A WPI Yankee in NSF's Court
To say that Michael Sokal, professor of history, is happy to be back on the WPI campus is an understatement. For two years, his world was centered around a ninth-floor office at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia, only a few Metro stops from the grand monuments and government buildings of Washington, D.C. As a program director at one of the busiest federal agencies, he oversaw the review of project proposals from scholars throughout the country seeking a small slice of the government's research-grant pie.
It was a role he took seriously and one for which he was proud to be chosen. He says he believes strongly that it is important for good scholarly work in the history of science and technology to be supported and nurtured, for it can provide new insights into the people and ideas that have shaped the world we live in. But as he talks about what these two years meant to him, it's clear he's more comfortable in the classroom than in the world of government.
That's most apparent when he speaks about the importance of teaching, and of how above all, holding the position at NSF left him better able to convey relevant messages to his students at WPI. "I'm very, very glad to have done this," he says. "But I am also glad to be have come back to Worcester, to my colleagues, to my home."
As program director, Sokal directed all NSF grantmaking for research and training in the fields of history, philosophy, and social studies of science and technology. His budget of about $3.5 million per year, small potatoes, perhaps, compared to the dollars tossed at some of the hard science and engineering directorates, was enough to fund about 40 regular grants and 20 dissertation awards annually.
Of the 400 or so program officers in all fields at NSF's research and education directorates, some 250, like Sokal, serve two-year terms on a rotating basis. Most are plucked from the ranks of academia, though some in the engineering and computer science directorates come from industry. The NSF uses this rotational system to ensure that program officers are familiar with the research frontiers in their fields, and also to avoid filling these positions with "traditional bureaucrats."
Sokal was asked to apply for the position by Ronald J. Overmann, who himself ran the science and technology studies program at the NSF under an earlier arrangement or 23 years until 1996. Though Sokal has written extensively about the history of science and technology, both in journal articles and books, he believes that it was his familiarity with the community of people doing work in the field that made him the right candidate for the job.
For example, from 1988 to 1992, he was executive secretary of the History of Science Society, where he managed all of the non-publications programs of the society, which has about 4,000 individual and institutional members. Recently, he was named one of two candidates for the president of the society; the election results will be announced in June. In other words, when it comes to his field, "I know people," he says with a smile. "And I'm not shy."
Knowing people will only get you so far, of course. At NSF, Sokal also needed to draw on his knowledge of what's going on in the field right now, and the directions it may be taking in the future. And with that knowledge, he had to make decisions about who would get support and who would not. "Most people who apply for an NSF grant are not going to be funded," he says. "There just isn't the money there, and some of the work isn't as good as it should be."
The science and technology studies area receives about 170 proposals per year, most of which are not funded. But Sokal says he did his best to avoid an impersonal quality to the rejections. "We tried to provide as much helpful feedback as we could to applicants whose proposals were declined," he says. "That's not the public's image of a bureaucrat. I have a feeling that the public's negative image is generally exaggerated, but it certainly doesn't apply at NSF.
"I use the label, 'enabling bureaucrat,'" he notes. "I established an office of the History of Science Society at WPI, not just to establish an office (who needs another office?), but to promote the teaching, scholarship and writing of its members. Same thing at the NSF. Our goal was to promote scholarship and training. That was the attitude of everyone, from the director (presidential appointee Rita Colwell), to the program assistants and office clerks. We're were there to promote the work of our principal investigators."
One proposal Sokal green-lighted is typical of the kind of work that he funded. It was a study of the mathematical manuscripts of Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century British moral philosopher. Hobbes' pessimistic view that humans are inherently selfish and need an all-powerful king to rule them made him a philosophical foil for his fellow Englishman John Locke, whose belief that all human beings are equal and free formed a blueprint for the U.S. Constitution. Hobbes was denounced both in his own day and afterward, but his ideas continue to influence Western political thought.
"Hobbes' work is important for political and moral theory, even today," Sokal says, "but most people don't know he did mathematical work. I didn't, either, until we got the proposal. And sure, there's no immediate payoff, and his work was probably 'wrong' by late-20th century standards. But if one wants to understand Hobbes, this is critical--and understanding Hobbes is still important."
The review process at NSF is a thorough one--one might even say exhaustive. Sokal's program had two target dates per year for proposals. ("We didn't call them 'deadlines'--we weren't that strict," he says.)
But, boiled down, there were two basic criteria that determined whether a proposal received funding: intellectual merit, and the potential broader impact of the research. "When you're talking broader impacts, it could mean anything from a better understanding of a general area, to better teaching, to better-informed public policy," Sokal says, "but it's now just about impossible for something without any such impact to get funded."
You might guess that someone in Sokal's position would see more than a few crackpot proposals. You'd be right. "We got a proposal once that tried to solve what the principal investigator identified as a major problem: the fact that years in the 20th century begin with 19, whereas those in the 21st century begin with 20," Sokal explains. A proposal related to the Y2K bug, perhaps? "No-no-no-no, nothing like that. The argument went, Isn't it a problem that years in the 21st century begins with 20? That's all."
Program directors are told from the beginning to be careful with taxpayer money, but the proposal in question was submitted by a taxpaying U.S. citizen, and so Sokal had to treat it seriously. The reviews, as expected, came back uniformly negative and the proposal was not funded. But the process had been followed and fairness had been preserved.
