A US National Academies panel studying the future of American research universities is considering recommending a third big push, similar to the establishment of land grant universities after the Civil War and the federal investment in research universities after World War two, that would involve greatly expanding partnerships between business, government and research institutions. That’s according to comments made at the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) meeting in Washington DC today.
Charles Holliday, a former CEO of Dupont who is chairing the NAS panel, said he was looking for feedback on whether his panel ought to recommend such an overhaul. The panel’s report is expected later this year and it is a follow-on to the influential Gathering Storm report that called on Congress to double funding for physical sciences research over 10 years relative to a 2007 baseline. “Do we need a third big thing?” asked Holliday, cautioning that he didn’t want to present the idea as a definite conclusion of the panel because it was possible that the study team would eventually settle for a less radical recommendation that universities should continue doing what they were doing but do it better.
In general Holliday said the panel feels universities could be more efficient at translating basic research into marketable products. The panel was looking at ways to do that without infringing on the quality of research environments and academic freedom, he said. He added that he was particularly concerned about the current strain on public universities funded through tight state budgets, and was collecting examples in which partnerships between state universities and business had been successful, to work out how to scale them up.
Another speaker at the PCAST meeting, Harvard physicist Venkatesh Narayanamurti, who is working on a study for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on the Impacts of Federal and Industry Funding of Science, Engineering, and Medicine on American Universities, also called for creative thinking on academic-industry partnership. Narayanamurti said the success in the 20th century of the great industrial labs including Bell Labs, Xerox Parc and General Electric showed it was wrong to think in terms of a division between basic and applied research and that a more holistic view was needed. As industrial labs have disappeared, the rate of publications by industrial physical science researchers in the US has more or less completely died, and new models for business and science to work together are urgently needed, he said.
Image: NAS panel chair Chad Holliday at the Council on Competitiveness in 2007 / Geasterb under Creative Commons .
