Category: scholarship

synthesizing the past

It was arranged for me to see Charles Beard, who was attending the American Historical Association’s 1935 convention in New York. Perched on the bed in his overheated room in the Hotel Pennsylvania, Beard poured forth his scorn for the pusillanimity and triviality of a historical scholarship that had lost all sense of its critical function in the civic realm. He gave me a formula for a fine scholarly career: “Choose a commodity, like tin, in some African colony. Write your first seminar paper on it. Write your thesis on it. Broaden it to another country or two and write a book on it. As you sink your mental life into it, your livelihood and an esteemed place in the halls of learning will be assured.”

-Carl Schorske, “A Life of Learning [pdf]” (the 1987 Charles Homer Haskins lecture)

Concerns about overspecialization in history are probably about as old as specialization itself. It would be easy to point to Carl Schorske’s 1935 conversation with Charles Beard quoted above and then to William Cronon’s recent column on the importance of synthetic, bigger picture history, then say something along the lines of “same as it ever was”, and then leave it at that. But just because overspecialization seems to be a persistent problem doesn’t mean that nothing can be done about it, and just because it seems to be a recurring problem doesn’t mean that it’s always of the same magnitude.

I could be mistaken, but I take Cronon’s title, “Breaking Apart, Putting Together” to be an implicit reference to the title of Thomas Bender’s “Wholes and Parts: The Need for Synthesis in American History” [JSTOR – paywalled] which was published just about 25 years ago. Writing after a couple of decades during which social history – which often involved intensive research on particular communities or social groups – had grown to become quite possibly the dominant form of American historical research, Bender urged historians to begin to synthesize this work into broader interpretations. For those historians who continued to write monographs – and Bender was not opposed to the monograph – Bender hoped that more of them would carry out their research with the possibility of future synthesis in mind: there’s not really a standard way of combining individual works of history, but it stands to reason that some works are more amenable to synthesis than others.

Bender’s article generated quite a bit of discussion at the time, not all of it positive:  some objected to the idea of synthesis, some objected to the particular kinds of synthesis Bender preferred. About a year after the article appeared, the Journal of American History published a special forum on synthesis, in which Bender defended his ideas against some of his critics [table of contents; articles paywalled].

Despite the criticism, the impression I got when I was reading up on this a few years ago was that Bender was not alone in his concerns, that other historians – and not just those who specialized in the United States – felt that there was a need to broaden the scope of individual historical works. Sometimes this was expressed more as a concern with fragmentation rather than with synthesis, per se, but I think those are two sides of the same coin.

In the intervening years, there does seem to have been an increase in the amount of synthetic work being produced, at least in American history. While you probably still will have a problem finding a recent, academic-ish survey of all of American history that is not actually a textbook – textbooks are a kind of synthesis, but not the kind Bender was writing about – there are now a fair number of surveys that cover particular periods of American history that build on recent research.

And course general surveys are not the only kind of synthesis there is. As Andrew Hartman has pointed out over on the U.S. Intellectual History blog, many works that focus on a particular topic or question also involve synthesizing other historians’ research on the same or related areas. Hartman’s examples are from intellectual history, but I can think of relatively recent works in political or social history, such as the history of voting or the history of marriage, that seem to qualify as both original and synthetic.

All of that said, I don’t really disagree with Cronon. I’m not a fan of setting up stark dichotomies as a rhetorical device and I don’t think, for reasons I’ve outlined above, that the situation is as bad for synthesis as it was in the mid-1980s, but I’m also a big fan of synthesis (and survey courses, for that matter). Since I think there could still be more of it I don’t really see a problem with arguing in favor of it.*

What I do wonder, though, is what relationship academic synthesis has to public interest in history, but that’s a subject for another post.

_____

*Even though I think I’m personally still more comfortable doing close-to-the-sources monograph-style research.

merely synthetic

Years ago, ex-blogger (and current twitterer) Caleb McDaniel wrote a post about academic plagiarism called “Good Fear and Bad.” The good fear was the fear of committing plagiarism that keeps academics vigilant, guarding against carelessness and error in their own research and writing: “It’s one of the internal controls that helps prevent the outright cases of intellectual theft from happening.”

Of course, no one really needs to be afraid of committing conscious plagiarism: being by definition a conscious act, they should focus more on not doing it at all. But that’s not really what Caleb was talking about. Instead, he was raising the specter of truly accidental or coincidental cases: cases where one paraphrases from notes without realizing that the paraphrase brings them back more closely to the text the notes are based on, or cases where one arrives independently at an image or metaphor only to find someone else already arrived at the same place. Cases that might look like plagiarism – that might even draw accusations – but aren’t.

