Cassidy is the most well-known and, by all accounts, most successful of the firms that have taken up academia's urgent pleas for new research facilities. In doing so, they have fanned the flames of the debate over the propriety of "pork-barrel" politics in science, the process by which schools obtain federal money for facilities without any review of the scientific merits of their requests.
The firm was created in 1975 as Schlossberg, Cassidy and Associates. (Kenneth Schlossberg left in 1984.) Tufts University was an early—and satisfied—client, obtaining $10 million from Congress in 1977 for a veterinary school and $21 million in 1979 for a human nutrition research center. To date, the firm takes credit for helping to obtain $165 million worth of facilities for university clients.
Unquestionably, the academic community is in the midst of an infrastructure crisis. Science officials have estimated that up to $14 billion is needed to ...
