Author: jlolds

Native Angeleno, professor of Neuroscience and Public Policy at George Mason University

Publics in distress redux…

I’ve written about the difficult challenges that America’s public research universities are facing before, here and here. Tyler Cowen and I began a conversation over lunch last week that extended to email about what’s really going on with this phenomenon. His viewpoint (and Tyler jump in if I’ve got you wrong on this) is that the growth of income inequality combined with the hollowing out of the middle class has seriously eroded the potential tuition base for these institutions. I agreed, noting that the explosive growth in these flagship publics coincided with the GI Bill and the growth of the middle class following  the Second World War.

What’s odd is that the conventional wisdom on this matter is quite different: that the enormous growth in federal R&D (Vannevar Bush’s legacy) fueled the golden age following the War. This viewpoint holds that the economic engine for the public research institutions was embodied in the growth of the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation as they created first “Individual-PI science” and second big program science (like the polar programs and the big telescopes).

What is certainly true for the flagships is they are being squeezed from both ends–their tuition base is eroding while the Federal R&D bonanza has gone into a slow macro-decline. Add to that, the race to the bottom in state support and the student debt crisis and you have a recipe for bad times ahead.

So what to do?

I think many research publics are looking for their IP portfolios to save them (as in the Wisconsin WARF model), but the recent revisions to US patent law are creating challenges for patent defensive maneuvers. In any case, such strategies present real public relations difficulties for universities.

Others that are land-rich (as UC Irvine was in the 1960’s) may rightly attempt to generate long term new revenue streams from real estate. Stanford’s famous shopping center was an early successful example of this strategy.

Or…the public flagships may simply slowly decline, ceding the cutting-edge research space to the privates like Harvard, Stanford and Caltech, while they lower tuition to $10K/year and use MOOCS to reach out ever more to new pools of students. This may indeed happen (first in Texas). I hope it doesn’t. To me the integral linkage between research and teaching is absolutely central to national competitiveness.

So let’s find some creative ways to save the public research universities and implement them quickly.

Proposed pandemic flu research at Wisconsin…

ScienceInsider has an excellent roundup of informed opinions here. I share the concerns of Harvard’s Marc Lipsitch:

 “The fact that the global population is being put at risk by such experiments, to an appreciable but unknown degree, without being informed, much less consenting, is an ethical problem that has not been faced squarely.”

The real issue here is of tail risk. Accidents do happen in labs. In this case, the potential consequences of such an accident would be extreme. In a sense, this reminds me of the first test of the atomic bomb in New Mexico–the scientists involved weren’t completely sure that the thing wouldn’t ignite the entire world’s atmosphere. I suppose they went ahead because the value proposition in terms of ending the War was very attractive to the ultimate decision makers.

Impact factor debate….

Michael White’s thoughtful piece on the use of Impact Factor on assessing scientists for promotion and tenure is here. The piece is in Pacific Standard, a magazine publication that I’m increasingly impressed by.

I’m a supporter of DORA for readers who are curious.

Those are the docks of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution as I arrived yesterday by ferry. My office here at the MBL is on the opposite side of the Knorr, the large research vessel in the foreground.

Tomorrow, at the MBL Society Meeting, we’ll learn perhaps a bit more about the new affiliation between MBL and the University of Chicago. Ultimately, I’m anticipating it’ll involve some significant transfer of resources to the marine lab in return for a significant degree of control from the University. In any case, it represents a monumental change for the 125 year old MBL.

My take on the economy here is that it’s still in recovery mode. While Martha’s Vineyard was extremely busy, the local businesses (with one key exception) seem to be struggling.

Climate change solutions….

Bjorn Lomborg’s eloquent case for increased R&D on green energy sources, from the FT, here.

Money quote:

The analogy here is the computer in the 1950s. We did not get better computers by mass-producing subsidised vacuum tubes or taxing typewriters. The breakthroughs were achieved through a dramatic increase in R&D, leading to innovations such as the transistor and the integrated circuit, which enabled companies such as IBM and Apple to produce computers that consumers wanted.

The False Memory Paper…

Out of Tonegawa’s research group at MIT. My colleague Earl Miller blog has good links to the original paper and science media stories about it, here.

I think it’s a real tour de force. They used optogenetics to essentially demonstrate the power of a cell assembly to represent an engram. Hebb would be proud.