The Dispersion of Academic Research in the 1980s
Growth and dispersion were prominent features of the U.S. academic research system during the 1980s. Total academic RD dispersion occurred as the share of total research performed by the largest and most highly rated universities declined. Whereas growth is widely monitored and readily characterized in aggregate terms, changes in institutional shares of research are more complex and little studied [14, 22]. Yet, the dispersion of research has been a fundamental feature of American higher education (table 1). An examination of federal funds only (for which the longest record is available) shows that the heavy postwar concentration of research in a few universities with large defense laboratories had attenuated somewhat by the time of Sputnik. The dispersion of academic research at that point became an avowed goal of federal policy. The Seaborg Report (1960), the foundational document for the expansion of academic research in the 1960s, announced the goal of doubling the number of research universities from 15-20 to 30-40 [19]. Specific programs for this end were launched by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD); a private effort was made by the Ford Foundation. Although all of these programs were terminated by the early 1970s, dispersion nevertheless continued. Later developing universities in the Sunbelt, in particular, registered gains in research share during the 1970s, thereby reducing the shares of traditional leaders (and regions). Dispersion continued during the 1980s without significant direct federal encouragement. Since the end of the decade, however, the desirability of dispersion has been called into question in discussions of national research policy. TABLE 1 Dispersion of Federal Funds for Academic Research: Share (Percent of Total) of Ten Largest Performers, 1952-90 1952 1958 1968 1979 1990 43.4% 37.0% 27.7% 22.3% 20.1% SOURCE: Geiger [5, p. 204]. In a report entitled Fateful Choices, a working group of the Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable (GUIRR) [9] identified size and distribution (with dispersion being one possibility) as the variables determining the future of the academic enterprise. The leadership of American science has generally advocated increasing the size of academic science, particularly through enlarged federal support [13, 17]; however, something near to a consensus has emerged on one opinion: dispersion is a problem. Academic research, in this view, suffers from an "overcapacity" - too many researchers chasing too few (albeit increasing) dollars, a condition brought on in part by the commitment of an increasing number of universities to a research orientation. The report, Federally Funded Research, by the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) explicitly warned aspiring universities against trying to mimic the research university model, which it believes "may become less attractive, functional, and reproducible," if not actually "maladaptive for these times" [15, pp. 198-99]. A 1992 report of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology alleged that university research has fallen into a Malthusian cycle where growth in research funds to universities "stimulates graduate enrollments, and leads to growth in the number of researchers that inevitably outstrips the ability of the federal government to provide adequate support" [25, p. 6]. The Bush administration's President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology also registered its concern about excessive dispersion and opposed any "programs that would increase the net capacity of the system of research-intensive universities" [16, p. 12]. Robert M. Rosenzweig, former president of the Association of American Universities (AAU), was more explicit in his criticism, charging that too many universities competing for research funds threaten "a slow erosion of the average quality of the nation's scientific effort" [18, p. …