alarum to alarum, being told that this or that area 

 of research would be phased out, beefed up, or 

 what have you. An incredible amount of time has 

 been spent by all our principal investigators 

 either rebudgeting, writing new proposals, 

 changing lines of thrust of research, etc. In 

 general, the effort has had some aspects of a 

 dumb show because the actual cutbacks have 

 seldom taken, in detailed form, the directions 

 which were originally predicted. In a word, our 

 ability to plan on any reasonable temporal basis 

 is, to all effects, nonexistent. Clearly, a major 

 contribution to the health of our scientific efforts 

 would be to develop a mechanism whereby the 

 capriciousness of Congressional funding (with 

 its one-year structure) and the political aims of a 

 given administration would be minimized. 



The outlines of the solution to this problem are 

 blurred, at best I can't help feeling, however, that 

 the solution lies in some kind of institutional 

 funding scheme . . . 



Continuity and stability of funding was the 

 second most frequently mentioned issue among 

 each of the three levels of university 

 respondents. Among engineering chairmen it 

 was, in fact, the first. One remedy often 

 suggested for this problem is an increase in 

 national research planning. Although this 

 solution was not frequently mentioned among 

 departmental chairmen, it ranked third among 

 all presidents and vice presidents combined. It 

 was especially high in Carnegie Research 

 Universities I, but quite low in Research 

 Universities II. 



F. N. Andrews, Vice President for Research 

 and Dean of the Graduate School at Purdue 

 University, stated the need for policy and 

 planning as he sees it: 



We believe that the Federal Government should 

 develop a clear and specific long-range plan for 

 the support of basic research and for the 

 appropriate applications of research through the 

 development process. It is essential that a new 

 and effective mechanism for science planning, 

 with direct access to the President, be establish- 

 ed. The nation suffers because there is no 

 publicly announced, long-range policy— a plan 



that would include specific proposals forthe next 

 decade and which would be sufficiently broad in 

 its scope to plan forthe remainderof this century. 



In this connection a scientific advisory 

 apparatus in the White House was frequently 

 mentioned. For example, Charles G. 

 Overberger, Vice President for Research at the 

 University of Michigan, gave the opinion that 

 "an office and an agency are needed which can 

 ensure that our national resources for research 

 are adequate and that these are most properly 

 placed." 



Another frequently mentioned solution for 

 instability in the funding of individual grants or 

 contracts at the university was direct support to 

 the institution itself. This suggestion ranked 

 fifth among all university vice presidents for 

 research and sixth among all university 

 presidents, but was rarely mentioned by 

 department chairmen. Further, although the 

 Research University II presidents and vice 

 presidents combined ranked the issue of in- 

 stitutional support first, the presidents and vice 

 presidents combined at Research Universities I 

 did not place this issue in their top eight. This is 

 one of the differences between responses from 

 Research Universities I and II. 



The need for institutional funding is argued 

 by John L. Margrave, Dean of Advanced Studies 

 and Research at Rice University: 



There is continuing need for institutional grants 

 of the type which have historically been made by 

 both the NSF and the NIH, in which an institute 

 receives a percentage of the total grant amount 

 directly in the form of a lump-sum payment to the 

 office of the president or chief administrative 

 officer. This uncommitted money provides the 

 administrative leader of a university an extremely 

 useful capacity to commit seed money for the 

 development of new ideas at early stages of a 

 research program, to supply supplementary 

 funding to stabilize a faculty member's research 

 program, and to handle other contingencies for 

 faculty or research students. In particular, the 

 "new ideas" which often are speculative and may 

 not always stand the strict review of a large panel 



DEPENDABILITY IN FUNDING FOR RESEARCH 



39 