"We did not weed out on intellectual grounds," Sokal says. "But we did weed out on appropriateness. Every once in a while we'd get a great proposal that has nothing to do with science and technology. We'd say 'Thank you, but it's not appropriate for us.' But no, we didn't weed for craziness."
"Crazy," of course, is the type of label that members of Congress occasionally slap on various projects and studies that get government funding, holding them up to public ridicule as examples of wasteful government spending. Of course, what sounds esoteric, foolish, or just plain useless to those outside a given field may have obvious merit to those within it.
A classic example of this kind of grandstanding, Sokal says, is Congress complaining about NSF-funded psychosocial studies of why people fall in love. His response? "When the divorce rate is 60 percent some states, understanding what brings people together and what draws them apart has a major social impact."
He cites another example from within his own program area, in which his predecessor funded a new biography of Isaac Newton. The great scientist and mathematician, who in addition to helping to develop calculus, discovering that white light is made up of every color in the spectrum, building the first reflecting telescope, and developing his three fundamental laws of motion, also had a famous encounter with falling fruit that led to his discovery of the universal law of gravitation. Not surprisingly, he has been the subject of many biographies over the years.
After NSF made the grant, Sokal says, "A member of Congress took the floor and asked, 'How many times does the apple have to fall from the tree?' But we have access to resources that previous biographers did not, including late-20th-century thought on Newton's mental illnesses. This is important to understanding Newton and his theories, and this is why the apple has to fall from the tree again."
Despite the politics, Sokal says there was no pressure on him--even in his "soft science" area--to justify grants based on any economic return. "It's quite clear that the budget makers at NSF, the OMB [Office of Management and Budget], and most members of Congress believe strongly that the social, behavioral and economic sciences are important for the United States and our lives today," he says.
But in Washington, there are certain concessions one must make to avoid needlessly explosive situations for the NSF. Often that means defusing potential public relations bombs before anyone knows they are ticking.
"The distinctions between early modern chemistry and alchemy were, and still are, not at all clear," he says. "Now this has all sorts of implications for understanding the evolution of ideas, and we get proposals for studying early alchemy in relation to chemistry. Great stuff; it reviews well. But I'd change the title of a funded proposal to, 'A Study of Early Modern Chemistry,' just so it didn't appear that the National Science Foundation was funding alchemy. The work is the same, the potential payoff is the same, but I was responding to the potential concerns. Another example: we funded a study of eugenics in the Soviet Union. It's important for understanding how Soviet genetics developed, and how it fell apart. But we had to change the title there, as well--the National Science Foundation is not going to fund eugenics! It's just an awareness of the political reality."
Sokal also explains that NSF is currently funding, via a grant he awarded, a study of how some mainstream Protestant churches came to accept Darwinism as part of their understanding of God's creation. "This is very important," he says. "How did this arise? But at times we get concerns: 'Why are we funding religious studies?' The response is: 'Religion and science are both part of our culture, and to understand how science operates, you have to look at all of its relationships.'"
Paying close attention to relationships of another sort is also an important consideration when you are doling out millions of dollars in grant money. NSF has strict conflict of interest rules. "We spent a lot of time with lawyers to make sure we were aware of the legal restrictions on how we operated," he notes. "I had to be careful--if any proposal came in from WPI or from the History of Science Society, I immediately recused myself."
Merely sharing a member affiliation or an acquaintance with someone, however, was not grounds for removing himself from the evaluation process. This was fortunate, and pragmatic, given that Sokal was selected for the position, in part, because of his many associations within the field. He estimates that he recused himself from only about 3 percent of the proposals received by his department.
While his time at NSF was personally and professionally beneficial, Sokal also stresses that it will help WPI, as well. "A better understanding of how science and technology are practiced, how the ideas have developed--this is what I've brought back," he says, adding that the manifestations of that understanding include greater rigor in his classes and in the Sufficiency projects and IQPs he directs.
Sokal helped establish the Humanities Sufficiency program in the early 1970s, and he believes strongly that work in the humanities at WPI should be--and usually is--as rigorous as work in any other technical area. In his view, one of the most important benefits of the Sufficiency program is that it introduces students who are immersed in technical disciplines to different modes of thought. "Not a better way of thinking, not a worse way--just different," he says.
That different way of thinking can also take WPI students in new directions. When he returned from a similar grantmaking position at the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1996, Sokal helped establish a concentration in humanities studies of science and technology within the humanities degree. This program takes advantage of WPI's strengths in such fields as bioethics and literature and science, as well as history of science and technology. It was designed to help interested students prepare for interdisciplinary fields like science writing or technical writing, or work in science policy studies.
Another benefit to the university is simpler, yet in many ways more elusive: name recognition. "I spoke at Cal Tech in 1974," he says, "and the only person in my audience who had ever heard of WPI was the man who had invited me. I was shocked! Quite clearly now it's different." In WPI's continuing quest for a broader reputation, Sokal's time at the NSF was another small but important step.
There's another bit of information--gleaned from hundreds of experiences with scholars at schools all over the country--that Sokal carried back with him from the nation's capital.
"One thing I learned from being at NSF, and also from my earlier time at NEH, is that WPI cares about teaching much more than the typical college or university in America," he says. "I won't say we're unique in that, or that we're perfect. But WPI is most unusual as a place where the faculty both participates in defining the cutting edges of their fields, and they bring that to their students through their classes and the project program. And that's what I was doing in Washington--helping to define the cutting edge."
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Last modified: Aug 31, 2004, 17:07 EDT
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