A Science Machine: The Rise of the U.S. Research University

Research production emulates the compartmentalization and perpetuity of a machine, literally and figuratively.

The Stanford University “Dish” was funded by the United States Air Force in the 1960s, partly to gain information on Soviet satellites; The Dish is a radio telescope still in use today.

Research universities (institutions which produce doctorates and have heavy emphasis on research production) in the United States have become a model for higher education throughout the world. An unprecedented number of STEM bachelor, masters, and doctorate degrees have been awarded. Patents, start-ups, and entrepreneurial activities have flourished. These institutions are regularly awarded exclusive governmental and private research contracts. Endowments for universities like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Caltech, and MIT exceed tens of billions of dollars. Undergraduate admission rates have plummeted to less than 5% at some of the most elite institutions. Talented researchers from all corners of the globe are recruited. Millions of dollars are invested in the construction of new facilities and state-of-the-art laboratories.

The history of the U.S. Research University is complex and has been subject to various social, economic, and political forces. However, the U.S. federal government has played a crucial role in “kick-starting” the research university starting with the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 and later turning towards scientific research as a means for defense during World War II. These initial infusions of funds were instrumental in the creation of college campuses and research facilities. A common theme in its history, is how the research university has had to continually justify its “usefulness”. Scientific discovery was never enough. The research had to justify someone else’s agenda, sometimes in problematic ways.

The Research University is An Important Contributor to the U.S. Economy

American research universities play an influential role in the U.S. economy through employment, purchasing goods and services, training students for future employment, and conducting research that can increase productivity and innovation. By the late 2010s, American research universities produced the most doctorates worldwide, was a leader in global R&D expenditures and scientific impact, had produced over 350 Nobel prize winners, and were the majority of the top 50 research universities in the world (Cole 2016).

Research prestige attracted funding. By 2020, nearly half of the “leading research universities” from the 1920s (Cornell, Harvard, Columbia, Pennsylvania University, Yale, John Hopkins, MIT, and Stanford) were in the top thirty for R&D. The Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education ranks universitas based on the number of doctorates produced and research production, from “R1” (e.g., MIT) to “R3”. R1 institutions typically have much higher funds than R2s or R3s. For example, in the university’s 2014 fiscal year, Johns Hopkins University, an R1 institution, which has historically been considered the “first” U.S. research university, paid $3.9 billion in wages, spent $1.5 billion in goods and services, and in 2016 invested $2.4 billion in research and development (Rhodes 2018). From 2018-2019, all U.S. universities spent nearly $14 billion on goods and services to support on-campus research (IRIS 2020). Flagship land-grant universities are often the largest employers in the city they are located in, and in some cases, the state. In 2019 alone, U.S. universities executed 8,000 new technology licenses or options and 1029 startups (National Science Board 2022). However, this wealth was very unevenly distributed.

The U.S. postwar academic research environment created stratifications in the higher education system, notably between the “research” university and the “teaching” university

Prior to World War II, undergraduate education had remained relatively unimpacted by faculty research projects. Though doctorate programs had expanded in the pre-war era, only major research institutions had doctorate programs of relevant size comparable to the undergraduate education program. After World War II, doctorate programs expanded significantly, from 100 American universities awarding doctoral degrees in 1950 to almost 200 in 1970. Furthermore, disciplines from the humanities to the sciences were experiencing “intellectual revolutions” with new paradigms and breakthroughs seemingly around every corner. Some humanities disciplines even attempted to make their research more “objective” and infuse scientific influences and mathematical modeling into their research. Federal agencies were developed in the United States, notably the National Science Foundation, to provide funding to faculty to conduct proposed research projects. This infusion of federal funding into academic research has yielded outstanding scientific achievements. Not only generating major scientific breakthroughs in nearly every STEM field imaginable, but U.S. researchers are also by far the biggest nationality represented in the Nobel science prizes, with 248 (35%) born in the United States.

Federal funding is the largest sources of funds for academic scientific research in the United States since the 1950s. With federal funding for academic research being virtually non-existent before World War II (agriculture research being an exception), academic R&D expenditures in the U.S. have accelerated since the 1950s.