I was reminded of this recently because I’m currently trying to work part of a course paper into a blog post (or two). It’s my own paper but it’s not original – that is, I did the research and did the writing and everything else involved in producing the paper, but it’s based entirely on secondary sources. It’s about the history of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights as documents: mostly, it’s about how they’ve been preserved over the years. My principal sources for the pre-1950 history of the Declaration and the Constitution were the 1949 annual report of the librarian of Congress and an article by Verner Clapp in the journal Special Libraries; among my post-1950 sources were some articles in the New York Times (I can post the full bibliography with links if anyone’s interested). I did not, because I was looking at material history rather than cultural or intellectual history, look at any of the many histories of the documents as expressions of ideas. But I kept them in mind for future reading.

A few days ago, I picked up Pauline Maier’s history of the Declaration of Independence, American Scripture, and was quite surprised to find much of what I covered in my paper written into its first few pages: Maier’s introduction starts with a reflection upon the Declaration as a material object and its history. There’s no question as to primacy here: I wrote the paper a couple of months ago for a readership in the ones; Maier wrote years ago for a readership in the thousands. So I did what any former almost-historian would do: I turned to the footnotes. And sure enough I found that same Librarian of Congress annual report, the Verner Clapp article, and one of the New York Times articles I used.

Before knowing that we worked from the same sources, I found the resemblance striking, even worrying – there’s at least one quotation we both used (it’s a good quotation!); after looking at the footnotes, it seemed almost unremarkable. After all, how many different ways can you say that for a few decades the Declaration hung on a wall in the United States Patent Office Building opposite a window where it was exposed to natural light, and that many suspect this prolonged exposure of causing much of the fading visible in the document? (I have not looked that up to make sure I’m not inadvertently quoting someone. Apologies to that someone if I am.)

But what about the sources themselves? There have been cases where scholars have been accused of hiding their unoriginality by quoting and citing sources they found through others’ work without acknowledging where they found those sources. Generally, the problem is with using only the bits of sources that another scholar used without crediting that scholar (e.g. by not writing “quoted in [citation]”), not with finding the sources and then using them directly. Since I worked directly from the sources I cited and in any case I found them elsewhere, that doesn’t really apply here.

Interestingly, we followed similar routes to our identical sources: in her footnotes, Maier thanks a conservator at the Library of Congress for the references to the Clapp article and the 1949 annual report. I found those same references through an article in a 1997 issue of the Library of Congress Information Bulletin, which for full circularity also refers to Maier’s introduction to her book. Appropriately enough, parts of that 1997 article also seem to be based on the references it recommends. I assume we both turned to the New York Times for more recent coverage because it’s a prominent paper with a certain amount of credibility and it has carried some fairly detailed articles on the documents’ preservation.

In the end, I don’t really think accidental plagiarism, or the appearance thereof, was ever much of an issue here. I wrote about the Constitution and Bill of Rights along with the Declaration – although the Declaration has the best documented history and consequently got the most attention in the paper – and I tried to include a bit more technical detail about preservation when I could. I also cited my sources and did not claim to be uncovering original information, just to be putting together in one place information already available.

I am still glad, however, that although I picked up a copy of American Scripture some time ago I did not open it until after finishing the paper: I think I might have been so paralyzed with fear of re-summarizing Maier’s summary that I would have had a hard time writing anything at all.

historians and their fact-finding

I’ve been browsing through studies of archival users over the past few days and have been finding them fascinating. (This probably says something about me.) There seems to have been a huge upsurge in interest in studying users within the archival profession in the past 15-20 years. Many of these studies, not surprisingly, focus on people conducting historical research: usually historians, but also other academic researchers, as well as genealogists, who I believe are the largest group of archives users in North America.*

I plan to write up something more detailed about these studies; having once been a(n) historian in training, I’ve been particularly interested in the studies focused on professional historians. Although that genealogy one linked above is great too, as I’ve done some casual family history searches, but nothing like what the professionals do.

In the meantime, I have a reference request: is there a study, or even a reflective article, by a historian that discusses the use of archival tools such as finding aids? Almost all of the user studies I’ve found are by archivists or others in the information professions. Meanwhile, most historical writing about archives I’ve seen generally discusses physical locations, access considerations, and maybe archivists, but then bypasses the routines of searching and requesting to jump to the archival material itself. There might be references to classification systems or organizational arrangements, but those aren’t really the focus of the writing. And then you’re left with the familiar scene of the historian alone with the sources – the emphasis is on the information sought, not the information seeking, and the latter is what I’m looking for.

I suppose this is a question that might be better on something like twitter, but it always seems like I’m on twitter late at night when no one’s around. Also, I think I might have gone over 140 characters.

