Secularising science?

TY - JOUR

T1 - Secularising science?

AU - Guston, David H.

N1 - Funding Information: David H Guston guston@rci.rutgers.edu Program in Public Policy, Rutgers University, New Brunswick NJ 08901, USA I will limit my remarks to the ‘‘secularisation of science’’, Fuller’s overall recommendation for the transformation of the current science — which reproduces liberal and communitarian flaws — to a republican science that is hoped to be both fully democratic itself, and congruent with democratic norms and practices of the larger society. By secularisation, Fuller largely seems to mean separation from the entangling nature of relations with the state, even — and perhaps especially — those that are ostensibly promotional, as he explicitly models the process on the separation of church and state achieved by Liberal societies beginning in the 17 th Century. That the model of religion is appropriate is almost taken for granted. After all, the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC), which Fuller almost fetishizes as the example of Big Science, was merely (to be) the grandest of the physics cathedrals. Not only does science occupy positions of prominence formerly enjoyed by religion, but it taps religion’s former and residual authority for its own grandeur. For example, the headquarters of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, known among the cognoscenti as the Temple of Science, sits on a very separate part of the National Mall in Washington, almost as far from the Congress as possible and nearby to the Federal Reserve Bank, the most separate of all political institutions in the U.S. government. The stones at the base of this Temple of Science, a raised rectangle within a rectangle, mimic the stones that Herod used in the reconstruction of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. But science’s claim to wear the mitre in addition to the crown is not as complete as it, or Fuller, lets on. Fuller describes what he takes to be part of the sacred nature of science in the U.S. — that by being politically fragmented, science may only be referred to by partial descriptions, like the many aspects of God. In the U.S., there is no Department of Science, and this lack Fuller takes to be an indicator of sacredness. I take it as just the opposite — a sign that science in the U.S. system is more like other mundane things and is therefore handled in the same fragmented way by Congress as the provision of social services, economic well-being, or the common defence. The lack of a Department of Science in the U.S. has a history, and at each turn the secularisers, for example Senator Allison’s Commission in the 1880s, won. This is true even after World War II, because the delay from 1945, when Vannevar Bush proposed a National Research Foundation, to 1950, when President Truman finally signed the bill creating the National Science Foundation, permitted the flourishing of a plural research tradition in several agencies, notably the Public Health Service, the Office of Naval Research, and the Atomic Energy Commission. The most precise statement of secularisation that Fuller provides goes as follows: the state should separate its power to distribute scientific knowledge from its power to produce it. Crudely put, a secularised science would keep the former ‘public’ but make the latter ‘private’. Now this is exactly what Don K. Price thought that the post-war system was doing. Price (not to be confused with Derek de Solla Price, whom Fuller cites often on the size of science) was the founding dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, but well before that he was an analyst at the Bureau of the Budget who wrote the note upon which President Truman based his veto of the first NSF bill for its lack of presidential accountability. Price called the new system, spawned by the government office Bush ran during the war but nurtured in most of the government agencies sponsoring research after the war, “a new type of federalism.” He meant by this — like traditional federalism in the U.S. described a relationship between two sovereign entities, a national government and state governments — that the new relationship between the national government and universities would also be between sovereign entities, and despite the distribution of funds by the government, the production of research would be controlled by the independent research and educational institutions. It is not clear whether Fuller is disputing the intention of this system, or its results some 50 years later after the accumulation of a variety of small and large changes. The surest way for the U.S. government to divorce distribution from production would be to give up the more than $10 billion it spends in its own laboratories, and there has been a debate for the last decade or so about privatising these labs, especially those belonging to the Department of Energy and the Department of Commerce, but also those of the National Institutes of Health. It would strike me as odd, however, if that turns out to be the real recommendation for secularisation because of the alternative organizations of inquiry offered in the model of the New Deal that Fuller valorises, the most competitive with the Bush model was one for a greater role for government itself in performing socially relevant research. One could talk more about options that existed during and after the New Deal period, and about how the system may or may not have changed substantially since then. I believe it has changed because the government is now involved, if only minutely, in manipulating the internal reward system of science to achieve goals of assuring the integrity and productivity of science [1] . That is, there is now a micro-economic policy for science and not just a macro-economic policy. But to consider the macro-economic policy, one has to wonder whether Fuller’s secularisation has not already been achieved by default. Whereas, at the height of Cold War paranoia and space-age frontier mentality in the mid-1960s, the U.S. government spent almost 70% of all R&D funds nationally and industry provided the bulk of the remainder, today that situation is reversed and industry provides two-thirds of national R&D spending and the government only one-third. So one wonders exactly how much more divestiture of the production of research does the government need to engage in? With this scepticism elaborated, let me just conclude by articulating full agreement with Fuller about the problem of the equitable distribution of research funds and his plan of social inheritance taxation. Some of the alternatives he floats, particularly one that would crack down on conflicts of interest in the peer review and the research evaluation process, I think are right on target. One subtle area is the question of prizes, the efficiency of which economists have promoted since the publication of Gordon Tullock’s The Organization of Inquiry in 1966 [2] . My view is that the government, in changes to intellectual property rights made in the 1980s, attempted to institute the logic of prizes by allowing researchers to profit from the patenting and licensing of products derived from sponsored research. These intellectual property rights and money from licenses stand as prizes awarded to federally employed or sponsored researchers for producing potential commercial goods. Fuller seems aware of the ambiguity of intellectual property, and could make more use of it. Another specific policy is the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), which many science agencies, including NSF, administer. EPSCoR sets aside a pot of funds to be allocated to institutions in the bottom one-third of U.S. states, provided that the projects meet certain criteria including merit review. EPSCoR faces two major problems: 1) the challenge that institutions are the recipients of the social engineering benefits, but states are the indicators of the trouble that demands attention; and 2) the question of when states (or institutions) graduate from EPSCoR. Some normative guidance that Fuller is qualified to offer would be helpful here.

PY - 2002

Y1 - 2002

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=0036168773&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=0036168773&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1016/S0016-3287(01)00059-3

DO - 10.1016/S0016-3287(01)00059-3

M3 - Comment/debate

AN - SCOPUS:0036168773

SN - 0016-3287

VL - 34

SP - 197

EP - 199

JO - Futures

JF - Futures

IS - 2

ER -