Resolution: Bridging the Gap
The changing national priorities for basic and applied research affect research in many ways. The long-term cost-effectiveness of research remains unchallenged. The current focus of concern is, instead, on maximizing the efficacy and speed with which basic-research findings are transferred to the marketplace. One resulting trend is a reallocation of resources, with a higher proportion going to applied research. Today about half of the Ph.D.’s in science and engineering are employed outside the academic environment -- a substantial increase since the 1970’s [National Science Foundation, 1994]. Another response is simply a more conscientious linkage between basic research and its potential applications to quality of life (e.g., in industry, professions, and health).
Research funding is changing. The proportion of projects funded entirely by a single grant from a federal agency is dropping. Increasingly, funding agencies are requiring cost sharing and collaboration with private industry. Joint projects between academic researchers and businesses are sprouting at an unprecedented rate, as both groups discover that carefully framed collaborative projects permit individuals to maintain their own objectives and benefit from broader expertise. For example, companies are recognizing the R&D leverage inherent in using faculty expertise and faculty generated government cost sharing.
Universities are implementing mechanisms for assuring technology transfer and cooperative research among faculty, students, and local business. Some examples are student internships, graduate-student summer jobs in local industry, undergraduate research opportunity programs, university research parks, technology transfer offices, and seed money for research oriented toward technology development.
“To feed applied science by starving basic science is like economising on the foundations of a building so that it may be built higher.” [Porter, 1986]
How far will the pendulum of transformation in research funding swing? The rift between applied and basic research is decreasing, but is there still too much emphasis on basic research? At state and national levels, some are asking whether we really need and can afford the research universities.
Both research and graduate-level teaching make the same major demand on an individual’s time: to be up-to-the-minute in a specialized and rapidly growing field. Whereas textbooks are fine for the undergraduate level where well-established ‘facts’ are taught, graduate-level teaching and research must be at the cutting edge where new ideas are being proposed, evaluated, and rejected. Active researchers are the best guides in this frontier, where the graduate student must learn to travel.
Graduate study is an apprenticeship. Like undergraduate education, it includes some texts and lectures. Unlike undergraduate education and trade schools, most graduate and professional programs require an individually tailored interplay of supervised yet independent study, a learning-by-doing that develops both specialized knowledge and a combination of competencies and work attitudes. Effective graduate-level apprenticeship requires a mentor, research facilities, identification of feasible and decisive research topics, and usually research funding. The research component of a research university is designed to provide exactly these requirements.
These two aspects of graduate study, apprenticeship and evaluation of new ideas, make graduate study less amenable to distance learning and electronic teaching than is undergraduate study. The combination of personal attention and electronic technology is, in contrast, at the heart of graduate education in a research university.
