Damos cuenta de un par de artículos publicados recientemente en The Chronicle of Higher Education y en la revista Nature sobre el tópico de los recortes aplicados al financiamiento de la cien cia e investigación, particularemente en los Estados Unidos.
The Chronicle of Higher Education, Thursday, January 13, 2011
Scientists Fault Universities as Favoring Research Over Teaching
By Paul Basken
The United States’ educational and research pre-eminence is being undermined, and some of the chief underminers are universities themselves, according to articles this week in Science and Nature magazines.
Universities are aggressively seeking federal dollars to build bigger and fancier laboratory facilities, and are not paying an equal amount of attention to teaching and nurturing the students who would fill them, scientists say in the articles.
“It’s a Ponzi scheme,” said Kenneth G. Mann, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Vermont, whose concerns were described by Nature. “Eventually you’ll have a situation where you’re not even producing the feedstock into the system.” (ver más abajo este artículo compoleto)
A group of researchers, led by two biology professors, Diane K. O’Dowd of the University of California at Irvine and Richard M. Losick of Harvard University, made a similar point in a commentary in Science. Teaching is suffering at universities because the institutions prize research success above all other factors in promotions, they said. The job of educating students offers little reward, and instead “often carries the derogatory label ‘teaching load,'” they wrote.
Those faculty members raise the issue at a time of growing anxiety for universities and their research enterprises. Republicans took control of the House of Representatives this month, after party leaders promised during last year’s election campaign to cut nondiscretionary federal spending to 2008 levels. That is likely to mean deep budget cuts at the federal science-financing agencies. The National Institutes of Health, the largest nonmilitary provider of research money to universities, could see its budget fall 9 percent below its anticipated 2011 level of $31.3-billion.
And universities have been seeing even more dire budget scenarios at the state level, the traditional foundation of their governmental support. Those worries, and the hope among universities that the federal government might take up more of the load from the states, helped encourage the National Research Council, a private federally chartered institution, to form a study panel of 22 university and corporate leaders. The group, due to issue a report this spring, has been drafting arguments for why the federal government should recognize university science as a national asset deserving of more resources.
Skewed Priorities?
That is a worthwhile argument, Mr. Mann said. “Research is essential” to the overall success of a university and the country, he said.
At the same time, Mr. Mann said, universities have become so obsessed with using federal dollars to build new research facilities that they’ve skewed their priorities, leading both faculty members and students to see the competition for federal money as their main professional mission.
Mr. Mann, who served as chairman of biochemistry at Vermont from 1984 to 2005, said grant money made up about 22 percent of his salary as an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota back in 1970. Now it’s 60 percent, as he pulls in about $3-million a year in federal support, and administrators at Vermont are asking him to push it even higher.
“Nobody has ever asked me how good my papers were, and I think you would find that universally true,” he said, “They basically say, Well, how many research dollars are you bringing in?”
Some university leaders have recognized the potential for a financial crash if the federal government eventually proves itself unable or unwilling to support the number of university research labs it has already helped to build. Robert M. Berdahl, who plans to retire in May as president of the Association of American Universities, asked Congress in 2009 to help determine the optimal size of the nation’s university-research enterprise, giving impetus to the current study by the National Research Council.
Mr. Losick said his commentary in Science had put teaching into that equation because it questioned how research universities balanced research and teaching. The authors recommend that universities take steps that include helping their science faculty members improve their teaching practices, and basing tenure and promotions on teaching skills.
Mr. Mann said he saw a direct correlation between universities’ promoting and paying for those teaching skills, and improving the quality of science research. Among other problems, he said, universities rely heavily on the integrity of their faculty to produce trustworthy science. “As the pressures become higher for people to generate grant income to support their salaries and their enterprise,” he said, “then the pressure for the absence of integrity gets higher.”
The health of universities, and the overall U.S. economy, depends on finding that right balance, he said. “There’s a real risk at the present time to have a system that’s not stable.”

Published online 12 January 2011 | Nature 469, 133 (2011) | doi:10.1038/469133a
Column: World View
University cuts show science is far from saved
Scientific leaders have been too quick to praise the reprieve for research money, says Colin Macilwain. The slashing of teaching funds will do real damage.
