Fateful Choices: The Future of the U.S. Academic Research Enterprise (1992)

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A VISION FOR THE FUTURE

The academic research community in the United States is heading toward an era of unparalleled discovery, productivity, and excitement. In fields as diverse as computing and materials science, high-energy physics and psychology, cosmology and the neurosciences, university-based research will open new worlds of knowledge and make possible innovations not yet imagined. The research enterprise holds great promise for advancing social, health, and economic goals into the next century.

This hopeful vision for the U.S. academic research enterprise motivated the working group's deliberations and analyses. To achieve this vision, the enterprise must be guided wisely by current and future generations of investigators, university administrators, the sponsors of research, and the broader public. The working group's strong and positive presentation of this vision assumes that such guidance will prevail.

Dynamic change is a central component of this vision. The research enterprise of the future will be unlike the one of today. Significant opportunities and challenges can be expected in the decades ahead.

International research cooperation will become a pervasive feature of the U.S. academic research enterprise in the next century. Multinational research arrangements will be essential for studying such phenomena as large-scale environmental effects and the most demanding experimental problems in the physical and biological sciences. The research communities of both industrialized and developing countries will rely more and more on cooperative ventures to address these and other research problems. Just as foreign-based companies now support research in U.S. universities, in the future more governments and industries are likely to support the research activities of other nations.

Over the next few decades, the number of nations with highly effective research systems will grow. Their university, government, and industry laboratories will collaborate in novel, imaginative, and effective ways. Global competition in science and technology will require that the United States pay close attention to the research activities of other countries, especially those targeting economic growth as their primary research goal. This will be particularly true for the Western European and Pacific Rim countries, which have become fierce competitors in the knowledge-intensive global marketplace. Several of the newly democratized nations of Eastern

Europe and the former Soviet Union will most likely join in that competition. During the next century, nations in Asia, South America, and Africa can be expected to develop advanced research capacities or actively participate in multinational research programs.

Global competition in research will produce a flood of new and potentially useful information. Just as Japan in past decades capitalized on discoveries made in this country, during the next century, U.S. universities and industries will benefit from the growing base of knowledge and technology produced elsewhere.

International cooperation will take many forms. International research consortia will be created, where funds and personnel are exchanged or shared across national borders in order to address a specific research topic. Governments and industries will make financial contributions directly to and develop contacts with research institutions in other nations. Under such arrangements, research institutions would share research data, provide educational opportunities to young scientists from foreign nations, and in some cases provide licensing rights for patented products resulting from the sponsored research. In the future, it is likely that increasing numbers of U.S. academic scientists and engineers will benefit by travelling abroad to keep up with advances outside the United States.

International scientific cooperation and competition will be viewed by some as a threat to this nation's preeminent position in the world scientific community. On balance, however, these forces will turn out to be positive ones, creating incentives for achievement and excellence. Investments in academic research will be a vital ingredient to this country's ability to contribute to the urgent multinational research agenda and to our own continued success in the international marketplace.

Women and minorities will increase their participation in the academic research enterprise as educators, researchers, academic officers and policymakers. Women already have substantially increased their participation in several fields, such as biology and chemistry. Minorities, however, are now largely under-represented in all research fields. In the working group's vision for the future, the availability of these pools of potential talent, perhaps more than any other factor, offers the hope that future work-force needs across the whole of the sciences and engineering can be addressed.

Attracting a broader array of young people to scientific and engineering careers—women and minorities as well as white males—will not only promote equity, but also will serve as a vital safeguard in the event of dwindling immigration of foreign research talent. In the past, the United States has relied on foreign scientists and engineers to sustain much of the growth in its research workforce. This may no longer be a dependable source of talent. Other countries, including many developing nations, are develop-

ing research systems that will compete directly with the United States for this pool of talent.

Advances in computers and telecommunications have the potential to fundamentally change many aspects of research and education. In the next century, most researchers will use personal computers as ''information ports" to receive and send electronic and voice mail, complex documents, and real-time video images. In many research fields, telecommunications technology will bridge the distances separating individual investigators and research institutions.

This move to worldwide networks will usher in a new era in research. Desktop computers will give scientists around the world access to the latest generation of supercomputers. Investigators will be able to use advanced research equipment located anywhere in the world. One-of-a-kind high-technology research instruments and facilities, such as orbiting telescopes, sophisticated weather satellites, and high-energy particle accelerators, will be accessible from remote sites, as will specialized databases and digital libraries.

New communication technologies also will change approaches to teaching and learning at research institutions. Computer access to large library databases and other sources of information will expand the pool of knowledge available to students. Sophisticated two-way video and data links will make possible long-distance communication between students and faculty located at different sites. These new technologies will supplement, not replace, students' classroom experiences and personal communication between faculty and students.

In the 21st century, the academic research enterprise will be even more important to the vitality of the United States than it is today. Scientific and scholarly judgment increasingly will be relied on to help address complex issues in law, medicine, politics, and government. With growing urgency, society will call upon the academic research community to help solve a wide variety of problems related to human health, the economy, the environment, and many social issues.

The generation and manipulation of information will be of growing economic importance as products and processes progressively become knowledge-based. As in the past, the academic research community will continue to produce new basic knowledge and train new generations of scientists and engineers. An urgent challenge for the future, however, will be to transfer the knowledge gained from basic research more rapidly to the nation's commercial sector. The technologies developed through this transfer process, in addition to improving the nation's economic strength, will be incorporated into new research technologies and instrumentation that will help propel basic research productivity to ever-higher levels.

To fulfill these expanded roles, universities and colleges will need to maintain their dual missions of education and research and their culture of open information exchange. These qualities will ensure that U.S. academic research institutions continue to be centers of innovation.