The Big Money and High Politics of Science

THE ATLANTIC

FRANCIS BACON said that science is power. Today science is politics. Scientific institutions, plus an impalpable essence thought to emanate from them, “scientific excellence,” are in the process of becoming one of the main things that American politics will be about for as far into the future as one can imagine. The domestic power struggle is rapidly coining to a new focus upon the location of federal scientific installations and the allocation of federal contracts for research and development. That is the new definition of pork barrel.

Pork barrel, though the only recognizable name for the phenomenon in question, is an unnecessarily invidious term for the inevitable process of deciding how the economy is going to be energized by federal projects. If there is little reason to despise the general process, there is still less occasion for assuming that the particular projects arc unworthy. The improvement of rivers and harbors and the construction of dams were socially useful under the old dispensation. The seeding of the country with scientific installations is nothing to be ashamed of today.

Potentially, there is a great deal of scientific pork to be divided, for the federal science budget is approaching $15.5 billion a year. In 1940 the figure was $74 million. As the old forms of pork are phased out by the Great Annihilator, McNamara, there will be no dearth of new projects for resilient communities. In Boston, there are lamentations about the imminent demise of the old Watertown Arsenal; but Cambridge is going to have a new NASA Electronics Research Center, with an ultimate spillover of some $40 million a year in subcontracts. The people who are let out at the arsenal will probably not be hired by NASA, but Boston as a community has successfully negotiated the perilous transition from old-style pork to new. Every American city and region must do the same.

The historical backdrop for this new kind of politics is the long process of continentalizing American science and culture. To populate the entire continent was one thing; to curb the financial dominance of the Northeast over the rest of the country was another and more diflicult; but the most difficult of all has been to level the cultural gradient from Boston and New York to the Pacific. For one thing, the stakes were always being raised. By the time the Midwest had constructed a network of vigorous liberal arts colleges on the old New England model, the idea of the graduate school was ready to explode, and the leveling upward had to begin all over again.

So far as the Midwest was concerned, the balance was amply redressed by the founding of the University of Chicago. From 1895 to 1920, the University of Chicago was the most important American center of research in physics, not only holding its own with the Eastern universities but outstripping them. Albert A. Michelson at Chicago was subverting classical physics by his measurements of the speed of light. Robert A. Millikan at Chicago was measuring the charge of the electron and quashing the residual doubts about the atomic theory. In one field, chemistry, the leading institutions in the period up to 1920 were Harvard and M.I.T. One man, Arthur A. Noyes, was the pivot of the M.I.T. school of chemists.

It was a major divide in American cultural history when Noyes was induced to abandon M.I.T. for Cal lech in 1919. George Ellery Hale, the promoter of giant telescopes and destined to be the architect of the 200-inch instrument at Palomar, was already at Cal lech. (He had moved to Los Angeles to get the benefit of the pellucid night air, little suspecting that it would develop into the greatest smog belt in the world.) When in 1921 Hale and Noyes induced Millikan to leave Chicago for Cal Tech, the foundation was laid for making Cal lech what it clearly became in the 1930s, the greatest technical university in the world. When the physical sciences experienced an almost simultaneous upsurge at the University of California at Berkeley, the center of gravity of American science and in some degree of American culture had shifted to California.

In the last generation, the principal countervailing forces to Cal Tech and Berkeley, the Eastern end of a seesaw that still tilts to the Pacific, have been Columbia in physics and Harvard in chemistry and biology and medicine. The greatest single focus of strength in between has been the tradition in physiology at Washington University, St. Louis. The overwhelming majority of American Nobel Prize winners in science a fallible index have been divided among these five institutions: Berkeley, Cal Tech, Columbia, Harvard, and Washington.

UP TO 1940, the continentalizing of American science, the shifting incidence of basic research, seemed to be merely a matter of institutional prestige and vague regional pride, and for anybody except an academic scientist, a marginal form of psychological gratification or chagrin. The situation began to change radically with the coming of the Second World War and the creation by the federal government of major research facilities in loading universities: the Radiation Laboratory at M.I.T., the nuclear pile at the University til Chicago, the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins, the laboratory for chemical separation of uranium isotopes at Berkeley. At the point where the cost of scientific research was soaring to astronomical heights, the universities saw an opportunity to unload an ever increasing part of their scientific budget onto the federal government. The scientific prestige that would attract federal grants became a ponderable asset on the books of a university.

