Tarnished Image, Tighter Budgets Stymie Academic Science As School Year Begins

Still reeling from recent bouts of bad P.R., and in a bind for funding, some schools are reassessing their research missions As the academic year begins, university executives, research administrators, and others are reviewing with considerable trepidation a deskload of headaches affecting their 1991-1992 research agendas. There are stacks of articles about university misconduct and fraud from major newspapers and magazines, accounting ledgers revealing budgetary shortfalls, and memos from disgruntled science faculty complaining about competition for tight research dollars. University scientists themselves are coming back to piles of grant applications they will meticulously fill out with little guarantee of success. How will this blend of fiscal pressure and bad P.R. ultimately impact academic research? Some administrators interviewed for this article say that the difficulties will not trickle down to the faculty. The problems, they say, can be handled at the administrative level; indeed, they go so far as to say that the size of university administration was bloated, anyway, and needed some restraint. Others, however, wonder what will happen next year should the economic situation in the United States not improve. "What will they say should the recession continue and the states continue to cut back?" asks Milton Goldberg, executive director of the Council on Governmental Relations (COGR), a Washington D.C.-based lobbying organization representing 130 research universities. Goldberg and others are also concerned about possible sharp reductions in the federal government's reimbursement to universities of the indirect costs of federally funded research. While some of today's other headaches, such as the difficulty in obtaining funding, were also yesterday's pains, they are now compounded by new irritations, including the recessionary economy and reductions in states' allocations to universities. Austerity is forcing university administrators and scientists to reevaluate their missions with respect to research. For example, Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., is cutting back on the programs that its administrators deem to be the weakest. Economic hard times--a proposed decreased reimbursement for indirect costs, budget shortfalls in 22 states, reductions in private and philanthropic gifts to universities due to the recession--are now causing university administrators across the nation to tighten their belts. "This is the first time we are going into a fiscal year with the same money as we did the last year," says Al Barber, special consultant to the chancellor on research administration at the University of California, Los Angeles. "We are seeing no merit raises, cost-of-living increases are being capped ... and voluntary early retirement programs are being implemented. We have essentially lost our ability to deal with emergency situations." To reduce administrative expenses, university support staff have been laid off in large numbers throughout the country. At Northeastern University in Boston, 175 people received pink slips within the past year, as did 600 employees at San Diego State University. Besides being hurt by the recessionary cutbacks, "scientists will soon feel the heat from the indirect-costs cutback proposals. The new indirect-cost accounting procedures will cost more money to implement. At the same time, the money to pay for the new procedures is being cut through caps," says COGR's Goldberg. "Many administrative chores that scientists take for granted as being done by someone they will, within the year, be forced to do because of staff shortages." For example, faculty may be asked to sit on previously all-administrative committees or may lose secretarial staff. Research will suffer as a result of the recession and indirect costs, observers predict, because universities will no longer be able to afford the new programs, faculty, buildings, or equipment on their own. "Because of the state cutbacks, the university will not be able to compete for the large research grants for facilities and instrumentation that usually require matching funds," says Barber. "The recovery from indirect costs comes back to a central treasury, and we are then able to redistribute where we want," says Northwestern president Arnold Webber. The proposed cut, therefore, "affects the pool for investment in new programs," he says. Such hardships are particularly painful because they come after a booming economy, according to Donald Langenberg, chancellor of the University of Maryland system. In his inaugural address this past June, he said: "The '80s brought extraordinary growth in resources and programs to colleges and universities across the nation. We had an opportunity, during those boom years, to focus our new resources in the most innovative and imaginative ways. We failed to do so. We simply spread the manure and waited for the flowers to grow. We used our newfound wealth to create new and sometimes questionable programs, without cutting out the old, outmoded, or mediocre. Today we are paying the price. Many of us are now thinking, and some are saying aloud: `If only we had half of the money from the '80s to spend now. If only we had planned strategically then.' " But it is not too late to plan now, university analysts says. "The institutions that will do the best in the '90s are not going to be the ones that patch and save a little here, but are going to be the ones that take a careful look at what they are doing," says Robert Rosenzweig, president of the American Association of Universities. "Universities will have to go through the process of figuring out what they do best and what they do less well. They will have to begin to cut back on things they do marginally and concentrate the remaining resources on what they do best. " Universities, like Northwestern, that have been engaged in such analysis for the last couple of years expect to fare well during the bumpy economic