BASIC RESEARCH IN PRIVATE RESEARCH INSTITUTES 



in the joys and frustrations of research, who works with the re- 

 search materials himself, and makes the hard choices of what 

 effort to abandon and what to continue is at the real center of 

 this problem. Suitable provision for his recruitment and his 

 welfare and increase in his number is unquestionably of much 

 greater importance than the provision of spectacular facilities 

 carefully calculated in tons and dollars by the businessmen and 

 politicians of science surely to outdo the Russians in the same 

 field. 



Huge new synchrotrons and cosmotrons and electronic 

 computers, and polar expeditions and balloon and rocket flights 

 and great government laboratories costing more each year than 

 the total academic costs of many of our greatest universities — 

 all these conspicuous aspects of our new national devotion to 

 science are subsidiary and peripheral. They do not serve appre- 

 ciably to produce or develop creative thinkers and productive 

 investigators. At best they serve them, often in a brief or a rather 

 incidental way, and at worst they devour them. 



There is a growing conviction among my friends in aca- 

 demic circles that the university is no place for a scholar in 

 science today, because a professor's life nowadays is a rat race 

 of busvness and activity, managing contracts and projects, 

 guiding teams of assistants, and bossing crews of technicians, 

 plus the distractions of numerous trips and committees for 

 government agencies, necessary to keep the whole frenetic 

 business from collapse. 



This picture is ignored and even denied by some, but it is 

 much too genuine for a great many of our academic leaders 

 today. Too many of our academic leaders, of course, have 

 chosen this pattern of activity and personal power in preference 

 to the quieter and more difficult life of dealing with ideas and 

 scholarly initiative. 



In this busy and expansive world of scientific research, 



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