Even this, however, did not turn the incidence of research into a political issue. For almost twenty years there was a surprising acquiescence by Congress in the unargued proposition that the federal research dollar should go to the best men at the best institutions, that the only appropriate test was their reputation for “excellence” in the eyes of their peers. This inevitably entailed a heavy concentration of grants upon a small number of towering institutions, with a conspicuous geographical imbalance. But congressmen did not bestir themselves about it.

This self-restraint — or, more realistically, failure to grasp the political implications of what was happening - has begun to break down in the last five years. The question is, why this sudden awareness? Part of the answer is evident. The loudly trumpeted rationalization of the Defense Department by liquidating arsenals and navy yards has hit the politicians where they live — under the steely gaze of their constituents. For the record, congressmen duly squawk about the closings, but they know that the only real solution is to get a new grip on the federal budget. Pragmatically speaking, that means a big scientific installation or major research and development contracts for industry, preferably both.

Only one further element was required to perfect the logic of the new politics: the rising conviction that a vigorous scientific program at a major university is an irresistible magnet for the location of government research facilities that have no direct academic affiliation, and more than this, for the location of industrial plants with a scientific or engineering orientation industrial “spinoff.” University science is increasingly perceived as the great catalyst for the whole economy of a metropolitan district or geographical region.

Once it was generally accepted that great universities inevitably attract independent federal installations, that became an argument for putting new facilities near the greatest universities. This was the clinching factor in awarding the NASA Electronics Center to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Senator Edward Kennedy was first elected on the slogan “He Can Do More for Massachusetts,” but even he could not have delivered NASA unless he had had Harvard and M.I.T. to throw onto the scales.

No politician could fail to read the omens. In the years to come, the raw power grab among cities and regions will have to be camouflaged by persuasive invocations of the towering strength of the local university. There is the rub. If the local university is Harvard or M.I.T, — let alone both, a daily double on the Charles — or Chicago or Berkeley, the case is made to begin with. Yet the prospect of seeing the research dollar virtually monopolized by about two dozen universities (38 percent of federal grants to ten universities in 1964, 59 percent to twenty-five universities) became politically intolerable once the distribution of university science was seen as affecting the ultimate distribution of wealth and power in American society. It will be a matter of economic survival for less favored cities and regions to get federal grants for their universities, to build them up on the scientific side by the only possible means, a gigantic infusion of federal money.

THE circle appears to be vicious. How can a university that is not already supremely prestigious ever break into the big money? One answer is to federate with neighboring institutions, either formally or psychologically, to make a whole greater than the sum of the parts. The University of North Carolina, North Carolina State College, and Duke University have acquired a collective identity as the “Research Triangle,” and the union lias just been blessed by the award of a $25 million installation of the United States Public Health Service: the National Center of Environmental Sciences. One of the things that took John F. Kennedy to Dallas on the last day of his life was to lend his countenance to the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest, a new federation of live universities with an adjoining “Research Park” for “science-oriented industry and research facilities.”

Even universities which have already been doing well with the government by objective standards have banded together to banish feelings of deprivation at not receiving more. Consider the story of MURA, an acronym for Midwestern Universities Research Association. The universities in question include Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana. At the beginning of the 1960s, they felt aggrieved at not having a giant accelerator — atom smasher to the popular press — among them. All grants for this purpose are included in the budget of the Atomic Energy Commission. MURA was a planning and lobbying organization to get $170 million from the AEC to build a high-intensity accelerator in Wisconsin.

In May, 1963, an advisory panel headed by a Harvard physicist recommended construction of the MURA accelerator but only on the condition that it not interfere with higher-intensity machines for the East and West coasts. This was exactly the kind of report that Midwestern scientists, however unfairly, had come to expect from a committee with a Harvard chairman. The view lias hardened into the orthodoxy in the Midwest that the East and West coasts are conspiring to arrogate all major projects to themselves. One might say that Midwestern scientists have taken up a kind of nuclear Populism, but this time facing both ways.

The advisory report left the White House understandably confused, but by tnid-November, 1963, Senator Hubert Humphrey, already the most conspicuous figure in public life from the MI RA country, felt optimistic that the President was about to commit himself irrevocably to the MURA accelerator.

