MERLE A. TUVE 



because the available project money pays each one a good 

 stipend — it could be higher. The quality of the effort could 

 represent a deeper commitment to the search for truth and 

 beauty if we seriously undertook to devise and support measures 

 which are honestly directed toward the best support of indi- 

 vidual creativeness in science. There is much of it in every fresh 

 generation of graduate students, but I feel that we have directed 

 most of our efforts toward the creation and support of large- 

 scale activities essentially technological in character and con- 

 spicuous in possible effects. We have not had much success, as a 

 nation, in encouraging quietly creative scholarship and intensely 

 personal activity in research. Our state universities and our 

 larger private institutions did this moderately well but on a 

 modest scale twenty and thirty years ago, but this kind of local 

 enthusiasm seems less prevalent now that large grants, by every 

 scale of comparison, are made to individual professors. And 

 these professors are selected for support not by faculties and 

 deans or faculty research committees who know them, but by 

 their own self-esteem (that is, by their personal requests for 

 support) and by boards or panels in Washington. It is at least 

 highly probable that the present system of selection for research 

 support, strongly biased in favor of the excessively self-confident 

 person and the "big operator," is not well designed to favor the 

 quietly creative scholar. Perhaps all we need is the noisily 

 creative scholar, but he is surely a bit less genuinely decorative 

 to our society, and his contributions, although suitably expen- 

 sive, are probably less permanently valuable. 



Proposed Method of Operation 



I now turn with some hesitation to the suggestion of a 

 mechanism which might serve to increase and stabilize the level 

 of creative basic research in our country. My hesitation relates 

 only to the question of using federal funds in our educational 



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