American science at 250

Why it's time to double down on making promises we know we can keep

Like nearly all of our peers in the publishing world, we’re out in this week’s issue with a set of articles on the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Our books section features a set of essays on historical events and trends that have shaped American science generally. Our policy forum section has essays (here, here, and here) specifically on the history of American innovation as it moved from the private sector to universities. And my editorial features an interview with Beverly Gage, a Yale professor who has simultaneously released a book on American history told through a road trip to important sites called This Land is Your Land, and a report on the status of public trust in her institution and some ideas about how to earn it back.

All three of our sections have a similar theme, which is that we can acknowledge the problems with America and science while simultaneously believing both can be better and work towards improvement. Our books editor, Valerie Thompson, sums it up well in her introduction:

“There are three kinds of patriots, two bad, one good,” wrote the late American clergyman William Sloane Coffin in his 2004 book, Credo. “The bad ones are the uncritical lovers and the loveless critics. Good patriots carry on a lover’s quarrel with their country.” On the eve of the US semiquincentennial, the same framework feels useful for reflecting on the first 250 years of the country’s scientific enterprise. Science lovers will rightly note that American research has yielded magnificent benefits and greatly expanded the boundaries of human knowledge. Critics will correctly insist that it has wrought immense suffering and unimaginable destruction. Like Coffin’s quarreling lovers, the scholars below do not shy away from grappling with paradoxes in US science history, confronting the complexities of six notable moments: the Manhattan Project, the unrecognized contributions of enslaved people to early agricultural knowledge, the rise of Silicon Valley, the advent of biotechnology, the eugenics movement, and the space program. In doing so, they invite science lovers, critics, and everyone in between to contemplate the past and future of the US scientific enterprise and related questions about democracy, representation, and state support for research.

Two vantage points on our current situation

I was very eager to talk to Gage. Her book is unflinching in its critique of America’s failures, especially on slavery and the degree to which the Industrial Revolution produced benefits for some but made life worse for others. She traveled to Los Alamos and chronicled how science became permanently intertwined with American foreign policy through the leaders of the Manhattan project.

As Rose Horowitch recently explained in The Atlantic, it has been a season for writing reports on why trust in higher education is down. The simplest stat is that 70% of Americans think higher education is going in the wrong direction. While trust in science is high still at 77%, building support for science will always be hampered if the universities where the research is done remain unpopular.

Our colleagues at Nature just ran a whole package on this problem that is worth reading. A quote from Kathleen Hall Jamieson there sums it up well:

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a specialist in science communication at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, argues that there’s “a rhetoric of science in crisis”, rather than an actual one — and that it’s nothing new.

Trust in science remains high, but it is being punished because trust in higher education is low. So the collapse in trust of higher education is not something science can ignore.

Other reports getting a lot of attention are one by the higher ed association AAC&U, which speaks very generally to institutions across the country and another on the humanities that was commissioned by WashU and Vanderbilt but written by faculty from other institutions. The WashU/Vanderbilt was pitched to presidents and chancellors across the country but has come under fire for not involving local faculty on local problems. Gage’s report is on Yale by Yale faculty, which I think is the strongest stance. Because it’s from Yale, it is getting a lot of attention across the country, but the report is clear that it’s a local report, saying, “We focused our recommendations on Yale, but we hope they may prove useful to others in higher education as well.”

I was anxious to talk to Gage about how her two vantage points on American history and role of higher education come together. Here’s the video of our full conversation:

Simplifying the mission

As I said in the editorial, Gage found in her work on both documents that although she found much disappointment with the failure of America and its institutions to keep their promises, she still found much hope that improvement was possible. About America, she said about its more disaffected citizens that ‘They have big hopes and dreams for it still.” Similarly, about higher education, she says, “what people want is for the institutions to live up to their highest purposes and best aspirations.”

