1031 



18 SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL COOPERATION 



TABLE 3 Factors Inhibiting Effective Foreign Scientific 

 Interchange by U.S. Postdoctoral Students" 



Inadequate funding 27% 



Poor administration or staff support by fiosts 25% 



Language problems 23% 



Quality of foreign scholars 16% 



Inadequate scholarly/scientific facilities 14% 



Nationalism 9% 



Inadequate personal facilities 9% 



' Duplicate answers included in tabulation. 

 SOURCE: Ladd-Lipset (1977) data on toreign travel ot scientific personnel. 



of career advancement rewards also continues to be a factor in such 

 decisions. Moreover, there has been mounting pressure on scientists 

 and engineers working in research areas with potential national secu- 

 rity or proprietary applications to be more circumspect in the open 

 and immediate dissemination of state-of-the-art information.-^^ De- 

 spite these pressures, the consensus — both within and outside of the 

 government— is that individual scientific contacts and the dissemina- 

 tion of ideas and research results, all of which occur primarily within 

 the academic context, must continue unimpeded if scientific and tech- 

 nological progress is to be maintained. ^^ 



ASSESSMENT OF COSTS, BENEFITS, AND EFFECTIVENESS 



The historical record of U.S. participation in various forms of inter- 

 national cooperation in S&T reveals, in the aggregate, a pattern of 

 steady and rather impressive expansion through the decades of the 

 1950s and 1960s with interruptions only in the 1930s and 1940s. The 

 1970s witnessed slowing growth and near-equilibrium, and the 1980s 

 so far have seen somewhat erratic expansion and contraction. Cer- 

 tainly this pattern does not hold tru6 to the same extent in all scientific 

 fields. It is reflective, however, of the fact that, since the successful 

 rebuilding of S&T infrastructure in Europe and Japan, U.S. interna- 

 tional S&T policy has become much more complex and unpredictable, 

 meaning that international cooperative agreements are now pursued 

 as much for diplomatic, strategic, and economic reasons as for reasons 

 of scientific priority. In fact, some argue that, particularly in the bilat- 

 eral context, sound scientific design is sometimes sacrificed in the in- 

 terests of political expediency. 



One particular manifestation of this changed policy environment is 

 the extent to which the proffering or withdrawal of S&T cooperative 



