For universities worried about securing federal research money at a time of tightening budgets, the National Science Foundation has a simple message: Collaborate.
In the same week President Obama is unveiling his budget recommendations for the 2013 fiscal year, the NSF is sending a top official to U.S. campuses urging even greater attention to promoting interdisciplinary practices in research.
The official, Myron P. Gutmann, is a professor of history at the University of Michigan who is now serving as assistant director for the NSF’s Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate. His chief message is that NSF grants will be increasingly won by those researchers who find partners in other university departments.
“What we can do is encourage people to cross those boundaries,” Mr. Gutmann said before setting out for campuses this weekend in Indiana and on Monday in Minnesota. “And of course we encourage people by investing money.”
The push for more interdisciplinary research has been a priority of the NSF’s director, Subra Suresh, since his arrival at the foundation in October 2010. “Every time he talks, he talks about interdisciplinary research,” said Amy Scott, associate vice president for federal relations at the Association of American Universities, which has encouraged the strategy.
Mr. Gutmann’s mission reflects the sense of NSF leadership that rapid advances in a variety of fields are making clear the value of applying discoveries and approaches as widely as possible. Mr. Suresh, a former dean of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has cited valuable examples of interdisciplinary research, including the application of atomic-scale science to health care, and the study of extreme weather events by examining both natural and social factors.
Still, efforts to promote interdisciplinary research have been slowed both by government agencies that too often solicit grant proposals in field-specific categories, and by universities that continue to align tenure and job-promotion policies along established departmental divisions, Mr. Gutmann said.
Advancing the Agenda
The current era of economic anxiety could help the NSF advance its interdisciplinary agenda by making universities and their researchers especially eager to comply with it. The NSF has a $7-billion budget in the 2012 fiscal year, up slightly from $6.8-billion in 2011. However, that was down 1 percent from the previous year and far removed from pledges by Congress earlier in the administration to double the NSF budget within about a decade. Mr. Obama is planning Monday to request a 5-percent increase in nonmilitary research spending, though Congress is likely to trim that figure.
Pushing for more interdisciplinary cooperation makes both financial and scientific sense, said Mark C. Taylor, a professor of religion at Columbia University who has been critical of “hyper-specialization” at universities. The unsustainable nature of department-based hierarchies is increasingly reflected in the worried faces of graduate students who are finding themselves too specialized to land jobs, Mr. Taylor said.
But critics of the push toward interdisciplinary research, including Jerry A. Jacobs, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, contend that most researchers already rely heavily on their colleagues in other departments and that the process should be allowed to keep developing naturally. The world now has more than 28,000 peer-reviewed journals, with 750 to 1,000 being added each year, Mr. Jacobs said. “The reason there’s so much knowledge is because the disciplines really work,” he said.
The NSF recognizes the strength of traditional disciplines and merely wants to adjust the balance, Mr. Gutmann said. In his division, about a third of research grants are designed as interdisciplinary projects. “It doesn’t need to be 100 percent,” he said. “But it might want to be 60 percent.”