There has been an interesting exchange on one of the Chronicle of Higher Education blogs relating to a story on the efforts of Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) to manage the funding of research grants by the National Science Foundation. This effort is part of Rep. Smith and the Republican majority in the House to politicize and eventually eliminate NSF research funding . One source describes it thusly:
“The bill says that any research done using federal funds (which is the majority of research done in the United States) must have its results and finding approved by the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation of the Senate and the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology of the House of Representatives. If the findings are not agreed to, the research is taken from the researchers and disposed of by Congress as it sees fit.”
Rep. Smith’s long-term agenda is quite clear: kill off any independent research in the country that does not explicitly support the Republican political agenda, made abundantly clear by his attitude toward climate research.
As usual, I had to have my say ; here’s my response to the original posting:
I served as an NSF Program Manager in the early-to-mid 1980′s; I’ve also been both the recipient of NSF grants and had proposals declined, so I’m very familiar with the game from all sides. While I might not be one of Manoflamancha’s “best and brightest”, I and my colleagues conducted thoroughly professional and thorough reviews of the research proposals that we received, obtaining reviews from a wide range of highly competent scientists who took time from their own research to help us evaluate the next generation of projects in their field, and then synthesizing these comments into helpful guidance for the proposers and working closely with them to shape their projects more effectively. As a result of this very demanding and time-consuming process, we helped to generate a large number of ground-breaking research projects, including the first empirical studies of the impacts of personal computing on white-collar work.
There is no question that political elements enter into NSF’s funding of research. At the time, our “adversary” was Sen. William Proxmire of Wisconsin – I put that in quotes because despite his stern criticism of some NSF grants, he firmly believed in the value of science and its ability to improve lives; we just occasionally disagreed on how to do it. There was also internal academic politics, involving pressure to fund large well-established researchers rather than innovative new proposals, so we always had to juggle these elements as well. All program managers learn quickly how the research funding game is played; but the result of the game is that almost all of the research funded by NSF is of high quality, and a lot of high-quality proposals are not supported.
Rep. Smith is trying to impose an entirely different political agenda on research funding. He is hardly agenda-free; he is an explicit denier of climate change, among other things. He is seeking to impose a political review on all federally-supported research to be sure that the findings confirm the prejudices of his political supporters. If he succeeds, there will be no research supported that is not cleared first by his committee, which includes numerous self-proclaimed anti-science members. Independent research and research that might reach independent conclusions will be effectively dead in this country which is entirely in accordance with the Republican agenda. This whole dialogue needs to framed on terms of what its real purpose is – not screening for quality, but for conformance to a rigid and generally anti-scientific political agenda.
Following a brief and extremely general diatribe against all social science research and an accusation that I was furthering my own political agenda, I responded further:
I am trained as an organizational psychologist, largely through the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, one of the most respected programs in the country. I have taught research methods and statistics from beginning through structural equation modeling at several well-ranked universities, and I will go toe to toe with you on any statistical or measurement issue you care to debate (although I doubt it would interest anyone else). And yes, I do use “canned programs” such as SPSS, SAS, AMOS, and SmartPLS, largely because I don’t see all that much virtue in spending the next 15 years inverting matrices by hand, as apparently you feel is desirable (although I also doubt that you practice.)
Behavioral/social science is not physics (despite the degree of “physics envy” that sometimes leads my colleagues to drape their research in complex statistics that the data won’t support. It is a science, in that it has established rules of inference and procedures in place to reasonably protect against bad reasoning. Statistical analysis is helpful, as long as it’s adapted to the data. Statistics at bottom is simply a way of helping us avoid committing the inferential errors we’re all prone to. It doesn’t “prove” anything – but neither does it do any damage. Ultimately, the utility and validity of any research study, in “hard” or behavioral sciences, depends on the quality of the research questions asked, the nature of the data collected relating to the question, the acceptability of the research procedures, the suitability of the data to the analytical procedures employed, and the reasonableness of the conclusions based on the analysis. This is not a series of assessments to be made off the cuff by someone with no training or experience in research – particularly not by a congressman from Texas who cavalierly dismisses all scientific evidence in the case of climate change and whose publicly proclaimed agenda includes the systematic subordination of women, the suppression of gay people, and, it might be reasonably inferred, white supremacy.