The Yale report’s idea for solving the higher ed trust problem is for universities to recognize that trust is earned by keeping commitments and that institutions make a lot of contradictory promises: “Trust is earned by doing what you say you’re going to do—and, ideally, doing it well. In recent years, however, universities have been expected to be all things to all people: selective but inclusive, affordable but luxurious, meritocratic but equitable.” Gage summarized this for me by saying, “Universities are in the business of promising lots of things to lots of different constituencies.” From my experience, the reason for this is the constant scramble for resources; institutions need financial and political support from everyone if they want to continue to grow. “It mostly seems to be producing mixed expectations,” says Gage, “confusion, and battles over what's really going on.”

The Yale report’s prescriptions for these problems fall into three categories. The first two are uncontroversial. The way in which pricing for undergraduates is set by institutions where there is a high sticker price that is discounted creates confusion about what folks are paying. And the mystery surrounding who gets in and for what reason breeds mistrust. Hard to argue with either of these. But the third is where it gets dicey: Gage’s committee suggests that the university should simplify its mission statement to focus on the discovery and transmission of knowledge, something that universities do that is not done by other institutions. Yale followed suit and updated its mission statement accordingly. I applaud them for this: Committing to generate and distribute knowledge is a promise we can keep for everyone. All others are likely to be in the eye of the beholder.

A valid criticism of this change is that it sells short the role that universities can have in applying the knowledge they generate. For sure, it is often the case that the institution plays a vital role. And it sells short the impact that the knowledge can have. Again, scientific knowledge absolutely has solved key problems, many of them - such as human health and defense technology - being very popular politically. But the realization of these promises when they happen benefits people unevenly. New technologies drive the economy, but often — because of the inability of governments to implement equitable social policy — these advances benefit the wealthy and make life worse for those with fewer resources. We are already experiencing this with artificial intelligence and it will likely get worse.

Committing to generate and distribute knowledge is a promise we can keep for everyone. All others are likely to be in the eye of the beholder.

Perspective of a blue and red-state public chancellor

When I became chancellor of UNC 18 (!) years ago, North Carolina was a blue state across the governor and both houses of the legislature. Halfway through my 5 years, it flipped the other way. So I have been a public chancellor in both a blue and a red state. I always say that when the Democrats are in charge, they want you to do things (mostly social programs) that you often don’t really want to do, and when the Republicans are in charge, they want you to stop doing things that you do want to do. The former is easier, but neither are as neutral as they are portrayed.

When I accepted the job, I promised to solve health care access, K-12, climate change, world hunger, and wars. It’s cringy for me to read it now, but here it is:

Our to-do list is nothing less than the greatest problems of our time: Cure diseases, and get those cures to all the people who need them. Find and invent clean energy. Inspire students in our public schools. Feed seven billion people. Describe the world, and replace conflict with understanding.

The message worked like a charm in then-blue North Carolina, but news flash: I didn’t deliver on all this. And the right criticized me for saying we could be all things to all people if we could just get enough tax money, and the left criticized me every time I fell short of this expansive vision. When the politics changed in 2010, it was impossible to walk all that back.

What we did do is produce knowledge that absolutely did change the world and people who went on to do great things. If I’d promised that, I could have said that we delivered in every respect.

So what now?

When these topics get discussed among presidents and others, someone eventually says, “We just need to tell our story better.” I must have said it hundreds of times when I was a president, especially when alumni would say “Why don’t I hear about all the great things going on at the university?” I knew then but am even more aware now that we were telling our story just fine. We sent out press releases, put stuff on our website, started out on social media, etc. But good news that doesn’t affect people’s everyday lives doesn’t go anywhere. And most of the press releases we sent out were overstated - saying that this particular discovery would eventually cure a diseases or create some innovation - when most of the time we knew that was an incredible long shot. It’s easy to read those press releases and then wonder where your cancer cure is.

I think Gage’s message is that maybe we ought to do a worse job telling our story while we do a better job getting others to tell it for us. When we say the knowledge and people we generate are going to change the world, it comes across as self-serving, particularly if we promise something that is far-fetched. Better to focus on how we excel at research and teaching, while other people talk about the impact of our knowledge and people. It’s at least something new to try.

If we keep promising things we can do and deliver on those, that’s a way to earn back trust. It may be the only way.