As promised in an earlier post, I now have the capability to add a standardized metropolitan-region field to any entry in my tbed database. Consequently, I’ve spent a few hours a week for the last several months revisiting my roughly 1,700 entries, adding, dropping, and revising as necessary to account for the ebb and flow of state and federal programming.
One of the categories I try and track is “national centers,” a broad rubric under which I’ve included major university-based, tbed-oriented research centers sponsored by federal agencies such as NSF, DOE, NASA, parts of DOD, and NIH. There you can sample a dense acronym soup: ERCs, MRSECs, STCs, NSECs, CTSAs, and so on. In the course of my data validation, I made some new observations about one particular acronym: I/U CRCs, the Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers program of the National Science Foundation.
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Recently, probably partly in response to the flap over Bayh-Dole launched by the Kauffman Foundation, the White House issued an RFI (Request for Information) on the commercialization of university-based research.
Many institutional offices around the nation have put effort into their replies, and since they will take care to promote their own efforts and programs, I decided to write my own response, treating the RFI more as an RFC (Request for Comment) so I could write a discursive treatment rather than a mere catalog of programs I find meritorious.
You can read my response to the RFI in pdf form here or in text form after the break. Please feel free to comment below, or to send me email.
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The Center for an Urban Future, with which I have been affiliated as an advisor and author for many years, has published as the most recent number in its “Off the CUF” series of commentaries my thoughts on the implications of Columbia University’s Manhattanville campus project.
While the legal issues swirling around Manhattanville are up in the air as of the publication date, I have tried to focus on the policy implications, and how it happened that we all took our eye off the ball: the potential of this expansion to enable cluster formation and private-sector employment. At the risk of irritating both sides in this contentious process, I am asking that City leaders explicitly re-open the question of private-sector research partners of the university and whether they will be recruited and made welcome either in the project itself or in immediately adjoining land scheduled for rezoning by City Council this spring.
On Manhattanville, it’s time to lead toward the outcomes NYC wants, and time to stop cowering behind fear that any new complexity will complicate a fraught political process. I expect this piece to be controversial. Comments welcome. Click the link in the first paragraph for the article, or see it embedded in a frame after the jump.
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Can NSF centers achieve sustainability after graduation? evidence and argument
Tags: NSF
In my last post, I promised a look at why the term “graduated” makes little sense to me in the context of the National Science Foundation’s centers programs. I can adduce some theoretical arguments for my position, and I’ve also assembled a quick-and-dirty table (after the break) summarizing what I could find via superficial Web searching about the current status of centers that NSF regards as “graduated” from the ERC, I/U CRC, and MRSEC programs.
This empirical exploration revealed a bit more evidence for sustainability than I’d suspected, but on the whole I think it’s still unduly optimistic to believe that once federal funding stops, a university-based center will necessarily retain the essential characteristics of what was originally envisioned. That’s not to say the funding has been a failure, only that expectations for sustainability may be unduly high, or perhaps irrelevant.
Of course, it’s the ambition of every funder with public goals (whether federal or philanthropic) to leave behind an enduring, systemic change — if you like, to create a lasting institution focused on the particular set of issues of concern to the funder. However, when you think about what that would mean in the university context, it’s simply not realistic. Universities endure. Centers, typically, do not.
More on Can NSF centers achieve sustainability after graduation? evidence and argument
Filed under Commentary by David Hochman