NSF’s evolving broader impacts draw criticism in Science and Nature
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0645
Recent issues of Science and Nature contain critiques of changes being made to something familiar to submitters of NSF grant proposals: the requirement to justify envisioned research not only on grounds of intellectual merit, but on grounds of “broader impacts” in pursuit of national social and economic goals.
In a letter in Science headlined “NSF’s struggle to articulate relevance,” Robert Frodeman and J. Britt Holbrook of the University of North Texas explain that the National Science Board–originated “new plan will require researchers to identify the broader good of their research by selecting from a list of national priorities.” The proposed changes, the writers declare, “move too far in the direction of accountability, at the cost of scientific creativity and autonomy.” They name “three potential problems":
First, the list focuses on economics and national security, but excludes protecting the environment and addressing other social problems. Aside from the consequences of neglecting these areas, this new focus may undermine the attractiveness of STEM disciplines to more idealistic students who are interested in meeting human needs rather than fostering economic competitiveness. Second, under the proposed new criteria, applicants and reviewers are restricted to the provided list of national needs, which will complicate efforts to respond to new challenges as they develop. Third, addressing these national needs is now supposed to happen “collectively.” This reopens the question of whether each individual proposal must address broader impacts. The new criterion thus replaces vagueness regarding what counts as a broader impact with vagueness regarding who is responsible for addressing broader impacts.
Daniel Sarewitz lodges similar complaints. He’s a Nature columnist in Washington, DC, who also codirects the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University. Nature headlined his most recent piece “The dubious benefits of broader impact,” and blurbed it this way: “Assessments of the wider value of research are unpopular. Proposed changes will only produce more hype and hypocrisy, says Daniel Sarewitz.”
Sarewitz criticizes the omission “of such important aims as better energy technology, more effective environmental management, reinvigorated manufacturing, reduced vulnerability to natural and technological hazards, reversal of urban-infrastructure decay or improved performance of the research system.” He notes that to “convincingly assess how a particular research project might contribute to national goals could be more difficult than the proposed project itself,” since neither “project leaders nor peer-review panels are likely to have sufficient expertise to really understand a single project’s capacity to connect to a persistent challenge such as increasing the nation’s science literacy or economic competitiveness.” He asserts that "[i]ndividual projects are the wrong lever to bring NSF research into line with national goals.” Better, he says, to hold such projects, and the scientists who conduct them, “accountable to specific programmatic goals, not vague national ones.”
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for ‘Science and the media.’ He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