A week later that President was dead. A new President was reopening the budget and looking for economics. In the end, Johnson asked his principal scientific adviser, inherited from Kennedy, Jerome B. Wicsncr, on leave from M.I.T., to prepare a memorandum stating the case against MURA. It docs not follow that this was Wiesner’s own position. When, just before Christmas, the President met with a group from MURA, he read from this hostile memorandum prepared by Wicsner’s office on his own instructions and told the dumbfounded MURA people where it had come from. Then the President dismissed them without any opportunity for rebuttals. The MURA accelerator was dead. The MURA people stamped out of the White House denouncing Wicsncr as an agent of the bloated East and vowing in retaliation to block any accelerators on the East or West coasts.

Senator Humphrey let the President know how strong the feelings were running. Johnson did not retreat from his basic decision, the MURA accelerator was out, but he did make what appeared at first to be the empty gesture of saying that henceforth MURA should have a bigger role at lire Argonne National Laboratory, on the outskirts of Chicago, operated for the AEC by the University of Chicago but intended to cooperate with other universities in the Midwest. It was notorious that the great state universities had never hit it oil very well with Argonne. By the end of 1964, however, the President’s pledge had taken on real substance, for Argonne was reorganized under the joint direction of the AEC, the University of Chicago — and MURA.

What was far more important, Johnson in his correspondence with Humphrey endorsed, a trillc patronizingly, “the development of centers of scientific strength in the midwest,” called for “fairness” in the distribution of federal research funds, and implied that the best test of fairness would be direct correlation of research grants to a region with its population. The implication seemed to be that funds for research ought to be distributed more or Jess on the same, principle as money for highways or public schools.

It is now clear that he meant what he said and did what he meant. With the hearty cooperation of Congress, he has embarked upon a drastic, remedy for inequality among universities in the receipt of research grants, a deliberate policy of equalization imposed from Washington by reducing the proportion of federal funds going to major academic powers. The eatchphrase, openly avowed by the National Science Foundation, is to build up “the second 20 centers of excellence.” Why “20” is mysterious, except as a round figure commensurate with the size of the country and promising shares for all. The National Defense Education Act, as amended and expanded in 1964, is frankly biased in favor of helping the needy institutions to catch up. To this end the additional graduate fellowships authorized by the amended legislation, rising to 7500 per year by 1967, are to be assigned to graduate schools rather than students. Most prospective graduate students, in order to benefit from these fellowships, will have to go to institutions they would not have chosen in a free market.

IT IS no derogation from President Johnson’s sincerity about public health to point out that his proposal for thirty-two regional centers for medical research and treatment, correlated where possible with existing institutions, would have the identical effect of spreading the federal bounty evenly through the country, to the advantage of struggling universities. Johnson was here acting upon a recommendation from a distinguished commission dominated by medical scientists. The principle of regional equalization of medical research did not originate with the politicians. Yet no bilHon-dollar program of this kind would have a chance in Congress without a built-in guarantee that the centers would be evenly distributed through the country.

Disadvantaged universities, like disadvantaged individuals, races, and regions, are to he given a leg up in the Cheat Society. Whether by design or unerring instinct for political opportunities, Lyndon Johnson is speedily implementing the most coherent program of leveling upward that the United States has ever seen.

The historical implications of this development are tremendous. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the main stuff of American history has been the recurring sense of regional deprivation as a deliberate infliction by favored regions upon the rest of the country. That was the point of the armed risings of the backcountry against the tidewater in the colonial South, of the infuriated assault upon Eastern bastions of privilege by the Populists of the South and West at the end of tire nineteenth century; the point, above all, of the great constant in American history, the steady unappeased grievance of the South against the North. To compare great things with small, it was the point only yesterday of the new Populism of MURA. To take regional equalization as a national purpose will not miraculously iron out existing inequalities or prevent the emergence of new ones. It might, however, divest them of their single most galling aspect in past generations, of appearing to flow from the absence of a national commitment to appropriate remedies. Fierce combats will continue to be fought over the allocation of individual projects but in the mitigating context of a general recognition that all parts of the country are entitled by explicit national policy to share equally in the Largesse from Washington.

In one sense, we are witnessing the absolutely definitive triumph of regionalism the adoption of regional equalization as an undisputed national goal. At the same time, we are witnessing the death of regionalism as the political expression of distinctive ways of life generated in the matrix of distinctive natural environments. Today the regions are speedily becoming interchangeable units for participation in the federal bounty; they are no longer independent focuses of vitality expressing regional personalities but units to be plugged into the national grid for receipt of an energizing current from Washington. Regions survive and flourish, but increasingly in the character of a mere administrative convenience to the federal government, a means of breaking down the total lump to be distributed.

