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.
More on Revisiting the NSF I/U CRC program: some recent insights
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In an earlier post, I had promised some additional thoughts about unintended consequences of the 10-year doubling of the federal budget for research and development in the physical sciences, a policy which was embedded in President Obama’s FY 2010 budget outline.
The federal fiscal year 2010 is under way this month, but as should be no surprise, as of today we don’t have anything like a signed set of appropriations bills.
What we do know is that we’re about half a year into the S&T components of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), and judging by the press releases streaming from our major research universities and proud governors, the money is beginning to flow.
No university I know is turning down the chance to apply for ARRA or “stimulus act” funding, but what is not widely understood is that there is some apprehension in the academic community about this.
More on The ARRA ‘bump’ in S&T spending and the long-term hazards of doubling
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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