The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has just announced an innovative new program to support placing doctoral students in the sciences in private-industry research laboratories during their studies.

Backed by a $47 million federal investment over five years, along with additional commitments from nearly three dozen universities and private-industry partners, the four-year pilot program will provide more than 250 doctoral students nationwide with hands-on experience in industry research and development as part of their graduate education.

Designed as a scalable model, the pilot establishes a foundation for broader participation and has the potential to expand as additional partners invest in and help shape the program over time.

As the announcement notes, “The pilot delivers on key recommendations in Science: A New Golden Age, a report to the president released … by White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios.” (You can read my thoughts on that report here.)

NSF’s innovation brings to America a standard part of European practice: industrial doctorates. Similar programs exist in countries including Denmark and Sweden. In and of themselves, these programs simply reorient NSF toward a focus on and efficient delivery of education in applied technological research, as part of a broader portfolio of educational and research investments.

Of course, there are larger stakes.

Although American science policy is supposed to harmonize government, academy, and industry, the culture of American science, both in the university and in government, has drifted toward rigid and irrational hostility toward private industry. Doctoral science education housed solely in a university tends to reinforce that hostility. To shift government support of scientific doctoral education toward housing in private industry is to engage in character education of America’s future scientists—to encourage them to think of private industry as a normal place, filled with future colleagues, rather than as an enemy bastion. That shift in mindset would be an extraordinarily valuable contribution.

More profoundly, and more controversially, this is a harbinger of a strategic shift in government funding away from universities dedicated to pure research and toward industry and applied research. The effect of such a strategic move will be to create a new cadre of industrial scientists and remove the federal funding for the next generation of academic scientists. The unspoken rationale is something like this: the academic scientists include far too many activists who subordinate truth-seeking to a radical agenda, and we are getting increasingly diminishing returns, both in pure and in applied research, from funding the remainder. Let the universities fund the activists and the time-servers on their own dime.

NAS Director of Science Programs Scott Turner has written persuasively and eloquently about how removing federal funding is a prerequisite for returning science to an ethic of curiosity-driven discovery rather than grant-grubbing. (He also had something to say about the White House report). University scientists may indeed be better off without federal government support. But the strategic implication of this reform is that, regardless of whether it is good or bad for university scientists, America will be better off when it redirects NSF funds on a grand scale toward industrial scientists.

NAS supports the NSF’s reform as it now stands. It simply introduces European practice to America. We don’t yet need to take a position on whether NSF should redirect a much larger share of its funds toward industrial science—but we think such a proposal is in the cards and should be explicitly and vigorously debated.

Americans, scientists and laymen alike, should think through the advantages and disadvantages of a strategic shift by the NSF toward industrial science—and a concomitant defunding of university science.

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