Many factors operating over many generations have been pushing the country in this direction. If, however, we are now prepared to acknowledge that the redefinition of regionalism has been desirable as well as inexorable, a consummation to be deliberately hastened in our own time, one of the principal factors has been the current anxiety about the distribution of science. In the end, the distribution of science is the distribution of scientists, and in a free society they will not distribute themselves evenly over the country if the country is unevenly attractive. By the same token, no region in pursuit of scientific facilities can afford to displease them. Yet the scientific and technical classes are radically antiprovincial and devastatingly implacable in demanding an end to social strife and social anachronisms as disturbing elements in their own environment. Wherever they go, they seal the doom of regional idiosyncrasies.

This is part of the logic that is painfully liquidating the peculiarities of the South, the great American exception and the one surviving pocket of the old regionalism. The state of Alabama has been publicly warned by an official of NASA that the big rocket and space-research installations at Huntsville could be lost if Alabama does not provide a congenial society for scientific and technical personnel to raise their families in. Threats of this kind, either express or tacit, put a price tag on Wallacism. The price is too high. The South is discovering the paradox that a region must surrender its distinctive identity to reap the benefits of the new regionalism.

IN THE context of civil rights, most Americans would feel that the old regionalism was well lost as a refuge for social inequities. The more difficult question remains of the impact of regional equalization upon the quality of American intellectual life. One thing is certain. The catchword of this generation of Americans, in and out of Washington, is “excellence.” There is little reason to think that the politicians, and still less the President, are out to induce the reign of mediocrity. The “second 20” universities are supposed to be raised to the level of the first twenty, rather than the latter reduced to the present condition of the second group. The leveling is to be upward.

Yet grave perils remain. All these revolve about the problem of “critical mass” in graduate education. The great danger in all other forms of instruction is that classes will be too large. The problem in graduate training is that the number of students in any given field may be too small to create the shared excitement and mutual criticism by which graduate students educate one another fully as much as the professors educate them. For this purpose, the relevant definition of “field” is not chemistry or physics but inorganic chemistry or solid state physics. Two doctoral candidates in solid state physics in each of four universities do not equal six candidates in a single university. Even if the sheer numbers materialized to enable all universities to achieve critical mass in all major fields, the question would still remain whether there were enough truly “excellent” people in the same field at any one place to keep each other up to snuff, or whether they would be fatally dispersed among forty universities and seldom attain critical mass among themselves.

Another aspect of the same problem is that the whole strategy of leveling upward presupposes the invulnerable excellence ot the first twenty universities. It is virtually certain, however, that bv am conceivable specification of the first twenty, some of these are operating on an insufficient margin of excellence and glamour to sustain the new, artificially stimulated competition of the second twenty They might find the first twenty contracting to ton and the rest plummeting into the second category. Even if the average level of the second group did rise, that might still entail a net loss in excellence.

Whatever consequences one may envision, is there anything to stop the Johnsonian Revolution? Probably not. Any favored regions or entrenched academic powers would find themselves in an inherently false position if they tried to resist the logic of regional and institutional equalization. They would inevitably appear to be cloaking their selfish interests with a specious concern for tingeneral good.

One practical factor may still operate as a check upon the Johnsonian Revolution: the tendency of private industry to concentrate on a few already supreme localities. If electronic firms think that Route 128 around Boston is an ideal place to locate because Harvard and M.I.T. are in the offing, the buildup of other universities in other regions by federal policy will not necessarily produce the full economic benefits intended for the surrounding communities. Yet here too the government is in a position to apply substantial pressures. Scientifically oriented industry is dependent in considerable degree upon government contracts. Firms that pile up too densely in regions that the government regards as already receiving a “fair share” might find themselves silently passed over in favor of others that spread themselves out in keeping with the new politics. Nevertheless, the preferences of private industry will probably remain the greatest single brake upon regional equalization. It does not follow that this or any Other brake will keep the motor from accelerating in that direction.

Even the endeavor to move in that direction as a primary national purpose is enough to constitute a new epoch in American history. The President undoubtedly hopes to achieve a definitive continentalizing of science and high culture with no sacrifice of quality. If he can make quality and equality march together in this fashion, he will have brought off one of the greatest and most beneficent revolutions in American history. It is a big if. The prospects of excellence in American life are riding on the outcome.