One point that I’d like to see made a little bit more clearly is that political scientists should try to reframe this. I doubt that we have much sympathy among members of other disciplines; that quote about “first they came for the X” is troubling precisely because, well, nobody stands up for the Xs as Xs. Besides, academics don’t have much sympathy for anyone outside of their discipline: would political scientists rally behind a struggling Anthropology? And the jerks at Freakonomics encouraged their readers to support icing both poli sci and sociology, so I doubt we can count on much deep help from the economists.
However.
If there’s one thing we can do, it’s to point out that there is a risk that targeting poli sci could lead to an actual domino theory. Not so much in the Coburn-is-coming-for-you-next sense—my guess is that Dr. Coburn (R., Latveria) is not, actually, all that incensed by NSF funding for economists—but in the sense that Congress shouldn’t dictate the inner workings of the NSF on anything. If it’s not Coburn targeting economists, maybe it’s Rand Paul requiring the NSF to only sponsor non-Keynesian economics research. Or Jeff Flake banning research into evolution—or a requirement that all geological research consider the null hypothesis that the earth is 4,000 years old.
Freedom of inquiry is a freedom that’s worth defending. To skeptics of #polisci—and they are legion even within our discipline–we have to make the core value at stake plain. Just as standing up for free speech means occasionally standing up for unsympathetic defendants, so too does standing up for free inquiry mean siding with disciplines that you don’t, necessarily, like. (Note that I’m not saying that poli sci is unsympathetic, but that this is an argument crafted for use with those who think it is.) What’s next: a requirement that the NSF give up (I don’t know) dinosaur research in order to only fund missile-defense requirements? Stopping research into development economics because it’s inconvenient for the State Department?
We’re not the largest discipline, and we’re not the NSF’s top concern. But NSF officials and other disciplines should be concerned about the precedent this sets. So, by all means, let’s remember to talk about the successes of political science. Doing so, however, carries a risk that the next Coburn amendment does what this one did: only attacking our non-policy-relevant contributions. We need to defend basic research, not our home turf.
I am well aware that this argument has been made elsewhere, so I don’t claim it’s original. I just think it bears repeating.
It should be concerning to all that the response to Coburn et. al has not been that political science offers tangible value but rather attacking it is attacking freedom of research. Pushing back against policies that seek to channel or constrain research is admirable but in defense of an entire discipline, especially one concerned with such a critically important subject matter, should be able to hang on tangible contributions instead of platitudes.
The Monkey Cage and others have done a valuable job of collating that information and putting it out. In some cases, such as the ANES, the value of the project speaks for itself. But that’s a necessary, not a sufficient, reason to support poli sci funding in the NSF. We have to go much farther.
The problem with this is that no academic field should have to justify itself based on tangible ‘benefits’ that its research has given society, and certainly not the tangible benefits that its research have given U.S. Senators. If there are great, if not, it shouldn’t matter.
Superficially, even if PoliSci (and by extension IR) haven’t given us any benefits while the natural sciences have (dubious, i know), that may be because we grapple with much tougher questions.
More seriously, the academy doesn’t exist to provide Senators and practitioners more generally with research they can use to further their causes. It exists to critically examine the world in which we live (and to teach of course). So an attack on the NSF, an (deeply flawed) organization that helps keep the academy alive is the biggest problem here, not less money for future APSR articles.
“no academic field should have to justify itself based on tangible ‘benefits’ that its research has given society”
This is a heresy, but I’m not sure I agree with this, especially if the question is whether society should give tax dollars to an academic discipline. Should the U.S. Congress fund research into theology? Or astrology? Or Ptolemaic astronomy?
There is a way in which there should be a justification for the billions of dollars that academic receive.
This is secondary to the larger debate but I am, actually, in some ways sympathetic to the strongest possible version of the Coburn critique (which is not a critique that Coburn himself has advanced).
Even if one is an atheist (which on most days I am), theology is not equatable w astrology. But that’s a tangent.
More to the point, I don’t fully get the orig. post’s reference to ‘standing up for free inquiry’. This implies, to me at any rate, that a cutoff of NSF funding is equivalent to censorship. That said, I of course oppose Congress micromanaging/dictating what the NSF funds and what it doesn’t.
I was trying to come up with three things that couldn’t produce things of objective value to society. Ptolemy and theology meet the criteria; I agree that astrology is weak.
In this case, I think there’s substantial evidence to support, but not enough to “prove,” the assertion that Coburn et al are attacking us because they think we’re doing something they don’t like. But “free inquiry” in this case isn’t free-as-in-speech or free-as-in-beer, but something more like “stadtluft macht frei”–the right of self-governing communities to determine their own standards. Something more than micromanagement.
Agreed that the academy doesn’t exist to serve Congress a defined product BUT, and DuckPM gets at this, we’re not talking about censorship of the academy so much as removal of a particular funding source. If anything, taking the NSF as a given resource without politically imposed conditions has been a fallacy of our own creation. Our funding always comes with some required justification and this seems only to be an expansion of that.
More importantly though, the point that we’ve failed to defend PoliSci on the merits amounts to a demand for more relevant work. If, at the core, we had a discipline which could offer a reasonably productive set of research programs year over year, we’d be in a much better position to defend the more abstract members of our disciplinary family from these sort of assailants. Instead, the Senator is able to paint mainstream IR with the same brush as speculative post-modernist critiques.
A touch melodramatic but perhaps our clarion call should be “deterrence, deterrence, deterrence” and whatever other work we can find that has similar logical completeness and policy impact. Defense of the discipline on normative grounds is a recipe for long run failure. More importantly, this sort of market effect – demanding that we justify ourselves and our work – is just the sort of competitive demand we should embrace to sharpen our work and educate prospective consumers and the public at large about what we do.
I’m not sure poli sci would get much help from economics, but one thing about the Freakonomics post is that it came from a sociologist, not an economist.
Yes: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/nyregion/sudhir-venkatesh-columbias-gang-scholar-lives-on-the-edge.html?pagewanted=all
There’s also an issue of academic credibility being eroded if this scenario — growing govt encroachment over the research agenda — comes to pass. I spent some time last year reading medical and scientific research put together by Chinese scientists using state funds as part of a project looking at how the Chinese construct internet addiction and the dangers of cyberspace differently than scientists in the West do. And the whole time I was keenly aware that the scientists may not have felt free either to pose the questions they really wanted to pose, or to arrive at the conclusions they wanted to arrive at (or if they did arrive at those conclusions, I never would have seen the research because it never would have been published). It made me doubt the research findings.
Maybe that’s a way in to talking about these issues with policymakers — reminding them of the many international students who come to the US for an education every year because it represents a better standard, and that part of what contributes to that better standard is the sense that scientiic endeavours are not controlled by the government. If we end up with the same system as China, how in the world will be manage to keep attracting enough Chinese students to fill the coffers of our universities? If a certain Congressman were worried about ‘economic and political security’ then perhaps he should ponder that.