*It would be interesting to know if this is true of archives use, as well as users. That is, do genealogists as a group request more material than historians (assuming historians are the second largest group)? Or do historians request so much material that, on aggregate, it outnumbers genealogical requests? And while I’m asking, how much overlap is there between these two types of requests?

a matter of degrees

Louis Menand:

The moral of the story that the numbers tell once seemed straightforward: if there are fewer jobs for people with Ph.D.s, then universities should stop giving so many Ph.D.s—by making it harder to get into a Ph.D. program (reducing the number of entrants) or harder to get through (reducing the number of graduates). But this has not worked. Possibly the story has a different moral, which is that there should be a lot more Ph.D.s, and they should be much easier to get. The non-academic world would be enriched if more people in it had exposure to academic modes of thought, and had thereby acquired a little understanding of the issues that scare terms like “deconstruction” and “postmodernism” are attempts to deal with. And the academic world would be livelier if it conceived of its purpose as something larger and more various than professional reproduction—and also if it had to deal with students who were not so neurotically invested in the academic intellectual status quo. If Ph.D. programs were determinate in length—if getting a Ph.D. were like getting a law degree—then graduate education might acquire additional focus and efficiency. It might also attract more of the many students who, after completing college, yearn for deeper immersion in academic inquiry, but who cannot envision spending six years or more struggling through a graduate program and then finding themselves virtually disqualified for anything but a teaching career that they cannot count on having.

That’s a surprising conclusion, but I think Menand is on the right track here. Only he misses an alternative conclusion that his own analysis points towards:

Who teaches that? Not, mainly, English Ph.D.s. Mainly, ABDs—graduate students who have completed all but their dissertations. There is a sense in which the system is now designed to produce ABDs.

…

The system works well from the institutional point of view not when it is producing Ph.D.s, but when it is producing ABDs. It is mainly ABDs who run sections for lecture courses and often offer courses of their own.

Maybe he’s too much a product of his professional training and context to see it,* but it seems to me that rather than completely transform the Ph.D., it might be better to acknowledge that the ABD has become a sort of degree without a diploma and then formalize it and confer upon it a legitimate status. That is, make it a terminal degree between the M.A. and the Ph.D., and reward people who teach with an ABD (or whatever it would be called if no longer associated with a dissertation) with a decent salary, benefits, and a measure of job security. That’s a lot to ask, especially in today’s economic climate, but if ABD is going to become a degree with a diploma, it can’t be a degree in diploma only. As for time to degree, I admittedly don’t have any numbers on this, but it seems like it usually takes about the same time to get to ABD within the same discipline across institutions, with variation in time to Ph.D. mostly a function of variation in the length of the final dissertation phase. A formalized ABD degree would have to set its requirements to avoid reproducing that same disparity.

Meanwhile, the Ph. D. – which may still need reforms in other ways – would get to remain distinct as a Ph. D. And the M.A. could remain a shorter, still in-depth but not as in-depth degree. My experience, anyway – and I was in a bit of an unusual situation because in my program you got an M.A. through coursework, but there was no M.A. thesis or M.A. exams – was that I learned quite a lot between finishing the M.A. requirements and passing my oral exams, and that this learning was not just a matter of covering more content but involved learning new ways of thinking about both my field (history) and, for lack of a better phrase, my orientation towards the world. Maybe it’s not always like that. But even though I went on to the start of the dissertation after I finished my exams, I still felt like I’d completed something very real and distinct when I became ABD; that would not have been the case had I left the program earlier.
 
 
*Or maybe, as an ABD, I’m blinded by my own status and context.

the mysteries of language

invigilate (verb):

1. to keep watch.
2. British. to keep watch over students at an examination.

invigilance, invigilancy (noun):

Want of vigilance; neglect of watching; carelessness.

levels of knowledge

Being in school again has me thinking about what it means to know something. Not because of anything covered in any one course, but because of the fact of the courses themselves. When you’re out of school, if you read something, and you have reason to believe you understand what you’ve learned from it, you can act as if you know that information without too much hesitation. Of course that knowledge, like most knowledge, is provisional: you could be misunderstanding it, or the source itself could be wrong. Just because you believe you know something doesn’t mean you’re beyond correction. You might qualify your statement when you present that knowledge – “I remember reading a study” – and you might ask someone with more expertise if what you know is true, but you generally don’t feel as if you need some sort of external approval to demonstrate that you really know it.

It’s different in school, where there are systems of evaluation set up to periodically evaluate your knowledge. Read a book about subject A outside of work and there’s not much you have to do aside from finish the book to believe that you’ve learned and now know something additional about A. Read the same book for class and you might have the same belief  about your knowledge – but until you’ve finished the coursework evaluation process, it will seem less settled.

Why am I bringing this up now? Aside from the fact that I’ve been struck by how differently I approach what I know depending on whether it’s part of an education program or not and simply think that is interesting, I am also going to be writing a bit about subjects related to my program. So I want to emphasize that this blog reflects the fact that I am in the process of learning. There are certain risks involved in showing one’s learning process in a public forum, but I hope that in writing about what I am learning, I’ll be able to give others at least a partial idea of what the library and archives fields are about. You can learn along with me.

For example, if I don’t have time to get into details, I tell people I’m in library school. People usually know libraries and they have some understanding of what librarians do, so library school doesn’t sound like anything that out of the ordinary. But I’m not just in library school; I’m also in an archives program (it’s a joint degree, so I’m in both). And people are less familiar with archives and what archivists do. I plan to write a post about the difference between the two – that is, between libraries and archives – but it turns out that the definition of an archive is quite particular – as is the definition of a record – and something that you have to learn carefully, even if you know, under general knowledge, what archives are, have done historical research in them, and don’t find the idea of “archives school” completely foreign to you.

transcript and memory

I ran through something like this in my head last fall when I dug up my college transcript to apply for library school. But it hadn’t occurred to me to make a post out of it until I read teo’s look at his transcript.

