Out of Proportion: Toward a Balance Among Science, Technology, Humanities, and the Arts
Robert R. Johnson
On April 27 President Obama addressed members of the National Academy of Sciences at their 146th annual meeting. The address covered a number of issues ranging from health to the environment to renewable energy to biomedicine, among others. In addition, his speech emphasized the commitment that the administration has to furthering education in what we often now refer to as STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math):
“Since we know that the progress and prosperity of future generations will depend on what we do now to educate the next generation, today I’m announcing a renewed commitment to education in mathematics and science. Through this commitment, American students will move from the middle to the top…for we know that the nation that out-educates us today will out-compete us tomorrow. And I don’t intend to have us out-educated.”
To this end, the government is ramping up financial resources and incentives in grand ways to reach the goal of educating American youth in STEM at all levels of the educational strata, from K-12 to graduate study. For example, an immediate 5 billion is being provided for the “Race to the Top” program which will reinforce endeavors to, as Obama states, “dramatically improve achievement in math and science standards, modernizing science labs, upgrading curriculum, and forging partnerships to improve the use of science and technology in our classrooms…[and] to enhance teacher preparation and training.” In addition, the new budget will triple the number of graduate research fellowships.
Avoiding Folly: The Problem of “Proportionate Share”
Few would argue that
this gearing up of STEM education is unwarranted. Quite the opposite is true as
it is clear that the
In July of 1945 Vannevar
Bush, The Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development under
Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, wrote a report titled “Science the Endless
Frontier” that would eventually become the basis of NSF a few years later. The
report, as you would expect, made a strong case for governmental support of
basic research leading to innovation that would draw upon public funding to
make the
In Bush’s report, however, there was a strong comment made about what he called “science’s proportionate share” in public financial support. In a section of the report under the heading “A Note of Warning,” Bush stated that:
” It would be folly to set up a program under which research in the natural sciences and medicine was expanded at the cost of the social sciences, humanities, and other studies so essential to national well-being. This point has been well stated by the Moe Committee as follows: “As citizens, as good citizens, we therefore think that we must have in mind while examining the question before us -- the discovery and development of scientific talent -- the needs of the whole national welfare. We could not suggest to you a program which would siphon into science and technology a disproportionately large share of the nation's highest abilities, without doing harm to the nation, nor, indeed, without crippling science. Science cannot live by and unto itself alone… There is never enough ability at high levels to satisfy all the needs of the nation; we would not seek to draw into science any more of it than science's proportionate share."
Somehow in the years following Vannevar Bush’s thoughtful commentary we have lost our bearings in regard to the proportionate share of funding provided to the humanities, arts, and social sciences (what I will refer to in the remainder of this essay as HASS). At present, the combined allotments to The National Endowment the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) are about 330 million dollars. This imbalance is even more stunning when we add the government allotments to the National Institutes of Heath of over 30 billion provided for 2009-10. In short, government funding through these flagship foundations of the arts and humanities isn’t even in the proverbial government funding ballpark, and pretty much not even in the sandlot. Further, when the U.S. Senate proposed 50 million dollars of stimulus money for the arts last year, there was an outcry in Congress that nearly stalled this miniscule proportion of the 775 billion dollar American Recovery Act (ARA) package. It finally passed, but only when attached to an unrelated bill.
Rethinking the Balancing Act
Reasons for this imbalance have been the result of various factors over the years, but there have been at least two constants driving the imbalance: 1) the desire for the U.S. to be the world’s premier superpower, and 2) the consistent argument by the sciences that we are continually lacking in youth who pursue careers in the sciences and related fields like engineering and technology.
The beginnings of NSF
were rooted in promoting the notion of “basic research” in the sciences. At the
beginnings of NSF there was a paucity of resources allotted by the government
to basic research in the sciences as such research was seen as within the
province of universities and corporations. The whole enterprise surrounding the
development of the atomic bomb, however, changed all of that about ten years
before the NSF was born. The basic research needed to create the bomb engrossed
the government in support of intensive scientific research at levels never seen
before, and that could never have come from university or corporate coffers as
the financial support was needed quickly and, in the case of atomic bomb
development, secretly. Starting with a humble budget of $6,000 in 1942, The
Uranium Committee of the Roosevelt administration grew to the eventual 2+
billion dollars expended by 1945 for the Manhattan Project and the dropping of
the bombs on
Linked to this ongoing
endeavor to uphold
In short, the effort to engage youth in STEM has been intense for well over fifty years, and in fact the government’s “turn to the sciences” has taken on epic proportions. The call for more money to support STEM education is, as Obama’s speech demonstrates, very strong. This acronym of science and engineering holds sway under the banner of supposed national deficiencies in scientists, mathematicians, and engineers. Ever since Vannevar Bush’s argument for a national effort encouraging individuals to pursue science and technology careers in measured ways, the acronym associated with STEM has gone beyond measure by funneling untold billions of dollars toward convincing more youths that STEM is both what they need and what the country needs.
