Kennedy D. Academic duty (Harvard, 1997)(T)(315s)_LEn

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Kennedy D. Academic duty (Harvard, 1997)(T)(315s)_LEn_.djvu

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Date Jun 22, 2005

Grant reviewers have made use of information gained from the
proposals of others for their own benefit often enough that NIH and NSF
have adopted policies to warn peer reviewers of their obligation to respect
the privacy of authors and to specify penalties that will be imposed on
those who fail to do so...
Fortunately, her worries ended when she received the welcome news
that her project had been funded...
One of the other committee members, an organic
chemist, complains that the whole exercise is a waste of time...
The other
agrees, adding that in his view the university is downright stingy in its
failure to support faculty research more generously...
Large databases and
computer models are increasingly common requirements in the social sci-
sciences...
In between the gifts of individuals and the highly structured forms of
federal support are grants from private foundations...
How can the university possibly deal fairly with these conflicting claims?
Revealed truth is in short supply in this complex and often hostile arena,
but a few principles and some economic facts may help...
B adds $5,000 for travel to the European
conference he will attend and for his society's annual meeting in New York...
As for individual gifts that support research, it is true that they don't
bear any of the indirect costs...
Thus
there is little incentive for these institutions to do the careful (and expen-
expensive) cost studies and auditing that are required to justify perfectly legiti-
legitimate recovery...
He urged me to meet
with Biddle, and so I soon invited him over for a cup of coffee and a chat...
The controller's office was then asked whether
any charges related to the Victoria, as we learned the yacht was named,
had found their way into indirect cost pools...
According to the government's own rules, these were legitimate,
recoverable costs—and indeed the Defense Contract Audit Agency had
actually reviewed and approved some of them...
In an article
published in Science magazine late in 1989, several of them made angry
statements about the situation...
The Department of Justice apparently agreed, because it had earlier
173
ACADEMIC DUTY
asked for legislation to outlaw the riling of qui tarn suits by government
employees...
There is also a lesson to be had from the political circumstances and
relationships that gave this matter its coloration...
Perhaps recalling what happens to those
who displease the chairman by not giving him what he seeks, the director
asserted that his agency clearly confirmed the principle that it can demand,
distribute, and disclose a grantee's data in response to a pressing public
health need...
The animal rights effort has prof-
profited from this mistrust of elites as well as from increasingly negative public
attitudes toward science...
None of this is surprising in
light of the pressure on faculty today to keep active and productive...
In the most active fields, success is
sometimes associated with a degree of self-importance and arrogance that
demeans professional stature...
The ad-
administration can also modify appointment and promotion policies, em-
emphasizing the significant over the spectacular and quality over quantity...
The most prestigious scholarly academies—the NAS and its sister insti-
institutions, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American
Philosophical Society—clearly put the emphasis on quality in the proce-
procedures used to elect senior scholars to membership...