Social science for what? : battles over public funding for the "other sciences" at the National Science Foundation / Mark Solovey.

• "The social sciences have often found themselves under attack. In American political culture and in the national science policy arena their most persistent and strongest critics have come from conservative quarters and the Republican Party. Conservative doubts about the intellectual value and practical relevance of political science, sociology, and related disciplines have also informed repeated efforts to slash social science funding at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). During President Donald Trump's first year in the White House, the new Republican administration's budget proposal to Congress included a 10.4 percent decrease in funding for NSF's Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBES Directorate). Such attacks on public funding for the social sciences have special importance because the NSF has a broad mandate to look after the health of American science and is widely regarded as one of the country's premier federal science agencies. In order to understand the importance of debates over public funding and to appreciate their broader significance for the social sciences, for American science policy, and for the NSF itself, we require a deeper historical perspective. In this case, there is no better place to start than the beginning, with the agency's legislative origins and formative years. Efforts to place the social sciences in the NSF were an uphill battle from the outset, when legislative proposals for a new natural-science-oriented agency were first put forth and debated in the early post-WWII era. At that time, the question of whether the social sciences deserved to be included in the proposed agency provoked heated debate in the nation's political, scientific, and academic communities. When the dust had settled a few years later, the agency's 1950 charter explicitly mentioned the physical and biological sciences. But it did not mention the social sciences. Passages stating that the agency could support "other sciences" left this possibility open, however. And in subsequent years, the young NSF did decide to provide very modest funding for a carefully circumscribed type of social science, which agency documents defined as the "hard-core" end of the social research continuum. With the passage of time, the agency also became a patron of singular importance for American social science. It provided extensive resources to advance scientific inquiry carried out by the nation's sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, economists, and scholars in related fields of inquiry at a wide range of universities, colleges, and research institutes. In 1988 Roberta B. Miller, the head of NSF's Social and Economic Science Division, asserted that the agency had become the "flagship" of American social science, attesting to the far-reaching significance and high regard that the agency had acquired in this area. This book seeks to understand the long-standing struggle to provide public funding for the "other sciences" at the NSF with the larger goal of shedding light on the agency's special importance in the recent history of the social sciences. The book examines the contentious story of NSF's social science efforts, starting from the beginning. The principal time period of analysis runs from the mid-to-late 1940s, marked by the end of World War Two and the onset of the Cold War, up through the end of the Reagan presidency in the late 1980s. In the final piece of this study, we will see how insights gleaned from that time span provide an essential foundation for understanding more recent developments and the continuing controversy over NSF's engagements with the social sciences leading up to the present day"-- 

Ämnesord

Social sciences  -- Research -- United States -- History. (LCSH)

Research  -- United States -- Finance -- History. (LCSH)

Endowment of research  -- United States -- History. (LCSH)

Samhällsvetenskap  -- forskning -- historia (sao)

Förenta staterna  (sao)

Institutionsnamn

National Science Foundation (U.S.)

Klassifikation

H62.5.U5 (LCC)

300.72/073 (DDC)

O:b (kssb/8 (machine generated))