Graduate student retention and graduation rates improved in the post-war era with new funding opportunities available to compensate students. An era of intellectual optimism, and desire for economic, social, and scientific progress abounded in the academic environment of the 1950s and early to mid-1960s. Entry into Ph.D. programs was far more competitive than in the pre-war years, more financial aid was provided, and undergraduate curriculums at many colleges worked specifically to prepare undergraduate students for graduate study (Geiger 2019). Furthermore, this new focus on research productivity shifted the many universities priorities from teaching to research. Federal funding for research was disproportionately awarded to “leading” universities and smaller institutions (notably HBCUs, or institutions that did not produce doctorates) were increasingly left behind. Furthermore, these new educational opportunities did little to benefit women and students of color. While the prevalent farming out of undergraduate course instruction to adjuncts and grad students was still a couple decades off, there was that ominous feeling.

LEFT: A mockup of the Apollo spacecraft guidance system at MIT. MIT was awarded a contract from NASA in 1961. RIGHT: Cornell’s “synchrotron” completed in 1949. Later improvements were commissioned by the National Science Foundation.

Since the 1940s, the research university has emulated the compartmentalization and perpetuity of a machine.

The narrative of the individual scientist toiling away in a laboratory to make a discovery is still a predominant cultural image but obfuscates how research actually works. The people who perform the scientific work have little control about distribution, management, and execution of such research (Gans, Murray, and Stern 2017). Government, science policy, industry leaders, universities, and leading “experts” are the “managers” of science. Copyright and patent laws allow for the protection and distribution of scientific results by those who have the power and capital to fund them. A small army of poorly-compensated graduate students, postdocs, and other contingent workers actually execute the science. This hierarchy of science only re-enforces race, class, and gender divisions. Specifically, people of color are more likely to be adjunct, contingent, or contract faculty. And in 2019, Black and Latino workers were underrepresented in STEM jobs that required bachelor, master or graduate degrees, but not in skilled and technical jobs that require less education than a bachelor degree (National Science Board 2022). Predominantly, women and people of color are segregated into lower paying positions.

How many research groups operate within research-intensive universities. Typically, the group is headed by a Principal Investigator (PI), a tenure-track faculty member who employs researchers at various educational levels. Research tasks are rigidly delegated. Often, women and people of color are relegated to lower ranks in the hierarchy and have less opportunities to move upwards and receive less compensation and credit.

Susan Harding in The Science Question in Feminism describes science as a “factory”. Harding argues that the hierarchy of science mimics larger social relations, with primarily white upper-class cis-het, able-bodied men leveraging the management and distribution of science (Harding 1986). STEM research is thus a highly integrated, wealthy, prestigious, and gendered social enterprise, in close collaboration with social relations of the larger society (Haack 1996). Pawley in “Asking Questions, We Walk” notes that the engineering profession in the U.S. has been entwined with “raced, colonized, and gendered context”, though it acts like it exists in “a neutral and unbiased state” (Pawley 2019) pp. 448-449. Pawley further argues that the engineering field also prevents collective organization because it educates students that “their role in the economic production system will be as management, not labor” and that the entrenched neoliberal market ideology in the engineering field discourages and disincentives social justice or any work that does not have an immediate economic benefit, such as addressing the climate crisis in a systemic, effectual way.

Rosalyn Sussman Yalow (1921-2011) the first American-born woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, clawed her way up the hierarchy, working as a secretary and learning stenography as a condition of admittance to entering the scientific workforce.

Likewise, the American research university is anything but neutral.

Nothing exemplifies this more than the rise of academic administration, which slowly eroded faculty and student governance in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries. Increased enrollment after World War II, in addition to increased federal funding opportunities, resulted in more faculty hires, new facilities, and new fields of specialization. New administrative positions like associate provosts, provosts, vice chancellors, chancellors, and vice presidents emerged (Rossiter 1995). Private foundations, state legislatures, and federal government agencies devoted research funds to elite universities for new science laboratories, libraries, and state-of-the art laboratory equipment. Efforts to centralize and strengthen administration began during this era.

