Saving Research Dollars

President Neil L. Rudenstine has traditionally played little role in the life of a Harvard undergraduate. His tenure has emphasized fund-raising as the main role of the President of the University, and although we are now beginning to reap the benefits of the expanded endowment, undergraduates may feel that he is at best a distant benefactor.

But Rudenstine's role in lobbying Congress to maintain federal funding levels for university research programs, all the more crucial since the departure of Harvard's Washington point-person, Vice-President James H. Row III '73, is a welcome use of Harvard's prestige for a purpose beyond enlarging the endowment.

Nationwide, universities get $75 billion in federal research funds, most of which is channeled through organizations like the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation, and schools in Massachusetts receive about $4 billion in such funding. Congress is considering a proposal to reduce such funding by 12.5 percent in the next year, prompting an outcry by many universities and funding recipients.

A group of New England educational leaders, led by Rudenstine and Tufts University President John DiBiaggio, recently traveled to Washington to lobby legislators and White House officials, including Chief of Staff John Podesta. We hope that Congress and the Clinton Administration will listen to the universities and maintain, if not increase, current research efforts. The programs are threatened by the federal spending caps enacted by Congress during the 1997 budget agreement, which allowed President Clinton and then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich to claim victory while delaying the hardest choices for a few election cycles. The result is that even in a boom economy with a government surplus, many vital programs will have to be cut for the spending caps to hold. Although the spending caps are likely to be exceeded, a long and bitter debate will certainly come first, as programs jockey for funding.

So far, the biological sciences have done best in the budget contests, with the National Institutes of Health emerging relatively unscathed. Although medical research can be lifesaving, Rudenstine and the University have rightly called for a more even distribution of research funding, which ensures that the physical and applied sciences are not left behind.

In part, these lobbying efforts may be a result of self-interest; Harvard is a beneficiary of federal research funds. In April, Rudenstine and the University similarly lobbied Congress to maintain funding levels for teaching hospitals, of which Harvard Medical School is affiliated with more than a dozen.

Teaching hospitals operate as non-profits and give charity care as well as educate a new generation of doctors. Rapid advancement in science and technology claim much of the responsibility for the economic prosperity and the budget surplus Congress is presently enjoying, and much of that advancement may owe its origin to funding decisions made decades ago. University research funded by the Defense Department developed the protocols that made the Internet possible and may have fundamentally changed the nature of the economy. It would be foolish to starve the next decades of similar innovation in other fields to achieve arbitrary, short-term budget goals.

Let's hope that Congress will hear what Rudenstine has to say.