The Chronicle of Higher Education - February 24, 2012

NEWS ; RESEARCH
National Science Foundation Steps Up Its Push for Interdisciplinary Research
B; P;;; B;;;;;
F;;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;; worried about securing federal re- search money at a time of
tightening budgets, the National Sci-
ence Foundation has a simple mes-
sage: Collaborate.
In the same week that President
Obama unveiled his budget recom-
mendations for the 2013 ;scal year,
the NSF sent a top of;cial to Ameri-
can campuses to talk up interdisci-
plinary practices in research.
The of;cial, Myron P. Gutmann,
is a professor of history at the Uni-
versity of Michigan who is now
serving as assistant director for the
agency’s Social, Behavioral, and
Economic Sciences Directorate. His
chief message was that NSF grants
would be increasingly won by those
researchers who ;nd partners in oth-
er university departments.
“What we can do is encourage
people to cross those boundaries,”
Mr. Gutmann said before setting out
for campuses in Indiana and Minne-
sota. “And of course we encourage
people by investing money.”
The push for more interdisciplin-
ary research has been a priority of
the science foundation’s director,
Subra Suresh, since his arrival at
the agency in October 2010. “Ev-
ery time he talks, he talks about in-
terdisciplinary research,” said Amy
Scott, associate vice president for
federal relations at the Association
of American Universities, which has
encouraged the strategy.
Mr. Gutmann’s mission re;ects
the sense of NSF leaders that rapid
advances in a variety of ;elds are
making clear the value of applying
discoveries and approaches as wide-
ly as possible.
Mr. Suresh, a former dean of en-
gineering at the Massachusetts Insti-
tute of Technology, has cited valu-
able examples of interdisciplinary
research—the application of atom-
ic-scale science to health care, for
instance, and the study of extreme
weather events by examining both
natural and social factors.
Even so, efforts to promote in-
terdisciplinary research have been
slowed both by government agen-
cies that too often solicit grant pro-
posals in ;eld-speci;c categories
and by universities that continue to
align tenure and job-promotion poli-
cies along established departmental
divisions, Mr. Gutmann said.
Last week Mr. Obama requested a
5-percent increase in nonmilitary re-
search spending, though Congress is
likely to trim that ;gure.
Pushing for more interdisciplin-
ary cooperation makes both ;nan-
cial and scienti;c sense, said Mark
C. Taylor, a professor of religion at
Columbia University who has been
critical of “hyper-specialization” at
universities. The unsustainable na-
ture of department-based hierarchies
is increasingly re;ected in the wor-
ried faces of graduate students who
are ;nding themselves too special-
ized to land jobs, Mr. Taylor said.

A;;;;;;;; ;;; A;;;;;
The current era of economic anxi-
ety could help the NSF advance its
interdisciplinary agenda by mak-
ing universities and their research-
ers especially eager to comply with
it. The agency has a $7-billion bud-
get in the 2012 ;scal year, up slight-
ly from $6.8-billion in 2011. How-
ever, that was down 1 percent from
the previous year and far removed
from pledges by Congress earlier
in the administration to double the
NSF budget within about a decade.

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