Commentary

Academic Freedom and Government Funding

The threats to academic freedom are more systemic than deliberate. While many journals are refereed, this does not present a significant roadblock to the publication of controversial ideas. Funding is a larger barrier to the spread of an unusual idea, but if there is an experiment that can be done inexpensively to disprove an unusual idea, it generally will be funded; funding is more a barrier to the development of theory than to the conducting of an experiment. The more serious threats to academic freedom are instead big science, by which I mean billion dollar research programs, the overfunding of research universities, which leads to the overproduction of young scientists, and the granting of tenure at the universities. This week I will discuss how funding and big science affect academic freedom. I will discuss the effects of funding and tenure at research universities on academic freedom next week.

In astronomy and astrophysics, the most widely read refereed journals are The Astrophysical Journal, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and Astronomy and Astrophysics. In the case of The Astrophysical Journal, where virtually all of my papers appeared, you send the journal a manuscript, and they send it to an anonymous referee of the editor's choosing. The referee sends a report back. Sometimes he rejects the paper; more often he demands some change, usually minor; sometimes he simply demands that the manuscript cite the referee's papers. On rare occasion a referee will accept a paper without requiring changes. While the referee can squash a paper that he dislikes for less than scientific reasons, the writer always has the option of demanding a new referee from the editor. Other alternatives are to submit the paper to a non-refereed journal, to present the idea in a conference proceedings, or to publish a preprint on a web site. A referee therefore does not present a serious obstacle to publishing an unusual idea.

Funding is a bigger obstacle, because most scientific funding in physics and astronomy comes from governments. In the United States, three agencies funding most of astrophysics: NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy. The funding for NASA and NSF are through peer-reviewed proposals. I am not familiar with the DOE procedures, although my impression from watching the selection of GLAST, a gamma-ray satellite funded by NASA and DOE, is that internal politics plays a much bigger role in funding of large experiment at DOE than at NASA.

Funding is always oversubscribed, so only a small percentage of proposals are funded, perhaps only a third. Most people I know who have peered reviewed proposals are conscientious about being fair. But inevitably, because decisions are being made by committee, funding goes primarily to mainstream projects. Being well known or being at a prominent university also helps. This nature of funding puts a damper on innovation in much the same way that government intervention in the free market puts a damper on the creation of innovative products.

But when faced with a truly radical idea, especially when it receives publicity, the funding agencies will let money flow into experiments that test it. The best example is the cold fusion experiments of the late 1980s. When Fleischmann and Pons claimed that they had produced nuclear fusion in a simple desk-top device, most scientists with an understanding of nuclear fusion scoffed at the idea: if Fleischmann and Pons had produced the amount of power that they claimed, the radiation produced in the reaction would have been fatal. But because of the public interest in cold fusion, not to mention the potential to make bundles of money, scientists rushed to reproduce the experiment, and money was available to investigate the phenomena. It was not until the scientific community failed to obtain the results of Fleischmann and Pons that funding for this area of research disappeared. Even now, some scientists are able to find funding to continue some work on cold fusion.

Public funding is a bigger impediment to academic freedom in theoretical astrophysics, because often the results of theoretical astrophysics are not testable or are not expected to precisely match observed phenomena, as the phenomena are too physically complex to precisely calculate (think of the weather). This divorce between theory and observation prevents experiment from fracturing the orthodoxies that develop within the theoretical community. Within the theoretical community, there is a tendency for everyone to work on the same theory; this feeds into the peer review process, so that large amounts of money go to the study of only one or two theories for a phenomenon.

Big science presents the biggest funding threat to academic freedom, because it sustains massive organizations around a handful of experiments. Big science affects the scientific community in the same way that giant corporations affect a free market; the bureaucracies surrounding these experiments discourage innovation and suck the money from other areas of science. A good example of the second point is the current public pressuring of NASA by prominent astrophysicists to service the Hubble Space Telescope; a service mission is projected to cost more than one billion dollars, and this money would inevitably come at the expense of other science missions. The continued operation of Hubble would slow experimentation in other areas of astrophysics and planetary science.

Big science also stifles spending within an area after the project is completed. When I was with the X-ray group at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, the head of the group commented to me that after the Compton Gamma-ray Observatory, there wouldn't be another gamma-ray mission for a time, because it would be some other field's “turn” (part of my research at that time was on gamma-ray sources). With the exception of the Hubble telescope, I have seen this born out. There is the sense within the space science community that each field takes its turn in getting an expensive NASA mission. It would not surprise me, although I am only guessing here, if the administration's earlier rejection of a service mission for Hubble is in part because it is not now the optical community's turn; their next turn is the James Webb Space Telescope, which is slated for launch in August 2011. NASA's shift to smaller missions over the past decade has helped alleviate this boom and bust cycle.

The long-term effect of big science is to drive money to certain areas of astrophysics and to develop a constituency for that money. This limits academic freedom by limiting the areas of research eligible for federal money. The development of constituencies tied to these funded areas ensures that the scientific community will pressure the government to sustained funding in these area in preference to other underfunded areas.