John Hart recently sent the following email to the faculty in my department in response to a BusinessWeek article about shifts in DARPA funding. I've emphasized a few key sentences and added some links.
I'm just returning from a meeting of the DARPA/NSF CARGO PI's meeting. At the end of the meeting we had a general discussion with the program managers there from NSF and DARPA and I asked them about the situation. The DARPA program manager was finishing his rotation up, but said that within DARPA they didn't believe they were actively reducing academic funding, but it does appear to be happening due to a desire to fund shorter term applied research (with 12 month deliverables), along with the increased security clearances. He did recommend that there was an art to specifying the deliverables, and one could do reasonable long term basic research by specifying the deliverables appropriately.Both the NSF and DARPA program managers expressed a desperate need for new program managers. The DARPA manager was in "computational geometry" (in the loose sense) and said after he left there was no one slated to replace him, and that all it took was someone to step up for us to get a better share of the available funds. Unfortunately, we didn't have a lot of volunteers. Denis Zorin mentioned to me later that Courant would "appoint" people from what later became his institute at NYU to serve as program directors. John Sullivan further mentioned that since at the time they were leading the way in applied mathematics, this made a lot of strategic sense for the institute, and being appointed by the institute director might have allieved any fears about departmental support upon return.
So it seems the solution to this problem might be a more proactive stance from the academic community in volunteering to be program managers at DARPA and NSF. I think this is a great solution (so long as it isn't me). I wonder if there's anything academia can do to sweeten the pot? I'm chair of SIGGRAPH's service award right now and perhaps it might be a good time to recognize some who helped fund computer graphics, and perhaps the same is true in the rest of computer science, as a way to encourage others to serve.
It's rather shocking to hear that DAPRA doesn't think it has reduced academic funding, when the acadmic community, the National Academies, the press, congressional committees, and even the Defense Science Board believe it has. (All these links are from CRA's excellent Computing Research Policy Blog.) Here, for example, is an except from a press release by the Science Committee of the US House of Representatives, discussing a recent committee meeting on the future of American computer science research.
[Committee chairman] Boehlert and the non-governmental witnesses particularly expressed concern about the balance between short- and long-term research at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). [...] In his opening statement, Boehlert said, "We cannot have a situation where university researchers can point to sharp declines in DARPA funding, reviews of research results that reflect telescoped time horizons, and increased classification. We cannot have a situation where proposal approval rates at the National Science Foundation drop by half in just a few years. We cannot have a situation where a Presidential advisory council declares that our information technology infrastructure is 'highly vulnerable' and that there is 'relatively little support for fundamental research to address the larger security vulnerabilities.' We cannot have a situation where a Pentagon advisory board similarly expresses deep concern over the lack of long-term computing research."
The other two points that John raises are equally important: (1) funding acencies are desperate for qualified program managers, but (2) there is little cultural or institutional incentive for researchers to become program managers. It's hard enough convincing people to take on heavy but necessary administrative duties within the university: department chairs, directors of graduate studies, assistant deans, etc. Who wants to give up 1-4 years of active research, move to Washington DC, and disappoint most of their colleagues for a living?
From my notably ignorant vantage, I have to ask: is there any correlation between science funding and wartime endeavors, as there was reputed to be during WWII? It's a moot point; but I'm curious.
Are we beyond the inflection point beyond which "more for less" is critically injurious to our capacity to offer anything to the worldwide scientific community?
Posted by: Daniel | May 18, 2005 at 04:35 PM