One of my mandates was to increase the impact of my budget by being diverse in several dimensions. Given equal proposals from MIT and Miskatonic, I’d recommend the latter. However, generally the MIT proposals were better.

Also, given my fixed budget, my impact was larger if I recommended lower cost institutions (if the quality was comparable). This is where a public university would have an advantage.

NSF has a special (small) pot of money for undergrad colleges (look up RUI) and for parts of the country that get a disproportionally small amount of money (look up EPSCOR).

NSF is so used to researchers moving and wanting to take their money that it has a special form to make that easy.

Nevertheless, one problem with poor universities is that they’re often in parts of the country that don’t think education is very important. Look at the average faculty salaries published in Comical Higher Ed. In much of the country, they are shamefully low. Given those boundary conditions, the feds can’t do much.

Finally, it’s not allowed for invididual reviewers or program directors to require cost sharing that is not mandated in the solicitation.

It seems to me that it would be best to try and take advantage of the good fortune of these elite institutions for the benefit of science and society as a whole. After all, as Luke Lea mentions, the tax deductibility of the contributions represents a federal subsidy of these institutions.

My suggestion is that we should expect proposals coming from elite institutions, like Harvard, to have a substantial contribution from university matching funds. Of course, it is probably not a good idea for individual reviewers to try implement policy changes in the reviews of individual proposals. But it would be good for the funding agencies to adopt policy like this so that those like Harvard’s president Faust will feel the need to devote more of their wealth to direct research support.

A particularly sneaky way to do this would be to include an estimate of the tax subsidies into the calculation of the indirect cost rates that universities can charge. Perhaps the indirect costs at Harvard would be negative!

They have an endowment for ten universities, all stuck up there in a small corner of New England that is growing completely out of touch with the rest of America.

The South and Lower Midwest, in particular, are short of first-rate educational institutions — and are discriminated against in admissions from places like Harvard, believe it or not. Read Ross Douthout’s book Privilege for substantiation on that last point.

Tax deductible charitable contributions, after all, are partly public money, and the public has a right to a more equitable share of the benefits, maybe?

(More generally, I think diversity is important for science, tendency to concentrate on a few centers is not beneficial in the long term. Easier said than done, I know).

When we tried to build a new group at Rutgers, it was opposed by certain people at certain elite institutions in more or less the same terms as the Faust piece: great science is done at great places and little upstarts should not try to horn in on the game. When we succeeded in building a great group, we never got the kind of government funding that the elite institutions have (I’m counting dollars per person). This was at a time when certain elite institutions were at a low ebb and were getting scandalously large amounts per person in return for mediocre research. And of course, in the end, two of our most successful researchers got stolen away by elite institutions. You will find by the way that a substantial fraction of the science faculty at elite campuses got there after first proving themselves at other places, and then being stolen.

So much of this is just a consequence of human nature, coupled with the nature of our political/economic system (not that I think there’s a better one - except in people’s imaginations), that it’s hard to see what to do about it. The two suggestions I have are:

1)If you ever get to review a grant proposal from an elite institution, be fair but don’t be polite. That is: say things like X is a pretty good physicist, but really doesn’t deserve to be getting 2-3 times the average funding in this field. Do a good job, go into depth, and provide a lot of data. If enough people start doing this the government agencies will at least have to do something about the really egregious cases. Of course, a lot of the people at these institutions really are the best in the world and deserve extraordinary funding.

2)Advocate a change in funding guidelines earmarking a large fraction of government science funding to institutions whose undergraduate tuition charges for in-state students, are below a certain (inflation indexed) bound. This is along the lines of “Harvard shouldn’t get any government funding” (a point of view I disagree with), but is more likely to actually happen. Not very likely, just more likely.

The latter is already so full, that they can’t even find novel topics for their grad students without stretching into fluff subjects. Hence the proliferation of academic research into topics like ‘Pornography as a means to analyze racial symbiotic relations in Lithuania’. Fascinating im sure, yet completely pointless.

Meanwhile, we have a generation of high quality physicists being squeezed out of research positions b/c of funding cuts.