It’s striking how I narrowed down to taking almost all history courses in my last few terms. I didn’t decide on graduate school until almost a year after I graduated, but you could see where I was heading.

Continue reading transcript and memory

shifting focus

For the first time in about three years, I have a fairly good idea of what I’ll be doing for the next three years: I’m going to be attending library school at the University of British Columbia in the joint masters program in library/archives. (I’ve actually known this for a few months, but never got around to mentioning it.) So to the extent that I’m still blogging, I’ll probably start discussing related topics in addition to whatever it is that I’ve been doing.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working on shifting my reading habits: more history; more about information, broadly speaking, less day-to-day news. Over the last couple of years, I’ve become somewhat of a news junkie in my spare time – I even did an internship where I was supposed to be a sort of news junkie in my working time – but now that I have other reading projects to pursue, plus skills I’m trying to maintain or acquire, I’ve been slowly cutting back. I’m starting to feel so uninformed about topics over which I have no influence, like the details of legislative proposals on health care which will almost certainly be enacted, if they ever are, in a form different than whatever I could have read about today. I’m not dropping to a level of Yahoo headlines only, but I’ve reduced the number of blogs I read daily. On the other hand, I’m now reading many of the Vancouver Sun‘s feeds.

Oh, and while I’m mentioning things from a while back that I never got around to writing about here (but did mention on twitter), over at the Sunlight Foundation’s blog you can read something I wrote last month about Brandeis and the history of transparency. It was originally supposed to be the first of two or three posts but I simply ran out of time before my internship ended. I really got into the research – it was very kind of the people at Sunlight to allow me to indulge in my historical interests – and now that I’m taking a university class this summer here in California, I can get into an academic library again. So maybe I’ll pick up that thread over here. (I suppose I already have, in a way.)

the structures of archival research

News of John Hope Franklin’s passing yesterday had me re-reading his 1988 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture (pdf). The Haskins Lectures are supposed to be autobiographical; Franklin’s makes me want to read his memoir. Particularly striking are his memories of doing research under the conditions of segregation:

It was necessary, as a black historian, to have a personal agenda, as well as one dealing with more general matters, that involved a type of activism. I discovered this in the spring of 1939 when I arrived in Raleigh, North Carolina, to do research in the state archives, only to be informed by the director that in planning the building the architects did not anticipate that any Afro-Americans would be doing research there. Perhaps it was the astonishment that the director, a Yale Ph.D. in history, saw in my face that prompted him to make a proposition. If I would wait a week he would make some arrangements. When I remained silent, registering a profound disbelief, he cut the time in half. I waited from Monday to Thursday, and upon my return to the archives I was escorted to a small room outfitted with a table and chair which was to be my private office for the next four years. (I hasten to explain that it did not take four years to complete my dissertation. I completed it the following year, but continued to do research there as long as I was teaching at St. Augustine’s College.) The director also presented me with keys to the manuscript collection to avoid requiring the white assistants to deliver manuscripts to me. That arrangement lasted only two weeks, when the white researchers, protesting discrimination, demanded keys to the manuscript collection for themselves. Rather than comply with their demands, the director relieved me of my keys and ordered the assistants to serve me.

Nothing illustrated the vagaries of policies and practices of racial segregation better than libraries and archives. In Raleigh alone, there were three different policies: the state library had two tables in the stacks set aside for the regular use of Negro readers; the state supreme court library had no segregation; while, as we have seen, the archives faced the matter as it arose. In Alabama and Tennessee, the state archives did not segregate readers, while Louisiana had a strict policy of excluding would-be Negro readers altogether. In the summer of 1945 I was permitted by the Louisiana director of archives to use the manuscript collection since the library was closed in observance of the victory of the United States over governmental tyranny and racial bigotry in Germany and Japan. As I have said elsewhere, pursuing Southern history was for me a strange career.

laws of science

Congressional Record, 2 May 2007, 4388-4391:

PARLIAMENTARY INQUIRY

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. Mr. Chairman, I have a parliamentary inquiry.

The Acting CHAIRMAN. The gentleman will state his parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. Would it have been possible for the Rules Committee to propose a rule to the House to waive the rule under which the Chair has just ruled this amendment out of order?

The Acting CHAIRMAN. The gentleman does not state a parliamentary inquiry. The gentleman’s question is hypothetical.

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. Mr. Chairman, I have a parliamentary inquiry.

The Acting CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from Georgia will state his parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. Mr. Chairman, isn’t it true that the Rules Committee has the authority to waive the rules under which this House operates so that certain amendments may be brought to the floor?

The Acting CHAIRMAN. The Chairman of the Committee of the Whole can only comment on the rule in operation for this bill.

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. I thank the Chair.

