Having spent some days pondering the fraction of what I managed to see at GECCO, I’m concocting a number of posts. But before I dive into the neatness and amazing stuff I was told about, let me ask that simple question again:
Is there a basic research crisis?
Now, I’ve been hanging around the Academy well past my personal best-by date, and I know that people have been complaining about lack and loss of funding for Their Important Esoterica since time long-past. Immemorial, even.
And my wife spent some years working in corporate research, and my own twisted path through life has taken me (in a professional, anti-academic capacity) to the Main Research Campuses of a handful of Fortune Dozen companies, and more of the Fortune 100. Researchers and mid-level project managers and technical contributors, no less than professors both tenured and un-, bitch all the time about lack of appreciation and money.
And they’re right. Most of the really interesting science and engineering is not incremental development: it’s basic stuff. Abstruse math, overarching modeling, bleeding-edge science fictional technology. The world changes because these people do their work. And traditionally the government (in the US) pays for that work. Either that, or Big Companies pay their researchers to sit in their fancy-dancy Research Campuses and putter.
I think I’m hearing more stories of loss. Not the normal quota, but an anecdotally-verifiable decrease in the amount of actual bucks paid out for science and engineering.
And don’t even get me started on the humanities and social sciences. They’re used to it, though they’re at least as important.
Yet. And yet. I know people who are (a) rich, and (b) want to pay smart people money. They cannot. They can contribute or donate or perhaps occasionally set up a chair or a fund or something, but they cannot buy smart people and their ideas. Because that would contaminate the Life of the Mind, I’m told.
But which Life of the Mind are we talking about, anyway? The one that rewards remarkable young undergraduates with sure-fire “tenure scholarships”? The one that refuses to let work interfere with family and social life, because it knows how important those aspects of life are to thoughtful interpretation and deep reasoning? Or, wait, maybe we mean the Life of the Mind where people share all their ideas in a massively productive roil of collaboration and fruitful discourse, without regard to personal stake and one-upsmanship.
That one, surely.
And then there’s corporate research. At least there, you get to go home at 6pm. But the rewards—of The Mind—are so much sparser. The other rewards, well… that’s different. Not what we’re looking for. Jobs and money and free time go such a short way towards acknowledging the loss one feels at being excluded from the Tour Ivoire itself.
No, what I saw and shared at GECCO was the deep, passionate thrill of discovery. Those people got more from their conversations and pub trips and Q-and-A sessions than a year’s worth of stipend. We solved each other’s problems.
And then we all went home.
So that, I think, is what’s broken. That, I think, is the threat to basic research: we all go home at the end of the conference.
Perhaps the deepest threat to basic research is the social environment in which it is supposedly husbanded.