Ramblemuse Touch Points

In his Times Eye on Science Blog of 11 July, Michael Lemonick addresses the issues of Saving American Science, the theme of a recent meeting by the Aspen Science Center. The theme of lagging U.S. innovation in science and technology has been rising as a concern for several years now. Congressman Frank Wolf provides some of the background in his editorial for the American Physical Society, Competing in the 21st Century. In the strictly financial sense, it’s not surprising that science and innovation are starting to noticeably lag — in terms of dollars, many areas of research have seen flat or falling funding for over a decade. In terms of what those dollars can actually support, the picture has been even worse. The concerns expressed by Wolf and others led to the National Summit on Competitiveness in December 2005 and to the formation of The Task Force on the Future of American Innovation. There seems to be more than a little concern.

While I only caught Lemonick’s blog tonight while scanning through my RSS subscriptions, by synchronicity I was discussing the theme of science and scientists while walking with a fellow scientist during lunch. My colleague is from a different country, one he noted, in which those with advanced education generally carry more respect than is afforded in the U.S. One also in which which some level of perceived intellectualism is more of a prerequisite for political success. This difference in cultural attitudes brings us to the paradox of the U.S. as a country that has been highly successful in science and technology, but, with that success as a relatively thin veneer over a deeper thread of anti-intellectualism. For a while, that anti-intellectualism was pushed to the side by the challenges of the cold war. Wolf notes this period in his essay.

But it will take more than Congress passing a few pieces of legislation. The national crisis in innovation demands a dedicated national response. Remembering how the nation was mobilized to compete for the space frontier after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in the late 1950’s, I wrote President Bush last year urging him to embrace this issue. I asked that he dramatically increase our nation’s innovation budget—federal basic research and development—over the next decade to ensure U.S. economic leadership in the 21st century. Many in the scientific community have told me now that at that time, they didn’t think there was a realistic chance of that happening.

There’s an implication in Wolf’s statement that the nation was mobilized by Sputnik, that prior to Sputnik, such mobilization wasn’t evident. The report Waiting for Sputnik by the Center for Strategic and International Studies places us back in that state of demobilization and waiting for a crisis. The authors of the report are explicit about the basis of concern by themselves, Frank Wolf, and others.

If there is one point that we hope you take away from Waiting for Sputnik, it is that the underfunding of basic research in physics, math and engineering is not a problem for science policy or business, but a major challenge for the future security of the United States.

The American anti-intellectualism appears both to be widely acknowledged and to stem from several sources. These include a sense of American entitlement and a desire for simple answers, left-overs from the once frontier need for pragmatic skills, and the authoritarian aspects of religious fundamentalism. One thing that’s clear is it isn’t just about science but about pursuits of the mind in general. It’s also not something new.

Back in June 1963, Time ran a review of Richard Hofstadter’s book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. In a post titled The Diploma Mill, College English instructor Kevin Keating discusses that sad state of affairs in his own department.

The notion of intellectual apathy and, perhaps more importantly, pragmatism brings me to my fifth point. Students today believe that college is a minor inconvenience and, worse still, an unavoidable evil that must be dealt with in order to get that coveted degree. — No one would deny that Americans are a pragmatic bunch, but at what point can a strictly utilitarian approach to education begin to adversely affect an entire people? I would argue that we have become not only a culturally isolated nation, but a culturally illiterate one as well.

In a blog piece titled Lie to Me, Songbird6, an anthropology major, comments on the state of mind that she sees around her at college.

This was an Honors class, so this blew my mind. I had realized in my freshman year that Honors did not mean academically enthusiastic, when a fellow Honors student announced that evolution wasn’t true and then refused to have a conversation about it, shaking his head and waving his hands. Since then, I have seen people brush away questions, debates, and lectures as they would pesky flies, living in their stable world and seemingly afraid to let anything potentially challenge it.

She also takes us back to that theme of cultural perspective about scientists. It falls well short of esteem.

In an article I read recently for a class, a cultural scholar explained American anti-intellectualism as such: intellectuals were the learned, wealthy elites who had oppressed American settlers. In an effort to empower Americans, language and popular culture divided intelligence into the distant, cruel intellectuals and the rustic, capable, “American” intelligent men. Today, the intellectuals are professors, scientists, and doctors — three of the most suspect groups in America.

Finally, I’ll close my links with the late Stephen J. Gould’s piece Dorothy, It’s Really Oz, and Gould’s question of “Why get excited over this latest episode in the long, sad history of American anti-intellectualism?” Given this pervasive thread of attitude, will it require another competitive crisis of the perceived magnitude of Sputnik to, at least for a time, shift American attitudes sufficiently to “Save” American Science?