Yet, we still pump the money endlessly into this endeavor with few accounts as to its effectiveness. When was the last time we heard that we have gotten closer to the goals of more STEM teachers and practitioners; that the nation is “winning the war” of providing us with more scientists and engineers? Instead, we most often hear that we are far short of the STEM needs and goals. Thus, more calls come for grants to take the project into the future with few calls for even a fraction of this number in HASS.
It is clear that we will need more scientists and technologists. That is the way of the world in the 21st century. We also need more humanists, artists, and social scientists that study the past, speculate on the future, and make things of aesthetic and functional beauty. Just as importantly, we need scientists, engineers, and technologists who fill the needs of “the whole national welfare”: scientists who strongly wed their expertise and knowledge with knowledge of HASS so that science does not, as Bush warned, attempt “to live by and onto itself alone.” Clearly, we need in our present time, desperately, to reset our bearings.
But how might we begin a process of re-navigating? There are many possibilities to this end, but one at the forefront would be to bring the scientists and technologists together with those in HASS within a meaningful context. One such context is the realm of ethics: one of the most challenging, but potentially most rewarding for scholars, researchers, developers, and the general public.
Building a Base for “Good Science” with HASS
Redistributing some of the resources from the sciences to the humanities and arts will require, to an extent, pronouncements from the top, just as President Obama has done for the furthering of scientific research and education. This work can, and already is being brought to the national arena in some small ways, but it has to be enlarged and strengthened. For example, the phrase “good science” has brought forward the issues of ideology and bias that has clouded problems of environmental degradation and biomedical research. Thus, politicians, scientists, educators, and foundation managers have latched on to this phrase as a way to demonstrate to policy makers and the general public what science is, in part, all about: free and open inquiry that attempts to understand the world and life without being directed by preconceived notions of what is good or bad.
Missing in many discussions of good science, however, is the notion of practical ethics: the activity of truly embedding ethical theory, methods, and practices into the entire cycle of scientific and technological research and development. Of course, ethics often is brought up in terms of ethical imperatives for science, such as having an ethical obligation to control global warming or to find new cures for debilitating diseases. But such use of ethics in these conversations rarely turns ethics toward science itself in ways that rigorously question science before the fact rather than after all of the research, experimentation, and implementation are over and the resulting products of science and technology have been unleashed into the world.
Ethics is about looking
into the future and is very much within the province of HASS, but voices of the
philosophers, rhetoricians, literary critics, creative writers, and historians
are often absent in any meaningful ways. For instance, in 1999 two worldwide
summits were held in
In A Parliament of Science: Science for the 21ST Century, a published collection of interviews conducted at the two summits by Michael Tobias, Teun Timmers, and Gill Wright, Dr. Somerville had this to say about her experience:
“In the session on ethics at the World Conference on Science, I was the only ethicist who spoke. The other people talked about issues that raised ethical concerns, but that’s different from doing ethics…Most people, when they first encounter ethics, particularly scientists, see it as something of an add-on. But ethics has to be embedded in the science. I call it “doing science in ethics time,” not just doing ethics in science time. Unethical science is bad science no matter how much you discover in doing it. Good science has good ethics.”
Actually “doing ethics”
will not only take commitment and buy-in among scientists and technologists,
but it will also take material resources. Placing ethical action across the
research and development spectrum and building it into the educational goals of
STEM will be costly in the short-term. Gathering public input, developing STEM
curricula that incorporates practical ethics, evaluating the ethical problems
in development processes, and then testing potential products before they are
put into place is not something contemporary science, and especially
technology, are used to doing. However, the long-term benefits can be
substantial. We will never know until we try, and the effort is certainly worth
the costs if the outcomes of science and technology are truly going to benefit
the whole of life, life that includes more than just humans. HASS specialists,
however, will have to be at the table to make good science happen, writ large,
in a meaningful way. This would be just one step, but indeed an important one,
toward reclaiming balance in our intellectual, educational, and research
endeavors.
A related version of this article has been published in Programatic Perspectives: Journal of the Council of Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication. The article can be viewed at www.cptsc.org/pp/vol2-1/johnson2-1.pdf