The commission answered these questions, but, as The Scientist correctly noted, the report was worded rather ambiguously. Bruce Smith, a science policy analyst at the Brookings Institution, was quoted as saying about the report: "It's like the Dead Sea Scrolls, written in some kind of strange code." I rather agreed with Smith, and felt strongly that the issues surrounding NSF's future are so important that the commission's views should have been expressed with much greater clarity.
For this reason, shortly after the report was given to the National Science Board, I wrote to the board to describe the four key points in the report on which I thought the commission was in full agreement, but which did not come through with the clarity they deserved. Here are the four points:
1. The National Science Board must not remain passive while enormous changes are taking place in the United States science ...
