Academic Scientists Launch Into 1993-94 School Year With Little Hope Of Easing Serious Funding Problems

On campuses across the United States, academic scientists and research administrators are beginning the 1993-94 school year with no expectations of relief from the fiscal and regulatory difficulties that have marked the past several autumns. States continue to cut back on support for public and private colleges and universities; moreover, the pool of federal funding is not growing sufficiently to keep up with the increased numbers of scientists vying for grants to support their research. "There's a level of acceptance on our campuses" that the funding situation is not going to improve, says Cornelius Pings, president of the Association of American Universities (AAU). To make matters worse, research administrators say, the paperwork required to satisfy government safety, cost-accounting, and animal-care regulations is mushrooming. At the same time, stiffer indirect-costs restrictions prohibit schools from receiving government reimbursement for the hours spent on such time- consuming labor. "It's a catch between a rock and a hard place," says Earl Friese, a materials scientist who is director of sponsored research at the California Institute of Technology. "We're required to do more administration--which costs more --but the government says, `We're not going to pay for it.' " The much-publicized 1991 investigation into accusations that Stanford University misused millions of dollars in federal funds has changed the way university research is regarded by Congress, says Suzanne Polmar, a biologist who is director of grant and contract administration at Yale University. "Since the Stanford mess, there's been a change in the whole culture in which universities deal with the federal government," she says. "We started as a joint, cooperative enterprise." But in recent years, she notes, universities have been viewed by the government "less and less as collaborators in the research effort. We're now viewed in the same way as defense contractors," with memories of egregious overcharging for hammers and toilets still fresh in the public consciousness. "The nature of the relationship has to be rejustified," says Milton Goldberg, executive director of the Council on Governmental Relations (COGR), a Washington, D.C.-based lobbying group representing 130 research universities. "What is the usefulness--the value to society--of fundamental research? Most of the people who understand that have passed from the scene. People are now questioning more than ever before this fundamental relationship." Exacerbating the problem for those in fields like physics, he says, is that "also passed from the scene is the Cold War and the idea that we [conduct research] in the name of defense." "There's a lot of anxiety among scientists," says Marilyn Gist Farquhar, coordinator of the division of cellular and molecular medicine at the University of California, San Diego. "There's no such thing as being relaxed about a grant [application] that's under review, no matter what you've done. The competition to obtain money and resources is so high, and it takes so much time, that it off-balances other things." Thus, she says, scientists have less time to fulfill their obligations to the scientific community, such as teaching or serving on committees. A ray of hope on the gloomy horizon, however, is that, after several years of working under budgetary and regulatory constraints, scientists and administrators say they are developing strategies to deal with them. While the mood at many universities is still dismal, prompting some researchers to leave academic science altogether, those who remain say they are creating ways to muddle through. As the era of austerity lingers on, "it gets less frustrating, [although] it doesn't get any easier," says Nina Matheny Roscher, chairwoman of the chemistry department at American University in Washington, D.C. "You get used to what the limitations are." Reviewing And Regrouping Many schools have found that the best way to cope with the crunch is to evaluate all their research programs, emphasizing the ones that are found to excel and dropping the rest. Two years ago, schools were gradually coming to the conclusion that they ought to concentrate resources on a few strong programs rather than spread them among many investigations of varying quality (R. Eisner, The Scientist, Sept. 2, 1991, page 1). Today, "almost all are doing some sort of evaluation, possibly with an eye to trimming the enterprise," says Pings of AAU's member universities. "It's an era of some restraint and adjustment," Pings says. "There's a sense that we're all in it--we all have to think out our role, decide what our niche is, and forgo some areas." Yale's Polmar speculates that eventually, schools will realize that it is no longer feasible to fund whole research programs almost exclusively through grant money. "Medical schools have been funding entire divisions on soft money," she says. "If [a program is] important to a university, then the university will have to be prepared to fund it in some way." For example, she says, "should the government be paying 90 percent of faculty salaries? That level of expenditure uses up resources, and I don't believe the supply of funding is going to grow any bigger." A positive consequence of reevaluation might be a renewed emphasis on teaching, says Robert Smith, a pharmaceutical chemist who is vice provost for research and dean of the graduate school at Washington State University in Pullman. "To keep within budget, [schools] have to consider different priorities for the faculty," Smith says. This is already happening on some campuses, including his own, he says: "I see a real shifting of emphasis in our own institution--[to a new] emphasis on teaching excellence." At Washington State, documentation of a faculty member's teaching efforts and teaching evaluations are used "as part of the portfolio [assessed in the decision-making process] for promotion and tenure." The Quest For Funds Science faculty are not the only ones whose jobs are being redefined in these cash-strapped times; academic administrators say that fund raising is becoming a bigger part of their responsibilities. American University's Roscher says she spends about 15 percent of her time in pursuit of research support from private donors and other sources: "It's spending more time than I ever thought I would spend." One way she has found to offset costs, Roscher says, is to locate government labs near her District of Columbia campus willing to share their equipment with students. "We can't possibly keep up with the latest equipment, because it's changing too fast," she says. "But the government labs are very helpful to the scientific community. If an instrument is available at night or on weekends, they try to accommodate us." A funding challenge that has been particularly nettlesome is finding money to cover graduate student stipends. "We have increased costs for graduate student stipends because of cutbacks in state funding, at the same time as tuition is going up," says Washington State's Smith, noting that over the past three to five years tuition at his school has doubled, to $15,000. "This puts added pressure on grants," the usual source of funds for stipends, he says. "The faculty are