Colin Macilwain
In countries where the economic crisis has hit hardest, science has not done badly — so far. But universities from Bologna to Berkeley face an almost existential crisis. While governments defend research spending, they are simultaneously slashing public funding for universities, where most research takes place.
The reaction from science lobby groups and figureheads in the scientific community to this situation has been bafflingly cheerful. Either they have lost touch with what’s happening on the ground, or else they are preoccupied with flattering politicians for ‘saving science’ — when politicians are actually cutting the very ground from underneath it. Most researchers know what is really going on, however, because they work in the universities where overall budgets are under the hammer.
Science today is so thoroughly embedded in universities that the line between the two has become difficult to discern. And research in universities requires solid undergraduate and graduate learning and teaching. It is foolhardy to weaken this foundation, because the modern research university is built on the energy and ideas of students. Students are not customers of a university; they are its very soul. The idea that research will prosper while teaching and learning decay is a dangerous fallacy.
The failure of many in the science establishment to pursue this point is most visible in Britain, where money for research and teaching comes from the same pot: the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. In the autumn spending review, warmly praised by many who claim to speak for UK science, this department saw its budget cut more steeply than any other big-spending arm of the UK government — by 8% a year for four years.
When the cuts were announced, John Beddington, the government’s chief scientific adviser, joined other officials in boasting that science had been protected, after Treasury officials were persuaded of its worth (see Nature 467, 1017; 2010). But the Treasury hadn’t given an inch. Science was protected purely by eviscerating public support for university teaching in England.
The reaction of Wellcome Trust head Mark Walport was typical. “I am delighted that the government has recognised the huge importance of science,” he said. “The government has listened to the voices of the science community who argued that continued investment in science was vital to the United Kingdom’s future success. It is now up to the science community to ensure it delivers on this crucial vote of confidence.”
One problem with this promise is that it isn’t within the power of the universities, or scientists, to deliver a competitive economy.
As Geoffrey Boulton of the University of Edinburgh and Colin Lucas, former vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, have pointed out, governments have started to make crazy assumptions about the ability of universities to deliver innovative companies and successful economies. In a 2008 League of European Research Universities paper, What are Universities For?, the duo argued that the thrust of higher-education policy in many countries is “squeezing out diversity of function and undermining teaching and learning”. Among policy-makers, they warned, “slipshod thinking about universities is leading to demands that they cannot satisfy, while obscuring their most important contributions to society and undermining their potential”.
Boulton and Lucas were talking mainly about Europe, but there are related problems in the United States. University management there is too often obsessed with building grandiose labs, to be financed by overheads on future research grants they expect to win from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (B. Alberts Science 329, 1257; 2010). With major expansion at the NIH over, and state government support for teaching in rapid decline, many institutions are now locked in a futile battle to fill these white elephants, creating what biochemist Kenneth Mann of the University of Vermont in Burlington has dubbed “a toxic, uncertain environment” for students.
With the long-term decline of top-class independent or corporate laboratories, almost all Nobel prize-level science is now done at universities. And the greatest universities, starting at the top with Harvard, increasingly define themselves chiefly in terms of their scientific prowess — or, more prosaically, by the amount of research funding they can attract.
When the universities were doing well — and in many parts of the world, they have just enjoyed decades of expansion — the concentration of scientific research within their walls was more or less entirely beneficial. When the economic storm struck in 2008, the ride came to an abrupt end. Now, as Western governments attempt to maintain investment in science as a route to innovation and industrial development, they are undermining support for students and the quality of their education. Instead of joining with students and teaching staff elsewhere in academia in protest, too many scientific leaders have stood aloof. (Martin Rees, until this month the president of the Royal Society in London, is a notable exception.) Strategically, this approach is a disaster in waiting.
China and India know this and are building universities from the ground up, with a firm emphasis on student education as their bedrock of energy and ideas. In the United Kingdom and elsewhere, these foundations are being demolished, and students drowned in debt, to keep researchers’ grants flowing. It can only end badly, and more in the scientific establishment should have the courage to say so.
Colin Macilwain is a contributing correspondent with Nature. e-mail: [email protected]