Of course I am and have been political; no one can operate in any organization today without being sensitive to both organizational and national politics. Politics is, as Robert Dahl once commented, all about “who gets what, when, and how.” When everyone else is devoted to acquiring your resources for their purposes, you’d simply be a fool not to join the process, if only to protect yourself in the clinches. Obviously, you have your own political agenda, which may or may not coincide with Rep. Smith’s, which includes deriding or suppressing any behavioral or attitudinal research that might call your agenda into question. The difference between us is that I encourage research -good research – regardless of its direction, and if it’s well done, I’ll give credibility to the findings. I’m not afraid of new knowledge, as I’m afraid all too many folks today are.
I apologize for taking up so much of the blog with reprints of dialogues engaged in elsewhere, but I feel strongly enough about this potential perversion of research at NSF and elsewhere that I’d like to see the dialogue broadened. I’m sure there will be further exchanges on this subject; watch this space.











At one point in 
JD Eveland is a polymath - thinker, scholar, analyst of what has been, what is, and what could be. He considers current trends in society, organization, technology, education, economics, and human behavior. He is particularly adept at saving organizations from themselves, despite their best efforts to avoid being saved.


Copyright JD Eveland , 2013. All rights reserved.
Jonathan Freeman | April 29th, 2013 at 5:23 pm #
What an interesting tool. Thanks for making folk aware of it. I had no idea it existed.
Might I suggest two Yiddish words to explore using it: “mensch”, and “schlep”, out of curiosity about the influence of Jewish/Ashkenazi culture in the USA, and the way in which Yiddish words became an integral part of American writing… although, did they? Perhaps your results will show that that there was a Rise & Fall?
Do you have any thoughts on Google’s apparent altruism? Apropos which I saw an interesting TED talk by Steven Wolfram (from 2010 in Long Beach I think) about his work of 30 years on computation, (Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha, The New Science). Will you be blogging about such efforts as his and Google’s to encompass the entirety of human knowledge and render it accessible and useable to anyone?
Jonathan Freeman | May 12th, 2013 at 2:59 pm #
Is there perchance a possible research project to be had in the “interesting” psychology behind the names chosen by responders to blogs? For instance:
“pistol targets silhouette”
“good design”
“cheapest auto insurance”
“Cleaning service in Henrico”
“audio video in virginia beach”
“electrical repair in madera”
“new”
“Marine”
“SMTP2GO”
“password hacking software”
“donk”
“unfinished cabinets in beaverton”
…to pick just a few completely at random…. in the spirit of which I suggest:
“nose picked at random” … that’s Random, South Texas… small town with terrible traffic problems, really bad congestion around the nasal base.
“Don Key” … little known Spanish explorer. Didn’t discover much as his mode of transport had relatively short legs.
“Virgin beaches on video” … actually a cable channel only viewable when staying at certain hotels.
ditto for “beaver finished on my cabinets”.
`In ship afterDrEvel1 | May 12th, 2013 at 5:17 pm #
I believe that I do a reasonably good job of keeping the junk responses out of my blog. Since I started, I have had (as of this afternoon) 2,188 response that are appropriately classified as “spam”. The vast majority of these are handled and suppressed by the Akismet software made available by WordPress for use with these blogs. I still get anywhere from 1 to 5 other spam responses that manage to slip through the screen and show up temporarily on the blog; however, I remove these as I find them. When removed, they become part of the spam database and their characteristics part of what the screening software uses to determine spam. Keeping the blog clear is just one of those things that we have to learn how to do.
allin
What interests me more than the names of the spammers (which may after all not be their real names), is the content of their messages that slip through the screen. Generally, they sound plausible, and occasionally even I wonder if this might not be a real response. It would have to be from a reader who hadn’t really read the post in question, but I aspire to as many readers as possible, even if they are sophomores in high school. The spammers obviously have generators capable of creating postings plausible enough to pass some pretty good screens; yet most of the spam doesn’t use them (look in your spam folder at the contents if you doubt me.) Are the literate spams from some particularly literate spammer? I have no answers here, unfortunately. I really don’t know enough about the mechanics of spam filters to offer a definitive analysis (for good reasons, the information publicly available about effective spam filters is limited.) However, I will continue to police my blog vigorously; and I’ll let you know when the beaver finishes with my cabinets.
BTW, I have some interesting findings along the lines that you suggested for using this tool further. I would have posted them 10 days ago except that when I had the post all ready to upload, I managed to delete it without any backup in the process. This so demoralized me that it’s taken about two weeks to even consider redoingin it. But I will; watch this space.