Washington stays strong in the race for university research grants

I am glad this article brings science funding to the table. I don't think people realize the strengths and potential for innovation in the Northwest. I have many questions about how these statistics should be interpreted and what are their implications.

For example:

How do these numbers compare in per capita?
What of the political implications of rankings like these?
What is state funding for science like in other NW states?
Is Alaska's growth in receiving federal funds related to increases in state higher ed allocation?
Do competitor states (we like to pick on CA) have a leg up because of robust state support of research?

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All good questions from Mr. Robey. One value of the statistics I report is they look at a five year period, which tends to smooth out peaks or valleys in state funding or an abnormally large federal grant in one year. The connection of state support for research to federal grants is probably complex. Colorado, for instance, does not spend many state dollars on its research universities, but it has quite a few federal research centers. I suspect the presence of strong Defense Departmant facilities is another factor helping draw research dollars, and here too Washington state has an advantage. It's also crucial for a state to have a major medical school. A final paradox: UW, which has not had good state support, had to figure out a way to find more money and so became virtually the top university in the country in grabbing federal research grants.

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"I suspect the presence of strong Defense Departmant facilities is another factor helping draw research dollars, and here too Washington state has an advantage."

David,

Can you expand on that? What would you consider Defense Dept. facilities here locally (beyond the numerous military bases in the area)?

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"A final paradox: UW, which has not had good state support, had to figure out a way to find more money and so became virtually the top university in the country in grabbing federal research grants."

This makes no sense whatsoever. By that standard, Mississippi should be number one.

The UW has been successful despite an astonishing lack not only of state support but of endowment. What is new is the extensive satte investment by Florida, Michigan, and North Carolina coming at a time that wealthy private schools like Harvard, MIT, and Princeton.

Will success continue? It is hard to know. The Bush budgets are a present disaster and worrisome for the future. The much touted UW 2 billion dollar campaign is conspicuous in its lack of impact on the campus ... making me suspect that the bulk of this money is in a few locales .. perhaps the Huskies or the B schol, bit certianly not the wider campus.

The too, our State has come up with the bizarre concept of the two year University ... the questionable campuses of Tacoma and Bothell that confer "UW" degrees to student sho never attend a University. The implication that we can educate our best kids on the cheap ain't reassuring.

David should know, you get what you pay for.

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I'd be a lot more impressed with the UW if it:
- graduated MORE undergraduate students
- graduated them at LESS COST per student
- had MORE and BETTER teaching professors
- generated more start-ups that benefited the region and not simply the University financially
- didn't generate so much of its R&D dollars in Defense where it benefits from the Bush perennial war mentality and readies us to BLOW UP THE PLANET someday
- did more to address public health issues in the region and the state
- did more to address transportation issues in the region and the state
- did something about the run-down character of the U District
- didn't depend on hand-outs from its alumni for funding (the UW should not be a charity, and donations would be better off given to help K-12 education, but that leads us to the moribund nature of the public schools...)
- took a global leadership role in Distance Learning
- really engaged in making Washington a great place, and was not so focused on generating a lot of federal funding.

On the Bright Side (and contradicting a lot of what I say above):
- A lot of high-quality graduates
- High academic standards across the board
- Good public/private partnerships with Boeing, Microsoft, health sciences
- A great health and medical complex
- UW TV is great (though too many repeats)
- Branch campuses (although I've heard them termed Potemkin villages)

My main point is that given all the Federal money that goes into the UW, the State itself doesn't have a lot to show for it. A lot of what gets done there might as well be done in Idaho or North Carolina. The State of Washington faces a lot of challenges, and the Best and the Brightest at the UW should be helping lead the charge rather than wallowing in grant money.

I could be way off base on all this, but my impression is that the UW largely shirks its responsibility to be involved with the community and prefers insularity and elitism to engagement and problem solving. The State needs to hold the UW accountable for improving the State in more ways than economic impact. If that's all we need then we can build a stadium or let more cruise liners lay anchor here, neither of which require brain surgery or rocket science. Let's start using that concentration of brain surgeons and rocket scientists to improve our transportation system, our school system, and our distant learning system.

