NEED FOR MORE RESEARCH FUNDING

Research funding, rather the lack of research funding, was the subject of this morning’s round table discussion on #Morning Joe (MSNBC). The invited guests point out that it was causing a brain drain; researchers were going overseas where they could obtain money to peruse their research ideas. It was an interesting discussion but was so narrowly focused (medical research) and superficial as to be almost nonsense. It was also interesting and surprising that Joe Scarborough was there but did not blame social spending—attack blame Obama—for the lack of research funding.

The actual situation is very complex and with the shift in our government from democracy to an oligarchy, it is getting more complex every day. It is a problem that the bigger it gets, the more insolvable it becomes. Start with the fundamental problem, which is that people do not want to pay taxes. Sometimes I get tired of going back to the same old theme in my blogs but innate human greed it is at the heart of our being. We hear it every day in political rhetoric; I earned it, I want to keep it; it is my money the evil government is spending; and most famously, read my lips, no more taxes. Now, we have to face the results of our greed and it is not simple that there is no government money for medical research; it goes much deeper that that.

Few people seem to realize that universities are the principle place where scientists do research. There has been a great shift from company owned research laboratories and facilities into educational facilities. This move has multiple parts. The teachers of students, the professors, are doing the research and not their students after they graduate; the universities have become the employer of their graduates and not the industries. This slowly shifted the costs of research, especially the salary responsibility, from industry to the governmental unit funding the universities, which are the people in the states and federal governments. Of course, this was the economic stimulus for industries to shift research from their laboratories into publically funded institutions; taxpayers were paying for the research from which they profited. In response, the elected representatives and universities administrators recognized the problem; therefore, they evolved a complicated system of research grants, which provided for the granting agency to pay some of the costs with money intended for research, put into the Universities general fund spent at the discretion of the university administrators—attractive to the politically ambitious among them

With the shift of research projects into public institution came the problem of ownership of research results. When research is done in private laboratories, the ownership is obvious but in a public institution, there is a question. The Bayh-Dole amendment solved that problem with government sponsored research grants; the research scientists and his or her institution owns the results. University administrators solved the problem with patentable research funded by industrial grants in essentially the same way. If a university scientist can patent his research results, he can become very rich doing marketable research. This shifted research from basic science, which college professors should do with government money, to for profit industrial research. Suddenly, professors were no longer interested in teaching but were interested in writing research grants and not teaching students and university administrators were interested in attracting the money paid by grants to general funds. Of course, with this in mind administrators hired researchers and not teachers and started to hire more researchers and to build new buildings to house the research—this all cost money, lots of money.  

We do not elect people who will raise our taxes. The legislative body decides how much money to raise (taxes) and where to spend it (to get votes). As the amounts of money paid to taxes decreased and costs went up, universities were underfunded. University administrators struggled to make up the difference; they raised tuition, increased class size, hired cheap teaching assistants, and shifted teaching responsibilities to lower ranked academicians. As this sequence spiraled out of control and tuition became outlandish, administrators raise the overhead costs for research grants; especially on federally funded grants (taxes again).

Because of our greed, we have forced university administrators to dig a hole so deep they cannot get out. The most ambitious among them have increased the size of their institutions and disregarded teaching responsibilities. The Federal Government Department of Commerce has seminars for college administrators to teach them how to co-opt their institutions with industries. Consequently, they do some terribly detrimental things for educations. State funding for universities is sometimes only at 20 to 25% of their budget where it had been approaching 100% of their budgets. Tuitions are commonly reaching $50,000 a year; thus, are prohibitive for all but the very rich, which reinforces the oligarchy; thus, digs the hole deeper and deeper. U.S. graduates are not able to find jobs because we are poorly training when compared to foreign-trained graduates. Research in the United States Universities is becoming so expensive that it too, is moving overseas, which was the only part of the problem Morning Joe and his guests, who are champions of small government and lower taxes—which makes them popular with the people!  

Our nation’s debt is out of control. The answer is simple; collect more taxes from the people who can afford it. Shifting the tax burden from the haves to the “have nots”, as they did in North Carolina is not the answer. Our rich are getting richer and our poor are getting poorer as the widening income gap proves and everyone of us knows is the case. The fact that our citizens cannot afford to attend our universities and when they do, they cannot find jobs when they graduate, is only one symptom of something much, much, deeper, our own greed!  After all, we are the ones who vote.    

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