Cornell University was an early notable example. Deane Waldo Malott, with a Master’s degree from Harvard Business School and experience as Vice President of the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, was elected president of Cornell University in 1951 and inaugurated with an apparently plagiarized speech (Trustees Elect Deane W. Malott as University’s Sixth President 1951) (Schultz 1980). He was dubbed by The Cornell Daily Sun as the “businessman president” with the problem of “preserving academic freedom and balancing the budget” (“A Businessman Takes Over” 1951). The Malott years were eventually known for the strengthening of administration, significant campus expansion, a puritanical moral code, and formalized fundraising campaigns. Interestingly, some Cornell students pushed back against this new investment in scientific research, feeling that it would detract from teaching quality (Altschuler and Karmnick 2014).

By the 1980s, these types of administrative practices had become the norm at institutions across the country. In response to strengthened faculty and student governance in the 1960s and 1970s, administrators began working to develop their own solidarity. Advice, books, and newsletters offered suggestions to increase academic leadership and chip away at faculty governance (Bousquet 2008). One such report used fear-mongering phrases like “Indeed, professors have been known to receive full pay for courses which had no students!” and that “Some departments were so large that faculty were tenured without completing terminal degrees, without publications, or without significant service of any sort”. The report even gleefully states that fifteen faculty positions were eliminated by removing courses that “contributed little to the major”, were “low enrollment”, “outdated”, that “demonstrated little potential for growth”, or “did not service the general education requirements of the university” (Cornesky and Others 1991). Corporate-type management styles tend to encourage faculty to relinquish certain values in the “pursuit of excellence”, which nurtures competition and market-based performance. With an increase in contingent faculty, this erodes the once influential “faculty culture” on campus (Bousquet 2008).

Administrative solidarity was given a boost by several federal government decisions during the 1980s. Most notably was the 1980 Supreme Court Yeshiva decision which labeled full-time faculty members as “managerial employees” who were excluded from collective bargaining under the National Labor Relations Act (Langin 2019). Almost immediately, private colleges began refusing to bargain with faculty unions and discounting pre-Yeshiva agreements. President Reagan’s decertification of air traffic controllers’ unions and anti-labor appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) further hindered faculty unionization efforts. In subsequent decades, under different presidential administrations, the NLRB went back and forth on rulings regarding graduate students’ rights to unionize (Langin 2019). State legislatures also affected such decisions, with employee bargaining rights varying from some protection to no protection with some states even prohibiting collective bargaining (Bousquet 2008) (NCTQ 2019).

From 1990-2012, administrative growth in postsecondary institutions accelerated. A report by the Delta Cost Project found that the number of staff or faculty per administrator declined 40% from 1990 to 2012. Increasing tuition was attributed to declines in governmental funding, more nonfaculty positions, and increased benefits costs. Tenure-stream faculty salaries were not contributing to such increases in tuition since full- or part-time faculty at research institutions were only 25-30% of employees (Desrochers and Kirshstein 2014). An IPS report showed how many public universities from 2005-2012 faced an increase in part-time adjunct faculty, a decline in permanent faculty positions, an increase in average executive pay, and an increase in student debt. Public universities with “top executive pay” (i.e., multimillion dollar salaries) from 2005-2012 saw part-time adjunct faculty hires increase 22% above the national average (Erwin and Wood 2014). Humanities fields were the worst hit by these cuts, but with recent funding cuts to scientific research, STEM fields are next.

Scientific research will likely still occur at academic institutions, despite recent funding cuts, but will likely be increasingly performed by poorly compensated workers who will gain more and more responsibilities with little chance of promotion.

Conclusion

World War II singularly transformed the purpose of postsecondary institutions. Original STEM research became forefront. Over the subsequent decades, the U.S. Research University has developed a highly productive and systematic way for producing and disseminating scientific research. This was largely facilitated by federal and military funding which influenced academic research directions. By the 1980s, however, the research university has increasingly adopted corporate management tactics, resulting in deeper labor divisions. Research output increasingly relied on poorly compensated technicians, students, or postdocs, who faced barriers in promotion due to stagnation in tenure-track job creation. Unsurprisingly, when universities began investing heavily in STEM research, they joined this “science machine” and were subjected to greater political and social influences. The pervasive enshrinement of the scientific method, particularly in STEM, only serves to obscure this influence.