federal funding. In the absence of such a determination, the suspicion, which I would hope is not correct, arises that this is one more entitlement program. I cannot agree with Salamo that such a program can be justified on the basis that “it is, therefore, simply good strategy to engage every state in this endeavor.”
Certainly the responsibility for communicating the importance and excitement of science and engineering to young students, our political structure, and other segments of society rests on all who are engaged in teaching and research. Outreach efforts require both time and funds. Those interested in spending the time should be supported and encouraged. However, I believe that it is harmful to require such outreach as a precondition of receiving research funding (NSF has this requirement for both multi-investigator and singleinvestigator grants). Such a requirement results in imaginative promises that often contain more than a little hypocrisy. Some of the promised outreach efforts actually achieve their goals; those should be appreciated. More do not, and although Salamo suggests that outreach efforts are evaluated during contract renewals, my experience is that the “evaluations” are relatively pro forma.
As far as I know, no determination has been made of whether such outreach activities are cost-effective overall. And there is a cost–in expended funds (in a period when the size of grants has decreased in constant dollars); in time spent; and, most important, in the loss of support for high-quality science and engineering because, during the proposal review process, the outreach effort was judged to be inadequate. In contrast to Salamo’s statement, I do believe that society benefits when research funding “supports the best to do the best.”
Incidentally, NSF has a division of education and human resources, whose specific mission is to support the outreach activities being discussed and whose budget ($875 million in fiscal year 2002) is comparable to that of the division of mathematical and physical sciences ($920 million in FY 2002). Because NSF’s primary mission is support of science and engineering, obvious questions arise when the dollar cost of outreach comes from the MPS budget.
Alexander Berezin has expressed a belief that the research abilities of all tenured faculty are equivalent. I cannot join him in that belief. To distribute research funds uniformly to all faculty who publish one or two papers in a refereed journal would, I believe, be extremely wasteful when research funds are already in short supply. I cannot believe that this distribution method would result in increased “serendipity, creativity, and originality in research” as Berezin expects. Similar systems are used in Japan and France, and an examination of their university research systems leads me to a strong preference for a true peerreview system.
Although I generally agree with David Montgomery about the peerreview system, I still believe that it is the best way to choose excellent research programs. The trick is to work with funding agencies to improve the system; the first step would be to undertake a frank discussion between the research community and the funding agencies. To date, this has not even started.
One issue that Montgomery briefly mentions is the “call for proposals” that increasingly forms the basis for research funding. The agencies often claim that the research community generates research topics, but in reality those topics used in the calls for proposals result either from the interests of agency personnel or from the agency’s attempts to increase its funding. In either case, the topics funded are determined by groups other than the active research community. Although that approach is appropriate for mission agencies, it seems less so for basic research agencies.
