The prospect of massive cuts in US federal government science funding has caused an increase in the usual heated internet debates over science funding. These typically involve people arguing either:
- “Funding for science research is an unalloyed good that leads to a more prosperous society. It’s a small fraction of the federal budget, should be much larger.”
- “Funding for science research is a scam that just lines the pockets of an entrenched and privileged elite. It comes out of the paychecks of hard-working people, should be much smaller or completely removed.”
I don’t want to enter into this kind of debate for lots of reasons, but thought it might be a good idea to write something about what I’ve seen of the effects of US federal government spending on research in the two subfields I know well (pure mathematics and theoretical physics). Both of these fields are far removed from the politically charged subfields of science (e.g. climate research), so opinions on whether research on them is inherently good/bad don’t follow the usual red state/blue state divisions. They’re also different in a very significant way from experimental sciences, where grant funding is completely crucial (you’re not going to do an experiment without money to fund the needed equipment).
The two subjects share other significant similarities: a researcher with a job doesn’t really need grant money to think about what they want to think about, the amount of grant money involved is relatively small, and what it can be spent on is a limited list of things (summer salary, travel, conferences, grad students, postdocs). In both cases, among these things what is most expensive is graduate students and postdocs. In the case of graduate students, university accounting charges grants for their tuition (which is something that would never otherwise be paid), so paying for a graduate student on a grant is a lot of money.
What I’ve always found remarkable is that despite all the close similarities, the situation is significantly different in these two fields (at least in the US). Oversimplifying a bit, the source of the difference is:
- In math departments (especially at top research institutions), graduate students are rarely paid as research assistants on grants, almost always as teaching assistants. The money to pay them comes from tuition. There are a few NSF-funded students, but the NSF only funds US citizens. When faculty have NSF math research grants, the size is not enough to pay the large sum a graduate student would cost.
The typical academic position at a top research institution for someone fresh out of a math Ph.D. is a term-limited non-tenure track teaching appointment, with the amount of required teaching kept low enough to allow time for research. There are some NSF-funded postdocs, but significantly fewer of these than the teaching jobs. The next step on the career ladder would be a tenure-track teaching position.
- In physics departments it’s typically been the opposite: graduate students are mostly paid as research assistants out of grant money (perhaps in some years holding a teaching assistantship). The situation with postdocs is also the opposite from that in math: these are essentially always pure research positions funded with grant money, do not involve teaching and funding from tuition money. Federal grants for theoretical particle physics come from two different agencies, NSF and DOE, more from DOE.
While both mathematicians and theoretical physicists are hoping to end up at the same place (a tenure-track teaching position funded with tuition money), they are getting there in two very different ways, with the mathematicians mostly funded by tuition money, the physicists funded by NSF/DOE grant money. The way they look at grant money is significantly different: for mathematicians it’s a nice supplement and a bit of a help for their research, for physicists it’s existential: no grant money, no job. At the time of a tenure decision, physicists to a much greater extent will be judged on whether they have a grant and how big it is. Once they have tenure, the situation is again very different. An NSF research grant for a mathematician is rarely going to pay for grad students and postdocs. To have other more junior people around to work with, you just need to maintain good relations with your colleagues on the graduate admission committee and the junior faculty hiring committee. Things are very different for physicists: the only way you’re going to get junior people to work with is to get a grant to pay for them.
I spend most of my time in a math department, and the issue of grants doesn’t come up very much, it’s not a big concern for most people. Whenever I go to talk to people in a physics department I’m struck by how the grant issue quickly comes up, with “what would this mean for my grant” something people are clearly thinking about.
In mathematics, it’s pretty clear what the implications of huge cuts in NSF funding will be: individual researchers will lose summer salary money, travel money for themselves and their collaborators, money to organize conferences. The number of grad students and postdocs will go down a bit. Most mathematicians look at this and think it’s obviously a mistake for society: why save a small amount of money by targeting cuts at the richest source of new mathematical ideas, some of which might even ultimately be of significant societal benefit?
In physics, it’s also pretty clear what the implications of huge NSF/DOE funding cuts would be: huge cuts in the number of grad students and postdocs, as well as the number of people in the field that universities would be willing to hire to tenure-track positions. Again, the amount of money involved is not that big, so the attitude is “why should my field be decimated and my research career destroyed to save a little money?”
Note that I’m not at all here discussing experimentalists. For them, the situation is even more straightforward: no grant, no experiment. Big science funding cuts means many fewer experiments.
The other big difference I see between pure math and theoretical particle physics is the relative intellectual health of the subjects. There’s plenty of useless math research going on, but there’s also a lot of very significant progress going on and many subfields are quite healthy. You can argue about whether “crisis” is the right word, but I don’t think there’s an honest case to be made that theoretical particle physics is a healthy subfield making significant progress. While a lot of the reason for this is not the fault of the theorists (SM too good, no experimental hints of how to do better), arguably the way grants have worked in the subject is partly responsible for the problem. If what everyone is doing is not working, but to get a grant you need to be doing what others are doing, then having grants be necessary for your career makes a bad situation worse.
So, from what I can see it’s clear that losing NSF grant money would be a net negative for US math research, and math researchers look at this as being pretty annoying. For US particle theory research, losing NSF and DOE grant money would have much bigger implications and researchers see this as a very personal and existential threat. Those who have been concerned about the health of the field and the negative effects of grant money on it are not necessarily all that sympathetic.
If you just want to engage in the usual arguments about government-funded scientific research, please don’t do it here. On the other hand, I’d be quite interested to hear other perspectives, especially from those who know more about the details of how grant-funded research works (my own information is limited and mainly math department based, it’s quite hard to get ones hands on good numbers for what is going on with this kind of funding).
There’s another, related difference.
In math, if you want an academic job, you generally need a teaching letter (that at least shows you are not a terrible teacher) and thus some math departments, like MIT, require math students to teach at least one term — I can actually see a case for making them teach at least two terms so that they can get more practice teaching. Of course, many students teach a lot more than two terms.
In physics, grad students typically don’t teach, postdocs typically don’t teach, so people don’t get much practice teaching until they have a tenure-track job. In my experience this doesn’t seem to lead to more terrible teachers in physics departments, even though you might expect it to. Maybe physicists going into academic jobs are self-selecting for not being terrible teachers.
One source of the difference here is that physics departments don’t teach service courses like Calculus and Linear Algebra, where most students taking them are studying some other STEM field, so math departments need a lot more TAs.
This is not a fair representation of how graduate student funding works at a lot of US institutions.
1. At most UC campuses (for example), theoretical physics graduate students are primarily (if not entirely) funded by TAs. What guarantees the funding of incoming theory students is the large number of service courses in the physics department, and hence TA positions, not federal funding directly.
2. However, indirect costs / overhead on federal grants is a large component of the budget of all major research institutions. If this overhead disappeared, it is plausible (or even likely) that many universities would reduce the number of TAs as a cost saving measure. In that regard, a cut to the NIH overhead could have major implications for math and physics graduate programs, even if NSF and DOE funding remain unchanged. We have heard anecdotally that some physics departments have already told admitted students that their funding cannot be guaranteed this year because of the potential impact of the NIH funding overhead cut.
Thanks Daniel,
I had heard that physics theory grad student funding at many institutions over the years has evolved to be more like math grad student funding, as theory groups no longer had the large grants necessary to fund many grad students. Back when I was a grad student in physics I believe at least some years I was funded on the theory group grant, but maybe that’s unusual now.
As for problems about to hit universities and grad student funding, there are a whole bunch besides possible cuts at NSF/DOE, so yes, things are looking bad on lots of fronts, with the NIH change just the beginning.