RESEARCH CUTBACKS & CORPORATE SQUEEZE
Conley, J. J.
American academia has become the scene of a kind of ideological warfare. Although the confrontation affects the humanities and other disciplines, the principal battlefield is the domain of...
...Corporate and semicorporate largesse is also expanding in graduate education...
...When several prominent academicians at Harvard, Stanford, M.I.T., and Yale earn more than $100,000 a year as corporate consultants, there is reason for concern about direct corporate influence on professional and intellectual decisions...
...The National Institute on Education, for instance, has made studies of voucher systems, home study, and the negative effects on child discipline of school desegregation its explicit research priorities...
...Why not think in terms of 500 young scholars, integrated into the corporate scene, having a look around, and, in due course, rejoining the academies as vacancies occur...
...With effort, it may be possible to halt and reverse this threat to intellectual freedom...
...the structure and function of groups, institutions, or societies...
...Social" is defined by the August 1981 research program announcement as large-scale social conditions or problems (e.g., poverty, unemployment, inadequate housing and slums, divorce, day care arrangements, accidents, and criminal behavior...
...The funding shifts now are in progress, and public advocacy of the political restructuring of whole disciplines has begun...
...Taming the social sciences has become a priority of rightists both within and outside the Reagan administration...
...the legal or educational systems...
...The healthy nonacademic job markets in economics and some areas of the other fields (for instance, industrial psychology) should not obscure the severe crises these fields are experiencing...
...The self-confidence of the social sciences in the 1960s has given way to despair in the '80s...
...Federal cuts in the funding of the Census and national surveys threaten the public's ability to monitor social and economic change...
...And throughout the social sciences, complaints are heard that review boards of federal funding agencies are being reshuffled...
...social roles and career determinants...
...The Reagan administration is suffused with hostility to the gathering and dissemination of social data...
...Second, corporations are develop383 ing patronage systems for scholars that will ensure their ideological pliability...
...other cuts have jeopardized the accuracy of the Consumer Price Index...
...social classes and groups and their interrelations...
...Knowledgeable observers are divided about the proportions of ignorance and design motivating the federal statistical curtailments, but many of the cuts appear to serve the purposes of the New Right...
...cultural beliefs and values...
...But his views are not without influence...
...The Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration has stated that it will henceforth fund no "social" research...
...They have begun to implement a joint corporate-government effort to smother the critical element in the social sciences, in history and the humanities...
...Professional publications are filled with discussions of the immediate effects of reductions in support, but (perhaps because of their training as observers of other people's actions) social scientists have been slow to speak out on the larger implications of their disciplinary crises...
...Corporations are putting influential scholarly economists on retainers that greatly exceed their academic salaries (New York Times, June 12, 1982...
...That effort to tame academic social criticism is put forward in two ways...
...For several years, the social sciences have been subject to draconian cutbacks in federal funding...
...A list of specific cuts given in the June 1982 issue of American Statistician shows that the most severely affected are the projects gathering data on wages and income, family size, housing, and working conditions...
...Buckley's dreams should not be confused with the immediate intentions of federal and corporate plan384 ners...
...Scholars cannot afford to practice a benign neglect of their own disciplines...
...Nor is he alone in his analysis of the university's role...
...sociolinguistics...
...Federal funding agencies now tend to adopt standards that specifically exclude types of research that may be "tainted" by liberalism...
...The "drive against data" culminated in May 1982 when David Stockman ordered the abolition of the Statistical Policy branch, the central office for federal statistical planning...
...and animal models of social structure and interactions...
...Although the confrontation affects the humanities and other disciplines, the principal battlefield is the domain of the empirical social sciences...
...If William F. Buckley had his way, the most pliable corporate scholars would eventually be given academic positions, replacing scholars (in cases of death or retirement) who are "invincibly ignorant" of the truth of the New Right...
...In many cases new appointments to these boards are apparently being made on the basis of conservative credentials...
...And some social scientists seem to believe that a low profile is the best strategy for weathering professional hard times...
...Yet it is surely unwise to pretend that the threat does not exist...
...At another level, however, the disciplinary crises have serious political and cultural implications that affect far more than the careers of individual scholars...
...game theory and decisionmaking...
...William F. Buckley has argued that the background of corporate scholars "would need to be investigated" to ensure that they would have no tendency "to bite the hand that feeds them...
...In their zeal to proscribe all social research, the Reagan functionaries appear to have placed beyond the pale even the ideologically compatible perspective of sociobiology...
...Corporations, for all that they have shown great ignorance of academic subversion of American institutions, are perhaps closer now than they have been at any time in the past generation to recognizing that the intellectual battle needs to be fought very tenaciously...
...While federal funding is cut back to freestanding private "think tanks" in the social sciences (such as Rand, Brookings and Abt), we see an increase in corporate support of individual "hired gun" consultants and conservative foundations (such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation...
...As federal support for social research declines, corporate patronage systems for scholars are expanding...
...The new corporate scholars are engaged to "tell the company's story...
...The federally induced "downsizing" of major public universities such as Berkeley, Michigan, and Wisconsin involves disproportionately large cuts for leading departments in empirical social research...
...The restoration of a portion of statistical funding in October 1982 has not affected the majority of the initial cuts, which remain in force...
...The tilting of funding priorities along ideological lines is being carried out swiftly and efficiently...
...Complaints about cutbacks in research funding may be seen as petty at a time when unemployment is rampant and breadlines return to the American scene...
...THE NEW ORDER is not merely a recasting of research priorities from liberal to conservative biases...
...Under these plans, postdoctoral work at GE or DuPont might become a part of the typical academic life cycle...
...First, federal funding now is used to discourage research in areas potentially critical of the present social structure, and to encourage instead neoconservative viewpoints...
...Scholars in psychology, sociology, political science, and economics are affected by a crisis of self-confidence within and external reductions of support for basic research from without...
...And now, within the various social sciences, pure theorists of both the left and right are calling for the abandonment of the empirical methods of research that were developed since World War II...
...There is nothing inevitable about the success of any part of the emerging rightist plan to subordinate academia...
...Other agencies are more discriminating...
...Plans have been suggested that would link private-sector support of graduate education with later employment opportunities for "corporate scholars" (Newsweek, June 14, 1982...
Vol. 30 • July 1983 • No. 3