road ahead. Although research funding for fiscal year 1992 at Northwestern has not increased over the 1991 levels, Webber says he is not worried. "You get in trouble when you think that budgets have to rise every year," he says. "Our budget has been increasing for the past six years at around 20 percent. We have been careful in our management so we can deal with one year that will be flat." Part of that management process at Northwestern involved assessing, through external and internal review, the strengths and weaknesses of the school's research programs and investing in programs judged to be intellectually robust and those that are likely to be funded, school administrators say. "Universities are going where the money is in terms of private and public funding," says Stephen Nagler, an attorney who specializes in technology transfer at the Philadelphia firm Reed, Smith, Shaw & McClay. At Northwestern, the physics department review, for example, revealed that "the university should stay in high-energy physics, build out astrophysics, but downgrade nuclear physics," says Webber. "When the physics department asks for resources, they have to be consistent with this plan. Had I gone to the physics department without the benefit of the review and told them to do it, it would have been called administrative willfulness and myopia. But when armed with a report that reflects the input of distinguished physicists outside of the university, it has legitimacy." In addition to the economic woes, one of the most troubling issues research administrators and scientists say they have to deal with these days is the bad press that followed U.S. congressional hearings into university and scientific affairs. "Why has there been such an attack by Congress and the newspapers on universities and researchers these days?" asks Robert Zemsky, director of the University Institute of Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Researchers who have received unwanted publicity include biologist David Baltimore, now president of Rockefeller University, who was a coauthor of a paper alleged to contain fraudulent data; physicist Richard Berendzen, the former president of American University, who resigned prior to pleading guilty in a Fairfax County, Va., court to making obscene phone calls; and Stanford University president Donald Kennedy, a biologist, who resigned in the wake of his school's indirect-costs controversy. The reason science and universities are being singled out, Zemsky contends, is that they have become two of the scapegoats being offered to society as the economy weakens. "This country is coming off of a drunk, and hangovers give rise to headaches," he says. "The 1980s were an obscenity of wastefulness, and the universities were part of that boom-boom economy. Today, though, competition for fewer resources is causing bad feelings in general. "Universities are being shown, like other institutions, to have had excesses and fraud, but they sort of promised they'd be `better' than business or politics. So there is a certain amount of pleasure in catching the universities with their pants down." It is the impact of bad press on research funding that worries Jared Cohen, vice provost for research at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He is concerned that the negative attention levied against universities and science "would be taken by Congress as a reason to stop supporting federal research. It's not just one thing, but a collection of things, such as indirect-cost abuses, misconduct in research, and concerns from sponsors [the federal government and private industry] that universities don't teach anymore. They will all be taken together" as a justification for paring down funding. Another consequence of the negative publicity surrounding the indirect-cost and misconduct scandals is that it further segregates two already divided university communities--the research faculty and the administration. "The faculty think that the administration is not using indirect- costs reimbursement from the feds on research and is therefore ripping the science faculty and science off," says UCLA's Barber. "And the administration thinks the scientists are out of control, either from misconduct or because they are not working for the institution but for themselves, as consultants for the biotech industry." Barber acknowledges that during his 35 years at UCLA, 20 years as vice chancellor--he has retired--the institution became more bureaucratic. "After all," Barber says, "UCLA is a $1.5 billion industry. When you spend that kind of money, you can't run it like a mom-and-pop drugstore. There has to be management and rules that sometimes make the faculty feel that Big Brother is watching them." Says Doug Kenkel, a biology professor at Yale University, "Sometimes one wonders what administration is up to." In addition to the rift between faculty and administrators, there is a division between the superstar scientists and the army of researchers who keep the scientific enterprise alive, says Zemsky: "Universities have to figure out a way to hold the talents and loyalties of those superstars while maintaining the loyalty of the others who are having trouble getting the grants." While there is more money for research today, the cost of doing science has gone up, and there are now many more researchers competing for the funds, scientists say. "You just can't take funding for granted anymore," says Robert Maier, a professor of biology at Johns Hopkins. "I work harder on my grants than ever before, with less reward.... As a result of the grant situation, I also do safer research. I do experiments that look for results that are more readily publishable. I am not willing to try something a little off the wall, even though that's usually how major findings are made. While this may be cost-effective in terms of funding, I think science is truly suffering."

Tarnished Image, Tighter Budgets Stymie Academic Science As School Year Begins

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