saying, `I don't know how I can afford to have grad students.' That's another tension that's out there." Compounding the anxiety is a recent news report that the National Institutes of Health is considering limiting its training grants for grad students to 70 percent of tuition. Currently, NIH reimburses universities for anywhere from 65 percent to 95 percent of a student's tuition (Science, 261:415, 1993). Roscher says she seeks out private donors willing to support students. Other sources of help, she says, are cooperative education programs or summer internships in which students work full-time and receive a salary. "While it delays their graduation, it can provide substantial money for a short period of time," she says. Because such experiences generally offer the opportunity for students to be exposed to new equipment, she adds, they are a source of educational value as well as fiscal relief. New Avenues Of course, academic scientists bear the brunt of the burden in the quest for dollars to fund their programs, and, with federal funding sources drying up, they are increasingly turning to private foundations and to industry for support. "Investigators are becoming more active in terms of the number of proposals they submit per faculty member," says Caltech research administrator Friese. "We're seeing a higher volume of proposals going through for the same amount of dollars. People are trying harder and harder." "We have seen an increase in the number of awards--but the dollars haven't gone up," says Yale's Polmar. "Faculty need more grants to get the money necessary to do one project. That takes a lot of work on the part of a PI [principal investigator]--time that could be spent in a lab. They tend to get resentful about that." To ease the pressure on the researchers, Polmar says, the grants and contracts office at Yale--itself short-staffed, and struggling to keep up with the flow of applications--has been picking up some of the detail involved in grantsmanship. "We try to keep the stuff that [faculty] have to do for us to a minimum. We're doing more and more with less and less; we're trying to computerize as much as possible." Fred King, director of the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta, says his staff is seeking outside help in coping with the flood of paperwork required for grant applications as well as to comply with health-and-safety, animal-care, and other government regulations. "We've brought in people to design systems for processing applications and information in order to streamline the paperwork and the meetings, but make sure we still do a responsible job" of following the rules, he says. "Scientists may not be the people who are best at designing those systems, although you need to have scientists involved, of course." Forming Partnerships As it becomes more obvious that there will not be enough federal funds to go around, industry is increasingly being looked upon by university faculty and administrators as a potential sponsor of research. But recent controversy over a 10-year, $300 million deal between the Scripps Research Institute of La Jolla, Calif., and the Swiss giant Sandoz Pharmaceuticals Corp. has made many academic administrators nervous about such alliances. After Congress and NIH loudly voiced concerns over the propriety of a foreign company's taking control of research from a federally funded institution, the Scripps-Sandoz contract was renegotiated in June (C. Anderson, Science, 260:1872-3, 1993). "Universities for years have been advised to seek external funding sources, to bring in more industry dollars" to substitute for scarce federal support, says Ann Stevens, a biochemist who is associate vice president for research at Emory. "Now, we're being criticized because we might have entered into deals that were questionable. But, by and large, universities have been very careful about negotiating limited conditions for licensing technologies developed under research agreements." "We've increased the number of [corporate] contracts, as opposed to grants from NIH or the National Science Foundation, over the past three or four years greatly," says Yerkes' King. The center director says he is spending more time "generating new ideas, [determining] how we are going to work with industry." King stresses that "strategies do need to be developed" to ensure that university-industry ties produce "corporate contracts that are also good-quality science. There has to be a payoff for scientists, too. You have to be doing quality science, not just working for a company on a contract basis." If contracts aren't carefully negotiated to allow re- searchers the freedom they need, he cautions, "you can degrade your science doing something that just gets the job done for somebody." Another way for academic scientists to cope under stressed funding conditions, says UC-San Diego's Farquhar, is to collaborate with each other. NIH, for example, offers program project grants, given to a group of researchers who "pool their expertise," says Farquhar, who has received such a grant along with eight colleagues from UC-San Diego and Scripps who are teaming up to investigate the role of GTP binding proteins in membrane trafficking and cell proliferation. "I'm a great believer in collaborative research," she says. While the money crunch has made cooperative research more common than it was 10 years ago, Farquhar points out, collaboration makes sense from a scientific perspective as well as a fiscal one. "Most problems require a multidisciplinary approach, and in universities, everyone can find people with a common problem interest and complementary expertise," she says. "We can't all be right at the forefront in six or seven different approaches." Joining with others who can approach the project from varying perspectives, Farquhar says, enables a scientist to "get further faster than you can working alone." Bailing Out Yet some academic scientists are fed up with the challenge of seeking new forms of funding; many are throwing in the towel and leaving their research careers behind. "There's still a lot of pessimism around," says Farquhar. "The most pessimistic have now gone in different directions." Some biomedical scientists with M.D. degrees, she says, are opting to "get out of research and turn their attention to clinical practice because they have that option." Others are leaving academia to take jobs in industry, particularly at biotech and pharmaceutical companies. Some who wish to stay on campus might decide to abandon their research and go into administration. But seasoned observers of the quest for government funding say there is no cause for despair; scientists should just relax and be prepared to change with the times. "Folks are just going to have to do less research," says COGR's Goldberg. "It's a practical impossibility to do more work with less resources. Modern research is very capital-intensive, and it requires a good deal of investment. "But I wouldn't view that in a pessimistic way," Goldberg says. "There's a fair amount of money available to do a lot of things. Those who are competing in [the federal funding environment] are still going to be doing a lot of good work."

Academic Scientists Launch Into 1993-94 School Year With Little Hope Of Easing Serious Funding Problems

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