“Keeping the ‘Flag of Science Flying:’ The National Science Foundation and the Coordination of Federal Science Policy Under Nixon’s 1973 Reorganization Plan No. 1”

Emily Gibson (National Science Foundation)

On January 26, 1973 President Nixon announced to Congress his “Reorganization Plan No. 1 of 1973.” Proposed as an effort to streamline the functions of the Executive Office of the President, the reorganization plan abolished the Office of Science and Technology (OST) and transferred its duties to the director of the National Science Foundation (NSF). That same day, Nixon also abolished the President’s Science Advisory Council. The scientific community viewed Nixon’s reorganization as an affront to the status of scientific expertise within the federal government.

Taking this moment of contention between the Nixon administration and scientific community as its starting point, this paper will explore how NSF coordinated and maintained federal support for basic scientific research despite the surrounding political climate. An examination of internal documents, correspondence, and congressional testimony will illuminate the process by which NSF, under the leadership of Director Guyford Stever, assumed the responsibilities of OST as well as Stever’s role as Science Advisor to the White House. This paper will also consider how the agency’s mission and organization uniquely positioned it to be a crucial source of continuity for scientific expertise in federal science policy, or how, in the Stever’s words, NSF was able to “keep the flag of science flying” during a moment of political discord. This material is part of a book-length project on the NSF’s history from Sputnik through the early 2000s.

“Imaginaries of Biomedicine: Disease Categories and the Reordering of University-Government Relations at the NIH”

Buhm Soon Park (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)

In 1951, Lowell J. Reed, vice president of the Johns Hopkins University in charge of medical activities, submitted to the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service the committee report of a 3-year study on the impact of federal grants and fellowship on the nation’s medical schools. Amidst concerns about the compatibility of government support and academic freedom and worries about the interference of increased research activity, the Reed committee concluded: “the PHS will exercise no control over research in progress.” It then praised “the system of selecting grantees through technical study sections with review by nongovernmental advisory councils and final approval by the Federal officials ultimately responsible for the expenditure of public goods.” This was a ringing endorsement of the dual-review system—one review for scientific merits and the other for health relevance—which was manifested in the disease-oriented organizational structure of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This paper explores the emergence of specific “imaginaries of biomedicine,” the collectively held visions of health research and the academic-governmental relationship in the postwar years. I aim to show that these visions, which informed the construction of biomedical research infrastructure, were stabilized and consolidated through the rapid growth of the NIH. To this end, I analyze the external committee reviews in the 1950s and the 1960s and the NIH’s responses to their various recommendations. The material comes from my current book project on the NIH’s institutional history.

“Transforming the Meaning of Applied Science: NSF Support for Computing Research, 1967-1986”

Janet Abbate (Virginia Tech)

The US National Science Foundation was founded in 1950 to support “pure research,” yet the definitions of pure and applied science have been historically unstable. I argue that “applied science” is in fact a political category: its changing meaning at NSF reflects debates over whether government should fund basic science or science relevant to social and economic needs.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the term “applied” was often used to signal that science was aimed at social uplift. Computer science got a foothold at NSF through arguments that computers would improve and equalize public education, and NSF launched an ambitious program called “Research Applied to National Needs.” By the late 1970s, however, the failure of RANN discredited the use of science as a social fix. The label “applied” began to disappear from NSF programs: the Directorate of “Engineering and Applied Science,” which had absorbed the remnants of RANN, was renamed simply Engineering, and the Office of Computing Activities discontinued its program for “Computer Applications.”

In the 1980s, funding for applied science was reframed as an economic policy tool, especially in light of Japan’s rising dominance in high tech. NSF Director Erich Bloch criticized earlier efforts that had prioritized “social problems” over “economic competitiveness” and moved NSF’s computing programs to a new Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, headed by a former computer industry executive. Computer scientists took advantage of the interpretive flexibility of “applied science” to maintain NSF support for their field through these political changes.

“Disciplining the Social Sciences during the Reagan Revolution”

Mark Solovey (University of Toronto)

Shortly after a federal charter established the U.S. National Science Foundation in 1950, the new agency became a cautious but nevertheless key federal patron for the social sciences, especially for academically oriented investigations and so-called basic research. But the social sciences’ position at the agency also became a common focal point for political and scholarly debate about their scientific identity, their practical value, and the role of public funding for them. In this paper I consider how the social sciences fared at the NSF during the Reagan era.

I argue that this period, marked by the surging power of a conservative agenda in American political culture and national science policy, had far-reaching implications for the standing of the social sciences at the NSF and in government and society more broadly. Briefly, overall funding for these sciences declined. They were subject to scathing criticisms from right-wing political figures and some high-ranking natural science and engineering leaders in the federal science establishment. NSF’s efforts to promote the social sciences were shaped by a measure of conservative discipline as well, as seen, for example, in the agency’s increased funding for economics and a more general determination to allign the agency’s programs with the Reagan administration’s agenda. The material discussed here is based on a chapter from my current book project on social science funding, policies, and programs at the NSF from the mid-1940s to the present.