AMENDMENT NO. 5 OFFERED BY MR. CAMPBELL OF CALIFORNIA

Mr. CAMPBELL of California. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

The Acting CHAIRMAN. The Clerk will designate the amendment.

The text of the amendment is as follows:

Amendment No. 5 offered by Mr. Campbell of California:

At the end of section 3, insert the following new subsection:

(h) Limitation.–None of the funds authorized under this section may be used for research related to–

(1) archives of Andean Knotted-String Records;

(2) the accuracy in the cross-cultural understanding of others’ emotions;

(3) bison hunting on the late prehistoric Great Plains;

(4) team versus individual play;

(5) sexual politics of waste in Dakar, Senegal;

(6) social relationships and reproductive strategies of Phayre’s Leaf Monkeys; and

(7) cognitive model of superstitious belief.

Mr. CAMPBELL of California. Mr. Chairman, we have a budget problem here in Washington, the Federal Government. The budget that was recently passed off of this floor has a deficit in it, continues that deficit for the next 4 years. It has a tax increase in it, the largest tax increase in American history, going forward. And it also continues to raid the Social Security funds, take the Social Security surplus that we have and spend it on things that are unrelated to Social Security. So we have a budget crisis going on.

What this amendment does is it says that there are certain things upon which we should not be spending money through this bill during this time of budget deficits, stealing Social Security funds, and increasing taxes.

What this amendment does, it says there’s just a couple of things that we should not be increasing the deficit by spending money on, and I quote, “The Archives of Andean Knotted-String Records,” or to study “The Accuracy in Cross-Cultural Understanding of Others’ Emotions.”

This amendment also says that we don’t want to increase spending and, therefore, increase taxes in order to pay for a study of “Bison Hunting on the Late Prehistoric Great Plains” or “Team Versus Individual Play” or “The Sexual Politics of Waste in Dakar.”

And it also says that we don’t want to increase spending and spend any of this money in this authorization and, thereby, be continuing to raid the Social Security Trust Funds in order to study “The Social Relationships and Reproductive Strategies of Phayre’s Leaf Monkeys” or “The Cognitive Model of Superstitious Belief.”

Now, Mr. Chairman, I understand that there is a process of peer review from which these studies come in the National Science Foundation, and that’s all well and good. But our job here is we are the elected representatives and stewards of the taxpayers’ money, not the academics in the National Science Foundation, and it is our decision whether or not we wish to spend taxpayers’ funds on studies of the social relationships and reproductive strategies of Phayre’s leaf monkeys or on bison hunting on the late prehistoric Great Plains. I think we should not do that.

I am sure that some believe that these are very fine academic studies. That’s excellent. Within the realms of academic halls, they may think a number of things are fine academic studies. That’s not the question.

The question before us is, do these things rise to the standard of requiring expenditures of taxpayer funds in a time of deficits, proposed tax increases and raiding Social Security funds? I think the answer is a resounding no. I think the answer should be a resounding no, which means that I would hope that the vote on this amendment would be an equally resounding yes.

Mr. BAIRD. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

I appreciate the gentleman’s comments about the budget deficit, and I would first suggest that the deficit rose to historic levels under the leadership of the former majority party, largest deficits in the history of this country, indeed, were accrued with President Bush and the former majority.

Looking to these studies, some of which are $10,000, now absolutely we must make sure that we spend all the taxpayer dollars wisely. But let me just share with you what the American Association for Advancement of Science, probably the most prestigious scientific body in this country, has said. Prohibiting specific grants sets a dangerous precedent for scientific research that has progressed and advanced for decades through freedom of inquiry into a broad spectrum of subjects. While congressional oversight of Federal programs is, of course, important, second-guessing peer review in this way could compromise the fabric of our public research enterprise one thread at a time. Therefore, we urge you to oppose such amendments.

Similar sentiments have been voiced by the Association of American Universities.

And I would be tempted to ask the gentleman from California, except he’s already stated his piece, why he would be opposing research that has been supported by the United States Army Research Institute; that is seen as critical to the security of our troops serving in Iraq.

Now, my wager is the gentleman’s saying to himself right now, I have no idea what the chairman is speaking about here. And that’s the problem. When you look at a cursory examination of the title, or an abstract, you don’t have an idea. That’s why we have peer review.

Which particular study am I talking about? I’m talking about the Study of the Accuracy of Cross Cultural Understanding of Others’ Emotions. What we are talking about here is if you’re going to be dealing with people from another culture, and you misread their expression of emotions, it can cost you your life, your buddies their life, or the innocent civilians their lives. The U.S. Army Research Institute believes this is important, and they support the basic elements of this kind of study.

I also am not sure, the gentleman seems to suggest, it seems, that we here in the Congress, with a cursory evaluation of the abstracts from studies, should insert ourselves in the peer-review process. I wonder if the gentleman had looked at chemistry research or physics research in the same way, and do we really want to spend this body’s time, and do you, sir, or you, sir, have the expertise to evaluate these studies? That’s why we have a peer-review process. That’s why we have a National Science Foundation. It is why we have a Science Foundation Board to direct us.

