Notes:Discussion:NSF future
From SASciWikid
Senate Panel Chair Asks Why NSF Funds Social Sciences
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Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R–TX), chair of a panel that oversees NSF and a member of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, put those and other sharply worded questions to NSF Director Arden Bement last week during an unusually combative hearing on the agency’s 2007 budget request. Hutchison signaled that she will be taking a hard look at NSF’s $200-million-a-year social and behavioral sciences portfolio, which funds some 52% of all social science research done by U.S. academics and some 90% of the work by political scientists. Hutchison made it clear during the 2 May hearing that she doesn’t think the social sciences should benefit from President George W. Bush’s proposal for a 10-year doubling of NSF’s budget as part of his American Competitiveness Initiative (Science, 17 February, p. 929). And she suggested afterward to Science that she’s open to more drastic measures. “I’m trying to decide whether it would be better to put political science and some other fields into another [government] department,” she said. “I want NSF to be our premier agency for basic research in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering. And when we are looking at scarce resources, I think NSF should stay focused on the hard sciences.”
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Time for a bit of action - Michael Fischer
This is something we must take very seriously indeed. Once someone with that kind of power is focused there can be grave consequences. This kind of issue does arise from time to time, but this is the most substantive threat in the USA in my memory.
I suppose we can put up a petition, won't do any harm, but probably won't do much good either. Probably our best contribution is to put together examples of how anthropological research has contributed to the development of the 'hard' sciences Senator Hutchison is supporting.
For example, building up a case file demonstrating that anthropological methods such as participant observation and ethnography has been adopted by many scientific and engineering projects, contributions of anthropology to the development of cognitive science, the rise of industrial anthropology in the USA, and although we might not appreciate it at times, the long standing contribution of anthropological studies towards understanding people outside the USA, influencing successful foreign policy in the past, and remains a resource for the reform of present foreign policy. Relating the role of the World Bank's increasing use of anthropology and sociology over the past 40 years, evidenced by thousands of articles published by World Bank social scientists.
Pushing the four fields concept might also be effective, if it hasn't been killed off by this time.
