CounterCurrent: Week of 02/16/2026
The academic sciences need to be rescued.
This is the premise of the National Association of Scholars' (NAS) latest report, Rescuing Science. Recovering Science as Civic Virtue, authored by NAS’s Director of Science Programs J. Scott Turner. In this report, Turner reassesses America’s 75‑year experiment with federally funded “Big Science,” arguing that the system built to spark discovery has instead smothered it under bureaucracy, politics, and perverse incentives.
For historical context, the prevailing view in the 1950s was that government, as the primary support for basic science—i.e., curiosity-driven research—would enable more fruitful future discoveries. In the wake of World War II, when basic science was key to the Allied victory, government leaders pushed for entrance into the sciences “in the hope that the peace and prosperity of the post-war world could be secured by American leadership in the sciences.” This ultimately led to a gathering of scientists, engineers, technocrats, and administrators, led by President Franklin Roosevelt’s scientific advisor Vannevar Bush, who all worked together to produce the 1945 report Science: The Endless Frontier (STEF), which became the guiding work for modern Big Science. STEF proposed that the government subsidize the sciences with taxpayer dollars, a first for American science. Five years later, in 1950, the “radical experiment with Big Science began” with the passage of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Act, which changed the scientific landscape.
What, in theory, was motivated by good intentions 75 years ago has led science down the wrong path. In Rescuing Science, Turner asserts that the Big Science experiment has failed,
Not only has generous government funding failed to stimulate discovery, it has set in place an array of perverse incentives that have actually smothered the spirit of discovery that the experiment was intended to support. Government support of academic science has now morphed into a massive government spending program, increasingly disconnected from its mission and the results it was supposed to provide.
Restoring the sciences to their pre-World War II state requires not only an understanding of what science has been for centuries, but also of how the Big Science experiment failed to deliver on its promises to research, scientists, and American taxpayers.
Science was long seen as a sort of civic virtue, “something to be cultivated by a free people governing their own affairs.” Examples include the proliferation of libraries, small museums, and intellectual societies. But as Turner explains, science began to be seen as a public good, and the difference is stark:
A civic virtue is undertaken voluntarily and supported by contributions of similarly-minded individuals. A public good, on the other hand, is an obligation, to be administered by government, and generally to be met through taxes.
The conversion of science as civic virtue to public good spans the last two centuries—read the full history here—with science today being underwritten by over $200 billion in public expenditure annually. This phenomenon of science as a civic virtue to a public good, coupled with government intervention, has created what Turner calls a Big Science Cartel, motivated by “self-aggrandizement and enrichment through skimming ever-growing research revenue streams.” This problem is also acute in higher education. Turner points out that the most egregious example is the expansion of the expensive administrative class within higher education. Revenues outstrip expenditures within higher education, and often the surplus, the bulk of which is brought in by research funding, goes to growing campus bureaucracy. Scientific researchers are incentivized with the ethic of production—i.e., quantity over quality—rather than an ethic of discovery, thus reducing science to a sacred cash cow. On the whole, science is no longer a virtuous and noble practice within academia.
What is to be done to rescue science?
The report proposes six key areas of policy reform to take place over the next 10-20 years:
- Reform of indirect costs determination and accounting.
- Restructuring grant proposal review to emphasize intellectual merit.
- Separating research funding proposals from funding facilities and administration costs.
- Phasing out the current project-oriented grant proposal to put funding decisions more strongly in the hands of scientists.
- Refocusing academic science more strongly on discovery.
- Reforming science graduate student support and training.
Extricating Small Science from the Big Science Cartel can, in part, be achieved by these proposed policy reforms. If enacted, these policy initiatives would “remove the perverse incentives” holding up the Big Science Cartel. However, the reforms must extend beyond policy. Science must grapple with a cultural reform as well. Rooting out the ethic of production and regrowing an ethic of discovery must accompany policy reforms to restore science in America. Turner proposes three cultural reforms,
- Take back control of the academic professions, including academic publishing, which now values publications as tokens to be exchanged as currency for promotion and reward.
- Reconsider the relationship of scientists with the research university and explore alternative ways that intellectual freedom can be secured.
- To explore how private philanthropy can support basic science and wean it off government support.
The full breakdown of policy and cultural reforms is fairly extensive and should be read from the source.
Disentangling science from itself will be a generational project, says Turner. However, it is a worthy endeavor and must be undertaken to restore the “ethic of discovery as the beating heart of basic science.”
Read the full report here. Also, there is still time to register for the livestream audience in the launch event of Rescuing Science. Recovering Science as Civic Virtue today at 6 pm ET, register here.
Until next week.
CounterCurrent is the National Association of Scholars’ weekly newsletter, written by the NAS Staff. To subscribe, update your email preferences here.
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