Officials are expecting federal legislators to maintain recent patterns in higher education funding, with funding for health and science research tapering off after years of significant increases.
After Republicans held onto control of both houses of Congress in Tuesday’s election, officials are expecting federal legislators to maintain recent patterns in higher education funding, with funding for health and science research tapering off after years of significant increases.
“We’re looking at possible major cutbacks across all the funding agencies on which higher education and students depend,” said John Burness, senior vice president for public affairs and government relations. “As money starts to get tighter, the funding is going to go down.”
After a five-year period when the budget for the National Institutes of Health—which has awarded Duke many sizable grants in recent years—doubled, the increases in NIH funding began to slow in 2003, and experts expect this to continue.
“We already had clear signals that NIH funding is going to decrease,” Burness said, predicting that NIH funding would increase “at inflation level—if that.”
The National Science Foundation is in a similar situation, with funding expected to increase meagerly over the coming years. The National Endowment for the Humanities is in worse condition, with no increase expected.
“There’s not much federal funding for the humanities or the arts,” said Judy Dillon, director of the Office of Research Support. “It’s not been so much a function of the [George W.] Bush administration as an ongoing trend in higher education.”
Burness said the decreased funding for humanities research comes not from a lack of interest, but a lack of resources.
“It’s not a question so much a question of how much they like a given group,” he said of Congress. “There’s so little money available, and every group is going after it.”
The pursuit of these funds will likely become more difficult, as Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, and Rep. Bill Young, R-Fla.—both of whom have given much support to higher education funding in the past—are leaving their posts as chairs of their respective appropriations committees. Rep. Ralph Regula, R-Ohio, who will replace Young, has a track record of being more frugal toward universities.
The amount of funding granted by the federal government governs not only the topics of the research, but also the methods, favoring directed research more likely to lead to tangible goals in the short term.
“What has changed more than the amount of money going in is the direction of the research,” Dillon said. “There’s been a tendency on the part of agencies to target their monies toward applied research more than fundamental research. They’re trying to bring a more immediate product out of the research.”
Dillon noted that Duke and other educational institutions will lose funding because of this focus on applied research.
“Universities in general do more fundamental research than applied research,” she said. “It’s what they’re set up for.”
Burness said legislators may be responsive to pleas on behalf of universities like Duke for funding to support both research and financial aid.
“Higher education has some arguments that have been powerful in the past and may be powerful again,” he said, specifically citing the benefits yielded by fundamental research and an educated populace.
Burness also noted the government’s capacity to defy expectations, referring to the 1994 mid-term elections, in which Republicans stormed to a huge majority in both houses. Higher education experts predicted cutbacks of 40 percent for higher education funding, which “never actually happened,” Burness said.
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