I absolutely agree that if taxpayer dollars are going to be spent on research, it is incumbent upon the scientist to do the research well, ethically, responsibly, and that it be relevant. But I do not believe it is the place of either side of this aisle to single out particular studies, as has been done in this case, and presume that with a 5-minute examination we know better than peer reviewers who have the degrees in the relevant fields and have spent years studying them and have evaluated them. That is a dangerous precedent to set, and I would urge strongly opposition to this amendment and a similar one which will emerge shortly for the sake of our soldiers.

Mr. EHLERS. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words.

These are always very difficult questions, and I have learned long ago never to judge the research by the title of the proposal. These are complex issues, and I don’t know if the gentleman was here earlier when I spoke about the rate of return on research at the National Science Foundation. The best estimate is that the rate of return is a minimum of 20 percent and a maximum 400 percent on individual research projects.

Now, I challenge anyone in this Chamber to find investments that will year after year give you that rate of return on the investment.

Another point I would like to make is, as I said, you can’t always judge the full proposal by the title. This was evident a few years ago when we went through exactly the same charade when discussing the National Science Foundation budget. Some of my colleagues came down to the floor to amend the NSF appropriations bill, and one offered an amendment to remove grants for the study of ATM. This person gave a magnificent speech why we should not spend money at the National Science Foundation or the Department of Energy to study ATM. His argument was, let the banking industry do the research on ATMs. What he didn’t know is that the proposal was not on automatic teller machines but the proposal was on studying asynchronous transfer modes, which involves the way computers talk to each other. This research led to a substantial change in the speed at which computers were able to talk to each other. This is a good example of why it is dangerous to just look at titles and make a judgment.

I would also pick up on the comment of Mr. Baird about cultural studies. I think one of the basic problems in Iraq, and I have told this to people in the White House, is that there were not enough people in the White House, perhaps even in the State Department, who understood the culture of the countries we were dealing with, and we failed to realize what would happen once we moved into that country. A good NSF-funded study beforehand would have been invaluable in determining what would happen.

Another example: a few years ago there was a grant on game theory. Once again, one of our colleagues rushed to the floor and said we have to eliminate funding for that. In fact, game theory is extremely useful in calculating the operation of nuclear reactors.

So I urge defeat of this amendment. It is very easy to sit on the House floor and pontificate about these issues. But if we are going to cut the budget, there are much more fertile fields in which to cut. Why would we cut the one agency that gives us a guaranteed rate of return on our investment when there are many other areas we can cut where we are getting little or no payback at all?

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

I appreciate the comments of my good friend from Michigan, and I appreciate the comments of my fellow colleague from Washington. And I have been, as a physician, a strong supporter of the National Science Foundation. I believe strongly that, in fact, they need more money, not less. I would argue that we need to prioritize appropriately in our Federal budget and provide much greater resources in the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health and the CDC and others that ultimately work and derive huge benefit to our entire society and, in fact, to the world.

But I commend my good friend from California for bringing this amendment forward because, although I may not have pulled out a couple of the items that he notes, for the life of me, I have a difficult time understanding and appreciating why on earth it would make any sense, and I would ask my good friend from Washington can you fathom how studying bison hunting on the Late Prehistoric Great Plains might have some effect on contemporary society that would make a difference with the compelling argument that you made regarding the study of cross-cultural emotions?

Mr. BAIRD. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. I would be happy to yield.

Mr. BAIRD. Mr. Chairman, I thank very much the gentleman for yielding. And I would just caution I wouldn’t state “for the life of me” on something that I hadn’t studied very well no matter how obvious it may look.

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. I would be happy to reclaim my time or I would be happy to have you answer the question, one or the other.

Mr. BAIRD. I could answer the question. I am just giving you the caveat about staking your life on things.

Here is the issue: I don’t think we want to say that we should never study the history of things. It is the perspective of this gentleman that we should not study history. And particularly, when you look at bison, I am not an expert in this, but to pretend to be so would be a mistake. To pretend to be so on your side or on my side would be a mistake. The authors of this study have contended that biologists and social scientists have tried to look at how humans make decisions to maximize and minimize risks in different environmental conditions. As you face different food supply systems, how do you deal with that? And that is part of the point here. How did people who live on the plains look at where they were going to harvest bison?

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. Reclaiming my time, Mr. Chairman, I would suggest candidly that it was a valiant attempt. It was truly a valiant attempt, and I appreciate the attempt, to make a justification for bison hunting on the Late Prehistoric Great Plains. I would also suggest that the sexual politics of waste in Dakar, Senegal is a questionable study.

So I commend my good friend from California, and I would be happy to yield to him.

Mr. CAMPBELL of California. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Georgia for yielding.

I appreciate the academic arguments, and I understand them. I am a history buff myself. I love this stuff. I might actually love this report, might enjoy reading it, might find it fascinating. That’s not the point. The point is do we want to spend taxpayer funds on this?

