LEE A. DUBRIDGE 



to expand their research until endowment funds had been 

 secured to underwrite it. Some, indeed, did so. But if all had 

 done so and left it to the state universities to become the only 

 research centers, the private university in this country would 

 have been doomed to oblivion. And that would not have been 

 good even for the state universities. 



But the private institutions as a whole met the challenge 

 and took the risks. Fortunately, certain of the largest sources of 

 new funds, such as the Office of Naval Research and the U. S. 

 Atomic Energy Commission, did pay full costs for some of the 

 very large university basic research projects which they sup- 

 ported. This helped to keep the universities solvent even though 

 certain other agencies did not pay full costs. Annual unre- 

 stricted gifts were sought and found also, and somehow the bills 

 got mostly paid — that is, all were paid except the professors' 

 salaries. They had to wait, partly because the professors 

 themselves did not realize the new turn which university finan- 

 cial problems had taken. 



If we now raise our eyes from the specific research prob- 

 lems in a specific university to the broader problems of academic 

 research in America, what difficulties do we see? Of course 

 there are many: fiscal, administrative, jurisdictional, political. 

 Some people worry about the "balance" of our research effort — 

 that we will spend too much money on space research and not 

 enough on cancer, or vice versa. (Incidentally, I have fre- 

 quently seen cases of general agreement on how much is "not 

 enough"; I have never seen a generally accepted way of learning 

 how much is "too much.") Great segments of science and tech- 

 nology now have great popular appeal, and special purpose 

 groups can whip up great enthusiasm for spending huge sums 

 on this disease or that, or on nuclear power, or astronautics or 

 oceanography, or radio astronomy, or other perfectly respectable 

 areas, both basic and applied. Hence, so-called "categorical" 



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