Things are heating up — but not too much in Providence, unfortunately. This past weekend, Congress continued a hotly partisan battle over federal spending for the rest of this year, providing a preview of the even worse fighting over next year's budget yet to come. As lawmakers continue to skirmish, university administrators and scientists foresee a gloomy future ahead for federal science agencies' budgets. In February, the House announced a proposal for federal spending during the rest of the current fiscal year that cuts $1.6 billion from the National Institutes of Health's budget and allots the National Science Foundation $139 million less than President Barack Obama requested.
In light of the federal financial situation, the University is looking to corporate sponsors for funding instead, The Herald reported March 23. Brown already has partnerships with General Motors, IBM and Microsoft and will likely forge ties with corporate sponsors to fund research in engineering, computer science, medicine and public health.
The state of the federal budget leaves the University in an understandably difficult position. Private industry and government dollars are the two primary sources of funding for scientific research, making corporate partnerships a logical place to turn to when federal agencies cannot provide more funding.
Ties to industry often provoke a knee-jerk reaction of suspicion, considering recent national news like GlaxoSmithKline's cover-up of the drug Avandia's harmful effects. It is important to note that academic ties to industry normally come under fire when individual researchers fail to disclose their financial conflicts of interest and that the University plans to seek corporate sponsors, which foster partnerships of a decidedly different nature, to fund research.
That said, we caution the University to remember that corporate partnerships are not a straightforward substitute for federal funding. The scientific community generally sees the government's role as financing basic science research, while industry is more likely to favor projects with clearly foreseeable practical applications and profits. Scientific knowledge should not languish in laboratories — but will corporate sponsors invest their funds in research that is risky, not immediately lucrative or without a clear and specific application for the sake of expanding scientific knowledge? As one administrator and faculty member said in last month's Herald article, "The University wants to contribute to knowledge growth." This is ideally the goal of an academic institution, which fundamentally clashes with the principal interest of a private, profit-driven corporation.
Furthermore, we were disappointed to see a certain disregard for undergraduate learning in administrators' remarks in last month's Herald article. Their comments focused on corporate sponsorships' potential to expand the University's research profile. This implied a separation between Brown's role in producing knowledge and teaching and specified no commitment to ensuring that undergraduates would benefit from such collaborations. One major draw of building stronger ties to corporations is the potential to provide undergraduates with research experience, internships and job opportunities after graduation. Undergraduate learning and success should not be secondary to, and are not separate from, Brown's goals as a research institution, and we urge administrators to consider the partnerships they plan to establish as a prime opportunity for enriching the undergraduate experience.
Editorials are written by The Herald's editorial page board. Send comments to editorials@browndailyherald.com.