The United States taxpayer cannot fund every bit of academic research for every university, for everything that every professor wants to do across this country. We can’t do that. The question before us is, are these the sorts of things we do want to spend taxpayer money on? I would suggest that they are not, and that is why I would suggest that to vote against this amendment is to say that you believe that taxpayer money should be spent on these specific items. That is the question before us. Not whether it is interesting. I am a Civil War buff. I love all kinds of interesting stuff about that, but I don’t think the taxpayer ought to pay for research into it.

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman for his comments, and I would concur. I think that there are many things that are exciting and interesting to study, whether or not they ought to be priorities at this point, and again, I would point to the bison hunting on the Late Prehistoric Great Plains.

And if my good friend from Michigan would care to make a comment, I would be pleased to yield.

Mr. EHLERS. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I just want to respond to the statement that we can’t fund every proposal that comes along, and that is absolutely true. The National Science Foundation funds a small fraction of the proposals that come through, and that is why we are beginning to slip as a Nation compared to other nations, because we are simply not, as a Congress, providing sufficient funds for the National Science Foundation. And I forget the current figure, but I think it is in the neighborhood of 20 percent of the grant applications are being funded; 80 percent are not being funded. It’s a tough business, and these are all peer-reviewed grants. I cannot defend them individually without looking at them. As I say, you can’t judge a proposal or a grant by its cover.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

I rise in opposition to the amendment, and I yield to the gentleman from Washington.

Mr. BAIRD. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Virginia for yielding.

The challenge here, my friends, is you asked, I think, a question that is just improperly placed. Neither of us is trained in these areas. You are challenging a fundamental tenet of how we do National Science Foundation research. If you truly believe that the most cost-effective use of this body’s time, and that we are qualified to use our time in that fashion, is to, one by one by one, review National Science Foundation grants for our considered and qualified judgment of the appropriateness of those grants, it seems to me that that is a bit of a stretch. It seems to me that you are really making a political statement.

If the political statement you want to make is we should spend the taxpayers’ dollars wisely, I, 100 percent, agree. You may not know it, and probably don’t, that we are working with the National Science Foundation to establish a letter actually that scientists that receive public grants would have to sign saying they understand the money came from the taxpayers, they are committed to doing research that is well designed and ethically high quality and that is relevant.

The problem for us, in this brief time we have here and lacking expertise in the field, is it is really presumptuous of us on either side to say I can either attack or defend. I would yield time to either of you if you want to tell us what your personal qualifications are in the area of expertise of any of these studies, and I will hold you to it. What personal qualifications do you have in the broad area of this study to speak to that study?

Mr. CAMPBELL of California. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. I yield to the gentleman from California.

Mr. CAMPBELL of California. We are qualified by virtue of the fact that we have been elected by people in our districts to be stewards of their money. As I said, this is not a question of whether or not these things have academic merit within a field of academics. It is a question of whether they are worthy of spending taxpayer money in that area. I think they are not.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Reclaiming my time, Mr. Chairman, I yield to the gentleman from Washington.

Mr. BAIRD. Let me just share with the gentleman the dangerous path you are on. There was a study some time back dealing with the sex life of the screw worm, perhaps aptly noted. The sex life of the screw worm, that would be pretty tempting to come to the floor and say, by God, why are we spending taxpayer dollars studying the sex life of screw worms? The reason being that that research saved the cattle industry millions of dollars by eliminating a parasite that deposited eggs in the placenta of newborn cows.

We don’t have the knowledge. We are indeed stewards of the taxpayers’ money, which is why we created the National Science Foundation, why we are very careful about designating how the peer-review process works, and, quite frankly, why we shouldn’t mess with that peer-review process. If we truly want to be stewards of the taxpayers’ money, which I believe all of us want to be, then our best approach is to delegate some of the decision making about where some of that money is spent to those who best know the realm in which the research is spent. It is precisely because I believe in the task of being a steward of the taxpayer dollars that I oppose the general purpose of the amendment.

I understand you are trying to save money. I just don’t think our best way to do so is by micromanaging either this or most of the other foundations.

And I thank the gentleman from Virginia for yielding.

Mr. GARRETT of New Jersey. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Just a couple of points and then I will yield.

I agree with the gentleman that in some respects, perhaps, this body should not be engaged in micromanaging various aspects of the Federal Government where we do not have expertise.

Earlier today, and in just the past week, we had a complete debate on that subject of whether this body, all 535 Members, were in appropriate position to micromanage the war, and I think some of us thought that we were not in the best position but that we should have, just as you are suggesting here, the trained professionals, the experts, the people on the field who are engaged in this activity on a daily basis make those decisions.

So I would agree with the gentleman there. And if we were to have consistency, then we should not be engaged in that matter and we should not be engaged in this case.