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Cold War research on computers, aerospace, electronics, and medicine was the driving force for creating a research-based economy on the West Coast, and Seattle, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles were the major beneficiaries. Among the non-university aspects in Washington are NOAA and facilities at Hanford. An excellent book to read on how Defense-related research nurtured the rise of science-based universities and nearby cities, especially in Silicon Valley, is by the Stanford urban historian Margaret Pugh O'Mara, "Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley" (Princeton, 2005).

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Apparently my vague impressions about the UW have at least a hint of validity. See Leroy Hood's damning by faint praise. He may have an axe to grind, but his comments are born out by the UW's inability to compete with the Bay Area in entrepreneurial activity ala Stanford, by Seattle's apparently NOT becoming the biotech mecca of the world, and -- judging from Dr. Hood's comments --by the UW's hamfisted and hamheaded approach to intellectual property.

The UW employees over 30,000 workers. I'd like to think that these people are doing good and carrying out a mission to educate the people of the State of Washington. But that goal likely falls off the list and behind goals number 1, 2, and 3: Bring in the Money.

The UW seems to be mostly about bringing in as much money as possible from endowments, downtown real estate investments, alumni fund-raising, football games, and especially federal grants.

The federal grant side of the UW leaves me torn between the humanitarian arm of the UW, which does a lot of good here and abroad, and by the military-industrial arm, which researches weapons of mass destruction for destroying civilization, and has helped to create one of the world's great nuclear states, ahead of India, France, Pakistan, China and France. That state? (See next post.)

Questions:
Insofar as the UW is a significant military-industrial research arm, is that a good thing?

To what extent are the UW, Boeing and implicitly the citizens of Washington State responsible for the creation of the post-Cold War military industrial state that brought us Bush and the war in Iraq?

Is Iraq part of the UW's legacy?

These might be good questions for the Norm Dicks, the commencement speaker, who is a strong proponent of Defense and the Home Port in Everett, and comes out of the Jackson & Magnuson era, when they were the Senators from Boeing. The strong defense mandate helped us "win" the Cold War. Without any countervailing superpowers, the strong defense mandate also helped turn Defense into Offense and helped us into the War in Iraq. It's time to question the assumptions of the institutions that profit mightily from the Iraq War. My hunch is that the UW is one of them.

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Here are 2002 estimates showing the top five nuclear national states as measured by number of nuclear warheads:

1. U.S. 10,600*
2. Russia 8600
3. China 400
4. France 350
5. U.K. 200

The total for the top five nation states is 20,150. Both the U.S. and Russia are committed to getting down to around 2000 weapons apiece by 2012, which is certainly encouraging. Currently the number of weapons actually armed and ready to go is more like 8000 for both countries, according to Rense.com cited above. A cursory internet search of sources on the internet suggests that the breakout of nuclear warheads in US States looks something like this:

1. GA 2000
2. WA 1685
3. NM 1450
4. NV 1350
5. ND 1140
6. CO/NE/WY 1135**
7. MO 550
8. MT 550
9. LA 540
10. TX 350
11. CA 160
12. VA 160
Total 10,920*
* Numbers differ because collected from different sources.
** Air force based weapons

U.S. weapons include sub-launched missiles (Tridents), strategic and non-strategic bomber weapons (B61's and W80-1's), intercontinental ballistic missiles (Minutemen III's, MX's), and reserve & retired Warheads (W79 8-inch shells, Minutemen II's, etc.)

My purpose here is to create the following ranking of "States" by number of warheads:

1. Russia 8000
2. GA 2000
3. WA 1685
4. NM 1450
5. NV 1350
6. ND 1140
7. CO/NE/WY 1135
8. MO 550
9. MT 550
10. LA 540
11. TX 350
12. China 400
13. France 350
14. U.K. 200

Maybe is Washington State made a pre-emptive attack on Georgia, we could take over the world! Where's Jack Bauer when you need him, anyway?

Interesting that nations that WANT nuclear weapons are on the Axis of Evil, but those that HAVE nuclear weapons are implicitly Good. That's our policy for nations. Our policy for terrorists seems to be "When nuclear weapons are outlawed, then only terrorists will have nuclear weapons." Or something like that.

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...but how else am I going to fit an elephant's foot into a shoe?

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