Let me make my second point and that is this: It is not incumbent upon the gentleman from California to be the expert in these areas that he is raising questions about. The underlying bill is not the gentleman from California’s bill. It is the majority party’s bill. It is your bill. You are coming to the floor making the case, or I should say the other side of the aisle, as I am speaking to the Chair, making the case that we should be spending all this money on these programs. So it is incumbent upon the offerer of the underlying legislation to make the case why we should be doing it and have the information why each one of these is justified so that when either the gentleman from California or Georgia raises the legitimate question, the same question that we are going to get when we go back to our constituents and are asked why did we vote on it, he should be making the justification for that.

With that, I will yield to the gentleman from Georgia.

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from New Jersey for his comments. And he is making a very apt point.

And I appreciate the comments of my good friend from Washington, who said, and I think it got down correctly, “We are neither trained nor have expertise in this area.” And you are absolutely right. But consistency is a wonderful thing and inconsistency is a challenge.

I would suggest that none of us are pure in this area, but my good friend talks about we ought to delegate decisionmaking to authorities who have expertise, and we should. As a physician, I am compelled and have strong affinity for all of the advocacy groups that come to my office, as I know they come to yours, and advocate on behalf of specific diseases. Most recently this week, the folks who have suffered under the scourge of breast cancer have come, and they are asking for more resources. And I always suggest to them that it is appropriate for those decisions to be made by individuals at the National Science Foundation, at the CDC, at the National Institutes of Health. But, in fact, what my good friend from Washington does all the time, in his capacity in Congress, is to determine exactly what that line item ought to be from an appropriations standpoint.

As a physician, the medical profession has suffered under the decisions that have been made in this Chamber and in the Chamber on the other side of this building because individuals thought they had greater expertise in the area of health care. And as my good friend from New Jersey clearly stated, and appropriately stated, that just this week we’ve been dealing with folks who believe they have greater expertise in the area of military competence and battles than our generals on the ground.

So I would suggest, Mr. Chairman, that my good friend from Washington is absolutely correct, that we ought to delegate in certain instances, but we ought to also utilize the prerogative that we have and the responsibility that we have as representatives in this body, representatives of our districts, and make certain that we are good stewards of the taxpayers’ money.

Mr. GARRETT of New Jersey. Mr. Chairman, I yield to the gentleman from Michigan.

Mr. EHLERS. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

First of all, I’ll make a deal with you; I won’t make any judgments about medical research if you don’t make judgments about NSF research.

The point of this really is that you cannot predict what will result from the research; that is the idea behind basic research.

Years ago when I was a graduate student at Berkeley, we were spending tremendous amounts of money to examine the behavior of elementary particles, protons, neutrons, mesons, and so on. And no one, even in the scientific community, could ever imagine any practical use for that. But later on the results from doing that research led to the development of a CAT scanner and the MRI. Now, who would ever have thought that elementary particle physics would lead to major findings in medicine which every doctor relies upon today?

Mr. McNERNEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word, and I yield to my good friend and colleague from Washington State (Mr. Baird).

Mr. BAIRD. I thank the gentleman from California. Just a couple of brief comments, and it’s getting late, so we don’t want to carry this forever.

I would suggest that we all agree that consistency is a very dangerous thing. If the gentleman talks about being consistent, I would ask the gentleman why they chose not to micromanage the vast expenditures of dollars, not even to have oversight hearings of the vast expenditure of dollars on the war.

If you really want to save the taxpayer dollars, we are burning $2.5 billion a week in Iraq. This entire bill is $21 billion over 3 years. We’re talking about 3 full years to fund the basic scientific research of this entire Nation, from mathematics to physics to chemistry to social sciences. That’s about 6 or 7 weeks or so of what you spend in Iraq. And yet when it came to oversight of the expenditures in Iraq, the majority, then-majority party was then just virtually silent. If you really want to save the taxpayers’ money, and I do, you could have looked at that.

But let me suggest what the gentleman from New Jersey misrepresents. And I asked earlier if any folks on the other side were qualified to study this. The gentleman from New Jersey just doesn’t seem to understand how this legislation works. He completely misrepresented when he said that it is incumbent upon the majority and the chairman who is bringing this forward to defend these studies. Sir, this bill does not authorize specific studies. That is not how the authorizing language for the National Science Foundation works. It would be ludicrous, and you should know that; and if you don’t know it, you are not qualified to speak to this. But it would be ludicrous to suggest that when you authorize a foundation, that you are authorizing every single specific study or that you know what all those specific studies are. That’s not how the National Science Foundation works. That’s not how we authorize it. That’s not how this bill functions. And it’s indeed not how many, many of the authorizing bills function here. So to suggest that, to bring forward a broad authorization bill that gives responsibility to a foundation, one has to justify every single study is to misrepresent how this legislation works. And that’s the problem. I think the gentleman either misunderstands or misrepresents how the legislation works.

I thank the gentleman from California for yielding.

The Acting CHAIRMAN (Mr. Andrews). The question is on the amendment offered by the gentleman from California (Mr. Campbell).

The question was taken; and the Acting Chairman announced that the noes appeared to have it.

Mr. CAMPBELL of California. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

The Acting CHAIRMAN. Pursuant to clause 6 of rule XVIII, further proceedings on the amendment offered by the gentleman from California will be postponed.